Design Practice

Chosen Brief & Rationale

For the project we are to choose a given live brief from the YCN competitions which we are to submit within just over 4 weeks. But which one and why should we choose it? Myself and Hannah decided that we should think hard and shouldn't compromise on a good/bad brief, after all we are designers that can both produce something spectacular for any brief. I myself was straight away interested in the Ted Baker brief, window dressing is my frontier and visual merchandising is a past-time from working in my part-time job, how perfect. But Ted Baker is a huge company with a massive following and so would be very popular with other designers aswell, winning would be much harder. We also as a team looked at "Feel Good" Drinks, a new company looking for some serious promotion and had links to the CocaCola company, again very high profile and the competition not just from the design community but from other peers would be huge. This became apparent when we raised hands to show which brief we were doing.

So we changed it. Fedrigoni is a paper manufacturer within london looking for a way to promote it's showrooms to its clientele. A less profile based company which on closer inspection showed to have a really interesting, passionate practice and had fun. With the showroom to be promoted they use the space really well, games nights, exhibitions, get-togethers and meetings obviously.

After submitting our rationale we contracted our agreements to each other regaring our resposibilities in our partner ship but also agreeing on the fact that the outcome of the brief is both mine and Hannah's equally. Fun.

Getting Ideas out and into the Open

No messing around would be the key to the success. After doing some initial research, Hannah quickly proposed that we put pen to paper, to get our initial ideas out and into the open. We decided as a pair we should get five ideas jotted down or even drawn, simply so that we could move on we wouldn't be tempted to just stick with an idea just because its the only one we can agree on.

Idea 01.

Looking at the idea of paper engineering I thought about the ways in whihc the paper can be manipulated, cutting, folding etc but how to make it playful and engaging and original? I thought about the ways I have maipulated paper before and then it can to me, paper mache. It about play but could also be used to consume waste paper, hence the title " We at Fedrigoni, don't want to waste anything, especially our showrooms."

There were other concepts but as a start I developed a series of ideas based on craft and use of the paper. To not spoil the surprise later I'll leave you with the drawings, I don't want to give too much away to my competition. [Below] Concepts 2-5.