we were asked first to choose a partner to work with. i chose to work with jordan. because he didnt have a partner me and jordan ended up working with jake as well.
we had a look through a few different briefs and narrowed it down to three. we then considered a few preliminary ideas to help us decide, based on what we could come up with and our design interests, which brief we should pursue.
having considered and narrowed down our aims and what briewf we found interesting we finally decided on the Fedrigoni brief. as part of the introductory process we were each asked to fill in a question sheet about our partner, skill sets, and chosen brief.
The Creative Challenge
We would like you to design a desk calendar for Fedrigoni customers to promote our Woodstock paper range.
Woodstock is an uncoated pulp coloured collection of papers and boards. A unique paper range made from 80% recycled pre-consumer waste and 20% FSC certified Virgin fibre. Available in seven different weights with 15 wonderfully warm pastel colours and an additional mottled version, the naturalness and simplicity of wood is clearly identifiable with this range of paper.
In order to grab a presence on our customers’ desks, the calendar will need to be genuinely useful, but also speak in a visual way which appeals to their high aesthetic standards. It should therefore be a creative, yet functional, piece which maintains awareness of the range throughout the year.
- why have you chosen to work with your creative partner? what are your aims?
i chose to work with jordan because he is a like minded and talanted designer with similar creative interests. he is hard working and organised and very capable of progressing an idea into a successful design solution. my aims for this project are to improve my time management and organisation skills and to improve my design outlook and considerations. im excited by the brief and hope to, with jord, produce a fantastic creative response.
- what are your specific areas of creative interest in this brief?
the brief is quite hands on and crafty and both of us enjoy that sort of design and production and so my interests lie a lot in the craft of our project and how we can use different production and finishing process to achieve our final outcome.
- what specific design skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? how do you intend to use them?
my skills lie heavuily in the hand rendered craft and drawn design and, being that the brief is about paper and a desk calander i think there is considerable scope for the hand made and mechanically considered design. jordan shares these intersts with me and were both really keen to learn and utilise new processes so i think the outcome will be well considered and crafted.
- what specific non-design skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? how do you intend to use them?
i have quite a good academic understanding, especially in history, politics, economics and global culture, and can often come up with quite good concepts. my problems lie in my lack of development of a concept and also my organisation and time management skills. i think my awareness of the world will inform my design concept and the content involved in our collaborative outcome.
- what will your specific roles be in the collaboration in relation to your brief?
because we are very like minded design, cerative, hobby, general interest wise i think the majority of the physical, research, concept work will be evenly spread. we both really enjoy process and so i think well both be really hands on and involved. in terms of organisation and time management i think jordan will have to push me a bit more but i want to switch up and become more organised in myself so im going to make more of an effort on that front.
- what do you think your individual responsibilities will be in relation to your brief?
i think my individual responsibilities will lie a lot in the visual progression of the project and to an extent the contruction. i think i will be heavily involved in the concept development and the path the project takes.
- what do you think your joint responsibilities will be?
i think the ideas and concept generation will be heavily collaborative as me and jordan are very much on a design level and can communicate ideas well that each of us can then progress and re discuss to come to a more appropriate and considered dsesisng response.
we were asked to bring the answers to the session but due to my lack of organisation i missed the session and so had to ask jordan to fill me in.
in the session they went through the tree potential briefs he ad brought in and decided on the pros and cons of each. from that we could then decide on which brief we wanted to pursue. because me and jordan had already done this prior to the session and considered a few ideas for each and then chosen the brief we wanted to pursue i feel as though i didnt miss as much as i thought.
having filled in the second version of the creative partners sheet we were asked to fill in a blank brief about the brief.
- What is the problem?
that fedrigoni want a design propsal for an interactive desk calander that promotes their paper range to customers
- What are they asking
you to do?
design the calaner
- What are they trying to
achieve?
promotional value for their woodstock paper range
- Who will benefit?
fedrigoni from the design, myself from practice and collaboration, customers from the calander
- What is the message?
that fedrigonis woodstock range is quality and environmetally ethical paper and should be recognised and bought
- Who is the target
audience?
customers of fedrigoni
- How will the message be
delivered?
through the calander design
- Can you see a problem?
that the design might not strike a successful balance between a functional desk calander and a design that shows off the paper range
-5 words that I thought
were the most important in the brief
presence, useful, aesthetic, creative, functional
- 5 things that I need to
consider
usability, understanding, look, durability, construction
- 5 products related to my
brief
calanders, desks, paper, hands,
- 5 places related to my
brief
leeds, england, italy, america, europe
- Who is the audience?
creatives and customers of fedrigoni and those at fedrigoni
- Who should the audience
be?
the above
- Who could the audience
be?
anyone with a desk
- What do they do
(audience)?
design
- Where do they go?
to work
- What do they buy?
paper
- Who do they live
with?
other creatives
- What can I do?
design a calander
- What am I going to do?
design a calander
- What could I do?
design a calander.
as part of the initial development we were asked to establish an initial action plan to help dictate our course of action.
we did this before knowing that jake would be part of our group and so decided to re do the action plan to include the new member.
RESEARCH -
we embarked on a collaborative research gathering quest and collated the work we had into design boards depicting our influences and ideas.
we embarked on a collaborative research gathering quest and collated the work we had into design boards depicting our influences and ideas.
