Guayaki Yerba Mate : Advertising Campaign
Student project to design a new advertising campaign using older paintings. Finding older paintings, renaissance/knights of the round table/etc, and doing product placement. To make it compelling and eye-catching, focusing on blending the product and painting seamlessly.
Guayaki originated in California as two friends in college, one introducing the other to yerba mate (an herbal tea), the two of them went out with a vision and became a team of five. Their mission was to share yerba mate with the world.
I researched both Guayaki and yerba mate in general to start, finding the searching yerba mate alone brought up the plant species itself and that of it being an herbal tea. Upon searching Guayaki, I found the brand’s vision/community/etc. I wanted to maintain the use of their tagline: ‘inspire us all to come to life’, as well as their logo. I then picked images of some of their products, starting with bottles and cans of their teas, later adding bags of loose tea and gourds with bombillas. ‘Traditionally, yerba mate is infused with hot water in a hollowed-out gourd. The liquid is filtered through a metal straw called a bombilla and is usually shared among friends who take a sip and pass it along.’ Finally, I set about generating designs, which products would go in which of the chosen images.
I ended up making 3 separate advertisements. Designs in mind, each started with the base image (painting) along with transparencies of the products that I’d created prior in Photoshop. A great deal of time was spent making selections, masking selections, and masking in general. Working with the many blending modes and opacity sliders was key to any degree of seamlessness in the work being done. Given that the paintings are all rather old, finding the right blending mode for an appropriate and matching texture was important and at times difficult. I also added one large version of the product in the bottom corner of each of the advertisements to make the product being sold more clear, in this case, one of their cans of tea coming up from a white baseline, hovering somewhat within the constructed product placement painting.