WEEK 34 - Brands: Love them? Hate them? Parody them!
Hey HOMwork friends, happy Friday!
(If this is your first time joining us, take a peek at our Challenge Archive for all previous assignments.)
This week, we have one of my favorite designers as a guest teacher: my pal Joseph Alessio!
Joseph wants to be a Renaissance man but doesn’t want to wear those weird puffy shorts, so, for now, he’s a designer and lettering artist based out of Oakland, California. He’s done work with clients like Target, Facebook, Google and Disney, and is a partner at Stuuudio. Fascinated by language and its visual life, he often explores how words can be translated into tactile media, turning something quotidian into the unexpected and delightful.
From Joseph:
We live in a world of brands. We love brands! We hate brands! We love to hate brands! Our brand loyalties are based on experience, nostalgia, or ambition whether that brand is niche or ubiquitous.
As designers and letterers, we all have dream brands we want to work for, a brand that reflects our personal values or provides us with a good experience or one that always seems to be at the cutting edge of design.
Nike is one of those brands for me—a brand I’ve had great personal experiences with and is always pushing the boundaries of storytelling and aesthetics of culture. We're told creating spec work for brands is a great way to get noticed by them, but for this assignment, I wanted to put a little twist on that.
Rather than creating another parallax sneaker showcase site (there are plenty of those on Dribbble already), I wanted to have a little fun with my favorite brand. Driven by my incurable penchant for puns (don’t @ me, Shakespeare was a master of puns long before Dad Jokes were a thing, and he’s canonized in literary history), I made my own punny spin on the Nike logo.
OMG FREE BRUSHES!
Awww yeah - as a HOMwork subscriber, you get two FREE Procreate brushes to play with every week, courtesy of DesignCuts.
<< Click here to download this week's brushes!
Your Assignment: Create a parody or homage of a brand you love!
You could try a visual pun, like a Starbucks logo with an alien instead of a mermaid (stars… planets… you see where I’m going), or a verbal pun like my piece.
Oh and guess what– parodies and fan art fall under Fair Use if you’re not selling merch! So don't worry about getting sued, just get creative with it.
Caption Idea: Tell us what inspires you about the brand you’ve chosen, and what prompted your spin on it.
Don't forget to tag @homsweethom and @alessio_joseph then follow and use the hashtag #HOMwork so we can see your parodies. We’ll be sharing our faves in our Stories all week!
