Every art student’s college career culminates in a terrifyingly massive project called their Capstone project. The word is fitting, as it’s the final piece - that project that brings everything to a close and shows the results of 4 - or even 5 - years of staying up late perfecting work, meeting deadlines, and pushing work to its fullest potential. I can confidently say Allevi8 is the exact definition of this.
Allevi8 is a product of months and I mean literal months of blood, sweat and tears. Capstone at DePaul runs two quarters - or roughly 20 weeks. The first 10 weeks focuses on ideation and the second 10 weeks is taking what we came up with and actually creating it. At the very end of the second 10 weeks, we’d have our Capstone show in which we’d present our work to the public in the Chicago Design Museum at Block 37.
Ideation
Allevi8 is an idea that stemmed from 12-year-old me not knowing what self-care was, but researching and wanting to know more. This is a subscription-based box whose primary function is to promote joy and self-care - helping alleviating mental illness. Smart, right? However, it also serves as an important learning tool, as mental illnesses like depression and anxiety which are way too common, are stigmatized and thought too taboo to be discussed by many people.
Just as many large projects begin, I sat for quite a long time just brainstorming and sketching. Part of our assignment was making sure not to settle on our first idea, and push ourselves to think outside the box. I initially had to come up with 10 ideas for this project, then narrow it down to 5, then 3 then eventually 1 idea that would be my final choice.
My top 3 topics for this project were:
1) An app that aids in protection of females at night
2) An app that creates personalized vinyls based off of created playlists
3) An anxiety and depression subscription-based box.
I decided on the box as I was passionate about it and knew that it was the motivation I needed to finish the school year. I also determined my deliverables early on: I would make a physical box and provide all the content for inside it - including a hand-pressed, custom t-shirt, as well as build a website in which to “sell” my box. I got busy sketching ideas for branding, physical box content, t-shirts, and even mockup e-gift cards I would include on my Shop page. I built my website last, so wire-framing came later.
After sketching everything out, I began to build various pieces out in Illustrator. I began with my 3 promotional cards that I included that were from existing apps like Headspace, Daylio, and Moodpath - all apps I’ve personally used and recommend for people that have anxiety or depression and need some help managing it. The idea was to include a kind of “partnership” similar to how other subscription boxes market to consumers. These cards are 4x3. One other piece of collateral I decided to include - also like other subscription boxes - I included a full list of everything in the box and their prices, which helped show consumers the value they were truly getting in their box.
Next, I tackled branding. In color theory, the color blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect and it’s also strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. I chose the infinity or “knotted” symbol as it looked like an 8 and fit well with the brands naming, however it also symbolizes that struggle is not infinite as the infinity is not whole, it’s broken. This symbol was really the cornerstone of my brand, and it’s found all over this project.
Once branding was out of the way, I began researching box printing companies and found one I loved that would print a singular box for me, called Packlane. I chose my box size by initially building out a template and testing my largest products inside it to ensure they would fit. Once I had chosen my box size, I contacted Packlane and they sent over a fool-proof dieline in the exact size of my box that I could build directly into. The most challenging part of this process was the pattern. I hand-generated this seamless pattern in Photoshop and imported it into Illustrator for external use.
The t-shirt was a fun little side-project. A friend’s mom owns her own design studio and she helped me out with this part, walking through every step with me.
After my box came my website. I wire framed an extremely simple site - 4 pages total: Home, Get the Box, Login, and Shop. Utilizing Squarespace, I built out these pages with appropriate branding and completed mockups so that during my Capstone show, viewers could go through the process of “purchasing” a box and discovering the site as a whole. I also designed custom icons to help describe the process of the subscription box and explain how it worked.
Lastly, was my Process Book. This 10x8 book showed essentially what I’ve shown here: every step of my project, sketches and all in an organized way that also explained my process.
Deliverables
My ending deliverables were: a fully-fledged box, a physical vinyl-pressed t-shirt, website, e-gift card, 2 t-shirt designs, box collateral and a 20-page Process Book.
To start Final Deliverables, here is my finished project set up from our Capstone Show.
The Box
The Promotional Cards
The Website
The T-shirt, E-Gift Card and T-shirt designs
The Process Book
