Extended Practice

Today we took our trees down to Marshall Mill, in Holbeck Urban Village to be photographed. We met the photographer, Roger at the Mill and he directed us within the shots. We also took some behind the scenes photos of the day.

OS31 Tree:

Staff at Marshall Mill have become very creative and have started to decorate the reception by turning everyday items into Christmas trees.

Behind the scenes of the day:

Boys and girls trees:

Steve the manager at Marshall Mill with our trees:

I really enjoyed the day as it was something different. Steve loved the concept of Communitree and asked if he could keep the tree for events around the mill. Overall the whole project was every enjoyable as it was something different. I also really enjoyed collaborating with other students.

After reading through the brief Laura and I have decided to collaborate. We plan to carry out all of the work over a period of 2-3 days (a weekend). Before starting to think of any ideas Laura came up with an idea to create a structure to follow in order to make the most of the time we had.

Task 1 was to review all of the key words in the brief. This was just to make sure that we weren't missing out any important information. We spent 10 minutes doing this.

Task 2 was to look through our research we carried out in Marks and Spencer mainly and write down our initial reactions from the designs. We only spent 5 minutes doing this.

Task 3 was to write down all of our initial ideas for design.

Task 4 involved reviewing all of our ideas and coming together to make a decision about our preferred ideas and which ones to develop further.

One of the ideas we came up with was to build different Christmas characters out of the mosaic tile shapes. This would act as a 'do it yourself' card. We decided however, that it would probably be too many pieces for this card. It may have worked for a younger target audience though which is something to bare in mind.

After experimenting with using mosaic tiles we decided that our idea needed to be re-visited and so we returned to our primary research undertaken at M&S and found an image of a large cracker. Laura is an expert at packaging and so she decided to go ahead and work on a 3D cracker. I enjoy vector illustration so I chose to work on the card itself, this would act as an insert within the cracker casing.

I think that dividing the work load and playing to each others strengths was a positive outcome from this brief as it saved time and allowed us to each get something out of the brief.

When designing the insert I was inspired by an interactive bag at M&S. This bag featured some really nice illustrations of Santa and some elves. Though the design was inspiring the size of the insert was considerably smaller which meant that the design would have to be a lot more simple. I chose to start my work straight on the computer as I had a very clear idea of what I wanted the design to look like.