Ninjas | 忍者 | Progress so far://

Less than 3 weeks left on the print module now so thought I'd post a brief update on where i'm at with the 'What's Good?' brief. As concluded from my last post on this, I have been working on why ninja's are good, with a more focused interest on the ninja skills and abilities. From the research gathered, the majority of the people who answered the survey said that they learnt about ninja culture through popular culture, more specifically in films, cartoons and anime. In response to this I wanted to further my research into ninja skills and abilities through how they are shown in films, cartoons and anime etc. This would also make my research alot more accessible as I found it rather difficult researching into the history of the subject, espcially as majority of it seems to be considered myth.

Moving on with the brief, I decided to generate some quick initial thoughts and ideas onto paper as a starting point to work from. From this, I gathered a few worthwhile ideas working around the subject of ninjas. As it is a print module on packaging design, I had to some how put the subject of ninja's into a relevant context, initially this was quite difficult and my work pretty much stalled for a few days as I found it difficult to adapt the ideology of ninja's into something useful and not something that just carries novelty value. I wanted to avoid the obvious, so started looking into the idea of a hidden identity and the possibility of a secret ninja society that still exist today......which unfortunately didn't really get anywhere.

Had a brief chat with Lorenzo just before reading week for some feedback and was told not to be retricted by reality and that it didn't matter if I completely made something up. And more importantly, to have fun with the brief. This turned out to be a turning point with what I was doing so far, as I spent most the time working under tight restrictions that I thought I had to follow, which apparently was not the case for this. So after realizing this, I came up with a few ideas that package something related to ninjas ://


From the brainstorm, I developed some of the strongest ideas and started specifying stock types, ideas on target audience, the message and the print process that I considered etc ://




SO, final 6 concepts to choose from are:
- Book that instructs people how to obtain ninja abilities.
- Packaging a ninja costume.
- Spoof newspaper article on ninja activity.
- Ninja recruitment pack containing branding, identity and ninja booklet.
- Ninja catalogue
- Pack of ninja playing/ collective cards