For this week’s Photoshop class assignment, I chose to do a mood board for a Schwinn campaign I’d like to see.   Schwinn is a storied bicycling company that has lately been divided into two levels; the discount-walmart styles and the high end styles. And by doing so, it seems that they’ve become less of a respected brand by being either viewed as really cheap or niche.  Being a classic American brand, I’d love to see them make a comeback and reinvigourate their brand identity, and I think a campaign along the lines of this mood board would help. A little edge, but classic and incorporating one of their old logomarks.

For this campaign I chose three Pantone colors of the year: Radiant Orchid, 2014; Mimosa, 2009; and Blue Iris, 2008.

For Radiant Orchid, I used the Pantone 2352 C colors as the basis of my swatches. RGB: 181, 101, 167; CMYK: 629, 69, 0, 0; HEX: B565A7. For Mimosa 14-0848 TCX, since it’s a fabric swatch, I had to use the Pantone color manager to find the RGB, and then converted the RGB to CMYK in Photoshop. RGB: 204, 192, 90; CMYK: 6, 25 ,76 ,0; HEX: F0C05A. Blue Iris 18-3943 TCX was also a fabric swatch, so I had to do the same process for it. RGB: 90, 91, 159; CMYK: 75, 72, 6, 1; HEX: 5A5B9F.

In the file, I placed the created the swatches first, placed them as rectangles, and added some stock photos around them.  I turned the top left image into a black and white photo, using the “Custom RGB to Grayscale” action, and for the top right image I downloaded and applied the holgarizer action. Then, I created selection masks and applied photo filters to colorize the top two and the bottom left to match the swatches.  I also duplicated the filters for the top two images to get a closer colorization to the swatches.

Finally, I took the old Schwinn paramount logo I found, and filled the interior with the Mimosa color (instead of the orange that it originally had). I felt that the Mimosa color gave a little more of a nostalgic angle to the brand.