Hello Kitty and Friends Happy Meal
BRIEF
The assignment was to engage in research, content creation, design, and construction to develop a new and improved Happy Meal experience for McDonald's.
CHALLENGE
The target audience I aimed for were students from the ages 12 through 24 as Sanrio characters are a popular trend. The route I wanted to take with this theme is an informational but also entertaining way of telling the audience what each Sanrio characters’ personalities are like.
ROLE
Student designer.
APPLICATION & EQUIPMENT
Adobe Illustrator, Procreate.
CLIENT
Class project.
HAPPY MEAL CONTAINER
I used the characters Hello Kitty and Pochacco in my Happy Meal container, and to tie the McDonald's branding into my design, I designed their mascot in the style I was going for in this project as well. I introduced Hello Kitty and Pochacco with their own speech bubbles and added elements that matched their backgrounds: Hello Kitty's town of friends and Pochacco's soccer goal.
CHICKEN MCNUGGETS BOX
For the Chicken McNuggets Box, I thought it was fitting to have Kuromi and My Melody together. The exterior design is Kuromi because as mentioned in her speech bubble, she has a tough appearance but is actually girly, so I wanted to display this with the box: a tough appearance on the outside and a soft pink design on the inside. This was perfect to pair with My Melody's soft personality as well. I also used the same typeface as the title of my project for consistency.
FRENCH FRIES CONTAINER
To further weave McDonald's branding into my concept, I had the characters on the fries container interact with the food item. Badtz-maru and Pompompurin are carrying french fries from the container. I also added a graphic of Pochi to go along with Badtz-maru's speech bubble.
DRINK CONTAINER
For the drink container, I added elements that matched with the characters' descriptions: Keroppi's hometown, Donut Pond, and a sky setting for Cinnamoroll's flying ears. Here, I added Ronald McDonald again.
TOY CONTAINER
I wanted a design that continued the consistency of my project title, so I used the same elements in both. I included the rainbow all along the box and used the same typeface for cohesiveness.
DESIGN TEMPLATE
RESEARCH
When researching and finding inspiration, I went to Sanrio's official website and researched each character that I wanted to include in my project. Here, I found descriptions and images of each character and used these to come up with my design. For inspiration, I gathered a collage of images and typography I wanted to experiment with. I ended up leaning towards the 3D imagery side of my research, and I grew fond of the italicized, pop-out, serif typefaces.
SKETCHES
For my sketches, I experimented with different layouts of each Happy Meal item and different styles I wanted to draw the characters. I wanted my design to have the familiarity of Sanrio's branding, but to make it my own project and style, I recreated them in a more simple way. I wanted to bring out the cuteness in these characters to appeal to my audience.
PROTOTYPING AND CONSTRUCTION
While constructing, I found that I had to print different items more than once because of layout and measurement issues. My pictures show the trial-and-error process I went through to be able to fold and cut the items to fit neatly.
REFLECTION
With the theme I chose, I had to design it in a way that wasn't already familiar to the public. Sanrio characters are known as 2D figures, and I wanted to take a step away from that concept by turning them into 3D characters. Doing this allowed me to design this theme that was already fully developed in my own personal way.
