Creative Brief | A Collection Inspired by The Nightmare Before Christmas
I hopped onto the Nightmare Before Christmas sleigh a little later in life, but the moment I watched the super cute and definitely quirky film, I was utterly and completely hooked. I watched it with hubs, and we decided that these characters were going to be our entire personality every season from that point forward.
Seriously, our seasonal decor is everything the Nightmare Before Christmas. Check it out on the geeky lifestyle blog, here.
Summary:
So I wanted to create a fabric and home decor collection that embodied the spirit of Jack, Sally, and Halloweentown in a classy and unique way. I also wanted to make the designs available for anyone like us who would transition this theme from fall to spooky season to the holiday season.
A Creative Brief for The Nightmare Before Christmas
Collection Name:
The Elegant Pumpkin King Collection
Project Objective:
To come up with a cohesive pattern collection that embodies the story of the Nightmare Before Christmas.
Target Audience:
Anyone who loves the Nightmare Before Christmas and enjoys unique artist designs that embody the spirit of the movie and the characters.
Design Style Guide for the Elegant Pumpkin King Collection
Keep a consistent look and feel for each pattern. For this collection, I’m going for an illustrative look - not too neat, but rather a quirky and imperfect representation of the movie itself. Use an ‘Inktober’ pen art style with cross hatching and messy lines. Try to incorporate a bit of gothic to the art style, but don’t overpower or complicate the simple designs with too much goth.
- dark visual style
- twisted sharp pointed design elements
- stark shadows broken by high-contrast streaks of light
- rejection of realism
- highly stylized environments
- distorted designs
- painted light shafts
- shadows that create sharp angular designs
- added contrast
- very vertical and very horizontal
- gothic art style
- mostly black and white
- pen and ink drawings that utilized cross-hatching for texture
- surrealism with a Victorian and Edwardian flavor
- macabre
The main color palette will be very Halloween - black, white, and orange with greys. But much more muted, just like the movie, and a lot more consistent and coherent - unlike the movie. Each pattern in this collection will need to coordinate and match with each other. The movie wasn’t quite like that in the pattern area, although the overall theme was consistent.
Tim Burton’s previous films: Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Vincent, Frankenweenie, etc.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1920 German silent horror film
The German Expressionist Cinema Movement
Edward Gorey, American Illustrator
Charles Addams, Cartoonist
