Flowless

I have finally finished the water project. This is the picture of the final product - a vessel pouring running tap water directly at the users table.

Little kettle family

I just realised that, while prototyping, I produced quite a collection of miniature kettle-like objects that are recently kicking about my desk. Together they make a nice little family, so I decided to take a 'family picture' of them.

Watercolours

So I did as I thought. I spent a good while trying to decide on a different technique for making my final D&AD boards. I wanted to experiment with something new, other than CAD or photoshop, that would make my presentation different and somehow unique. I believe, the third year, it’s high time to figure out what kind methods and tools fit me best, so I can practise them before the final year project.

I finally decided to paint my boards with watercolours. The effect, that can be achieved with the subtle, fresh and slightly blurred colours seemed to be just right to express the tone of my project. I settled on the composition and palette and…well, it all looked great in theory, but the practise wasn’t easy at all. Especially as the last time I really painted was… 3 years ago, I guess… Apparently watercolours are one of the most challenging painting techniques. Mostly due to the fact, that there is no white paint, so once you put darker colour there is no chance to erase it or paint over. It also requires a lot of patience as each layer has to dry completely before applying the next one. It basically makes it impossible to see any immediate effect and got me really frustrated. I came to the point when I was ready to abandon the whole idea of this ‘artistic rebel’ and put a few vectors in solidworks or illustrator and have the whole thing ready in half hour. Luckily I had support from certain artist from upstairs, who helped me out and gave some motivation. To be fair, I was pretty satisfied with the outcome. Unfortunately getting the digital version of the image turned out to be quite problematic too. As watercolour paints give very light colours, many delicate shadows (which I gave so much attention) were lost while photographing or scanning, so I spent another couple of hours trying to photoshop them back (still not quite there – the image on top)

What’s the moral of the story? Well, it’s hard to be creative .

D&AD boards

The last couple of days everyone from Product Design (I wish I could say IPD) have been stressing out about the d&ad boards. What we actually have to do, is to design four A3 presentation boards explaining our ideas and referring them back to the brief.
Those recent days I have seen a lot of example boards, that are sort of guideline of what we are expected to deliver – like what are the correct layouts, fonts, colours and so on.

Looking at those boards, I realised how little they differ from each other. They are all following the same pattern - a big rendering on the rationale board, little drawings of hands on the interaction board, 3-4 pictures of insights on the research board… They are all telling same boring story. Well, the truth is, that the boards need to fit the criteria of d&ad, which sets limits for the content, but still, there must be a way to do something different and fresh. And I’m going to find it! We’re designers – creatives, which means we shouldn’t be encouraged to follow the same matrix. Well, yes – it is the content, that matters the most, but as we are asked to present it in the visual form, I reckon the presentation does play an important role.