Designing a Coffee Cup - 'Flat White To Go'

This was my first time working on a product design brief. At first I didn't know how to approach it but I found researching into designs and mind mapping helped to generate ideas. 

I firstly looked into the overall design of the coffee cup looking at its efficiency as a hot drinks container. Through changing the design and making it look more artistic aesthetically I came to the conclusion that the original coffee cup design is very efficient and in my opinion it doesn't need re designing. 

As I found the mark making brief the most interesting I wanted to combine those ideas with my design for a sleeve. Through mind mapping I developed the idea of creating a natural and organic design which led me to the idea of mark making using flowers and plants. The most successful prints were those made with flowers and acrylic paint. I think that they were the most subtle and looked delicate on the page in comparison.

I further developed these simple monochromatic marks by introducing other materials such as strong coffee, different surface rubbings and green acrylic paint. I found that these colour schemes and materials work well together especially the black acrylic paint and subtle coffee stains as the colours contrast each other helping the design stand out.

Creating a colour scheme was my natural next step in the process of making a coffee cup sleeve. To do this I took photos from around my garden and then, using Photoshop, I picked out the different colours and used those to create lids for my cup combining them with different sleeve designs.

I was very happy with this possible coffee cup design as I feel that it met my aim of creating a natural and organic aesthetic for a coffee cup. If I was to develop this further I would want to combine natural materials to the sleeve such as bark or leaves and experiment with the actual material that the cup if made out of to make it more eco-friendly, coinciding with my overall aims.