Herman Miller Catalog
Project: Catalog (12 Pages Minimum)
Deliverables: Printed Publication
Defining the Problem
Herman Miller is a well established furniture company that has been around for over 100 years. They have continuously evolved what it means to be a furniture company as well as the standards of how furniture should be made. Throughout the company's history, you can identify a very tangible shift in the way they market to their consumers. In recent years, you can notice an upshift in their use of vibrant colors throughout their advertisements. With this catalog, I aimed to adhere to this new vibrant standard while adding my own stylistic elements throughout.
Brainstorming Process
In order to begin my brainstorming process for a long-format project, I will usually begin by getting my basic layout ideas visualized into a rough flat-plan. The whole purpose of this is to get the ideas flowing and giving myself a way to get basic ideas out, so you will notice that the flat-plan cover is vastly different from where the final cover ended up. This is one of the earliest stages of the design process, so it doesn't have to be perfect on the first go. Sometimes you may find that you can patch together bits and pieces of different spreads from your flat-plan in order to create one amazing spread.
Research Process
When researching Herman Miller, I looked at their earlier design style for their posters and catalog spreads. I was intrigued by how simple, yet effective their advertising was in the late 1940s to 1960s. I wanted to draw inspiration from these historical designs and if you look closely at the final catalog, you will be able to see where I drew inspiration from. For my cover, you can see that I was inspired by the style of the first picture in the image gallery below. I always try to do extensive research when creating projects for an existing brands to see what style they have been successful with previously and then creating my own rendition of the style. If you are interested in reading more about Herman Miller's graphic design history, I have provided the link to the article in which these pictures were sourced from below.
Analysis Process
For the analysis process, I read articles from Herman Miller's website and started looking through the furniture that they offered. I began hand-picking the furniture that I personally thought was visually stunning and some of the classics that they are known for, such as the Eames lounge chair. Once I had the furniture that I had in mind listed out; I began to document each of the descriptions, prices, dimensions, weight, and options that were offered with the furniture. Herman Miller was a great choice for this project because they make all of their information readily available through their website. I was able to get all of the information, fabric swatches, and material swatches all from their website. The best part was that they also allow you to download the 3D models for nearly any piece of furniture that you could want. The 3D models are compatible with Adobe Dimension, effectively allowing me to create my own product photography.
Ideation Process
When in the ideation stage, it is your opportunity to get out all of the ideas you have stored in your head. In my case, the ideation stage mainly consisted of how I wanted to design the cover. Originally, I had wanted to go with a 50's style catalog that used a lot of flat imagery, grainy texture, and hand-illustrated components that can be seen below. However, I wasn't very passionate about this style, so I knew that more ideation needed to be done. I continued sketching and came up with the idea that went on to become my cover.
Left: 50s Style Cover
Right: Sketched Final Cover
Bottom: All Iterations
Development Process
The development process was by far the longest part of the entire project. This is usually the case for any project, however, the rendering in Adobe Dimension takes a very long time to finish. Each render could range anywhere from 30-60 minutes and if you were to work on anything else while it was rendering, it would extend the time to render. In a perfect world, I would only have to render each spread one time. This was not the case, I messed up a lot and had to re-render things because this was the first time I was really using Adobe Dimension. I was essentially learning Dimension as I went through the project. In the end, it was extremely rewarding to see the final product all come together and I can confidently say that Adobe Dimension is one of my favorite programs now. The sheer capabilities that Dimension has is astounding and it's certainly a program that I will be using for future projects.
Evaluation Process
Once I had finalized the catalog and all of the spreads were complete, I was able to take a step back and really analyze the entire project as a whole. In total, it took me over 100 hours to complete, constant tweaking, and refining to get it to where it is now. In the end, this was one of the most fun and satisfying projects that I have done as a design student and I'm proud to showcase it in my portfolio.
Final Catalog
Mockups
