The Brand:
Elle Bee by Lauren Belzer is a cosmetic company that specializes in natural, hand-made and “good-for-you” skin care products, as well as candles, lotions, aromatherapy and other small household items. Elle Bee’s focus is on women, and was named after theeinitials of their founder, Lauren Belzer (LB) and turned into a name, Elle Bee. The target audience is females in the age range of 16-24, high school to late college. Elle Bee, located in Scottsdale, Arizona, aims to package their products with a piece of Arizona in its design.
The Project:
Patterns were the main focus for this project for Elle Bee. The company wanted three patterns in three different color combinations to apply to the items that make up their product line. They wanted it to have that “desert” feel to the design as well as a hand-done, elementary, simplistic look, incorporating a cactus-like element into one of the three overall designs. Elle Bee wanted these three patterns to be applicable not only to their cosmetic packaging, but to small notebooks with cotton fabric covers, and the retail bags used at checkout.
The Design:
The three patterns each showcase a piece of desert-like nature. Whether that is a cactus, desert palms, vines or brush, they are all designed in a hand-done, sketched way to mimic “doodling.” The goal for these patterns were to make them simplistic, yet fun, elementary, and whimsical and the same time, still giving off the Arizona vibes that Elle Bee was insistant upon. The color palette comes from the cactus greens, both dark and light variations, and three varieties of pinks - a deeper red-pink, an extremely light pink, and a pink that is in between the two. The patterns are named Bloom, Dot and Vine, all named after an element that is present in that pattern’s design. Because Bloom and Vine have very little in common in the realm of illustration elements, Dot was introduced to link the two designs together, incorporating both the large 3-dot element from Vine, and the small 5-dot element from Bloom. As the desert feel was the main idea stressed by Elle Bee, Bloom is to be the primary design for all of Elle Bee’s packaging, emphasizing the cactus in whichever of the three color combinations is desired by Elle Bee.
Student work completed for GD 300: Color at Chapman University