DEVELOPMENT -
we began by each coming up with a number of visual ideas recorded through drawing. we thought it necessarty to start with a broad range of ideas so that we could consider every possible path and potential outcome. because we are all quite illustrative and hands on we each came up with a number of simple illustrations depicting our ideas.
we also decided that, seen as the project was based around the paperstock range we should each do some physical mock ups with paper and cardstock in order to gain a feel for the paper and its potential. we each emailed fedrigoni to get a sample pack of the woodstock range to work with.
while developing our ideas jake did some experimentation with paper folding and cutting and discovered a method by which you can create strips in paper that when folded can be pushed in and out and that looks like steps. he considered the idea that each tab could represent a day. we all thought this was a really interesting and innovative idea and after talking about it some more decided to progress with the idea and see what came up. from it i started experimenting with more directed verisons relevant to the brief and managed to translate the idea into a basic calendrical model split by month.
the idea was that the user could follow the line of tabs, pushing one in each day, thereby keeping track of the days of each month. this would also encourage the users engagement with the paper, enabling them a physical connection with the stock, its feel, and its construct.
we had a crit in which we had to present our progression to a group of other groups.
from the crit we realised that we no longer needed to consider any alternative paths and that the idea we had was strong and could be developed into a successful outcome.
i feel as though our design development progressed really well up to, and beyond, this point. we made an effort to meet up outside college hours on numerous occasions and in these meeting made considerable progression every time. because we were working alongside each other i felt more motivated to pull my weight as we worked off each others drives. once the idea was established it was simply a case of progressing it to a final product.
the original design was held together via quite a few different parts that were quite fiddly to construct. we asked a number of classmates to try and work out how to contrust the calander and, while a few understood the process and put it together successfully, most people struggled and became frustrated. this is when we recognised our first design flaw. to be a successful product that works inline with the brief requirements, our calander design must be simple enough for the entire audience to be able to manage and understand. this lead us to consider new ways in which the calander could be contructed so that it still offered the same interactive value and look, but was easier to make.
i experimented with different ways that the main body of the calander could be attached to the support strip it sits on. i looked at various ways in which tabs and slots can be used to attach sheets of paper and progressed til i came up with the idea of a double tab/slot mechanism that was then used for the final design.
from this it was simply a case of designing the final nets for the laser cutter and then cutting it out. i designed the nets based on the use of a singal sheet of a4 for each month to reduce the amount of paper used for each calendrical set. i used illustrator to work out the paramaters and measurements. in order to test that everything worked and in order to establish the exact measurements required i first made a mock up of the final product. i measured and calculated the dimensions and cut it out by hand to check that everything was correct and so that i could record the numbers.
having gathered the relevant numerical information i then went on to translate the physical version into a net. being that there are three separations of the 12 months (28 days, 30 days, and 31 days) i had to work out a length for each tab that was wide enough not to be too flimsy but small enough so that all three ammounts of days could fit on the same net. i also had to design the name stencils for each month.
- JAN
- FEB
- MAR
- APR
- MAY
- JUN
- JUL
- AUG
- SEPT
- OCT
- NOV
- DEC
the black lines represent cut lines while the red represent score lines for folding.
the nets were then useable with the laser cutter and so me and jake went down and cut out our final outcomes using fedrigonis woodstock paper range.
having cut out the final versions it was then just a case of testing them, taking photos and creating our design boards ready for submission.
jordan made the templates for our boards and directed the compositin of them with mine and jakes input and adivce. we each wrote some of the copy, split by what parts of the biref we had each undergone. i uploaded the pdf to issuu and below is a link.
LINK TO SUBMISSION BOARDS ISSUU:
MY PERSONAL DESIGN BOARDS:
we used jordans ycn account and uploaded the project successfully.
EVALUATION -
i think this was one of my favourite projects from this academic year and im really proud of both my own and my groups conduct. working as part of a group has tought me a lot and i feel as though i have progressed heavily as a designer from taking part in the brief. from the begining i feel as though we established a good working ethic and all fed off each others creative flows, being motivated by each others desire to achieve. i think because we are all friends there was a more personal interest not to let the team down and so that was a sort of saftey net. being that we share similar styles and tastes there was little clash in terms of creative process or design outcomes which allowed the project to evolve more smoothly. throughout the different aspects of the brief we initially decided to split tasks but upon embarking on each we realised that a focussed team effort produced better results and in a shorter time space. working alongside jake and jordan meant that i was immersed in both of their design processes as well as my own which shed new light on methodology and helped me to improve my own process further.
in terms of design skills i imporved greatly. my ability to visualise an idea, both on screen and on paper, increased as my visualisation became clearer and more consice. i learned new drawing techniques as well as new computer skills throughout the adobe suite. my craft skills also improved considerably as, working by hand with the paper, cutting and folding and measuring forced me to thinmk practically.
because we all had a lot of ideas we were able to collectively recognise potential and comfortable debate our own ideas and preferences. there was never a case when we argued about what we thought was best or which direction we thought best to take the project.
in terms of my personal imput i think i provided a good topical consideration for the brief requirements and was well in tune to understand the needs of the audience and the client alike. my own design decisions, mainly concerned with the shaping and finalinsing of the actual calander, were on point and welcomed by the other group members. my understanding of craft and shape lead to the final outcome but i dont feel that any single one of us outweighed the others in terms of input.
our time management was well organised and we met every point of the brief progression well and to date. the only slight rush we incurred was in designing the submission boards but even then we were finished with enough time before the deadline.
the main imporovements i feel this brief could have benefited on were our research into the surrounding topics, as i feel the project could have done with a better understanding of the paper stock and how it is used. i think we could have also made more of an effort to communicate with each other and to work individually, because most of the project was done when we were all together. although it worked, more individual development may have made the final outcomes stronger.
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