Lizzie Wa Design

To do this week:

• Essay update
• Colour
• Branding
• Fonts
• sustainability 

Essay Update

I spent some time this week reading through and updating my essay, tidying up the structure and working out what sections needs cutting down and what ones needed more information adding into.

Playful Inspiration

This week I wanted to start thinking about how I would brand my outcome. I will want to create an identity for the project that can be used within signage and promotional assets. I also want to ensure this identity is linked to the design of the outcome itself so feel like creating both of these in tandem will help achieve the unified look i am hoping for. 

To get started on this process, I decided to get painting to see how the process could help to inspire me with shapes, colours and lines. I started without a plan to let the freedom of playing with the paints guide me organically and in a free and playful direction. As I painted, I found myself drawn towards certain colours and shapes more than others, and I let myself be taken by then, painting the shapes that felt best to me.

I think this was a good activity as it let me get swept up in the flow of playing with paint and allowing that process to influence the outcome of what I created. I liked how the use of coloured paper affected the look of the paint, and how as it dried and was thicker in places it created different effects. 

I also arranged the coloured cutout shapes i used previously to spell out the word play, seeing how i could make the word without writing it and simply using shapes to create it. 

Colour:

From my free painting exercise I started to think about the colours i would use and the emotions and feelings that these colour choices could spark in the viewers. 

Research colour theory I found that, despite the ideas being very subjective, some believe that the colour orange may promote playfulness (Cao 2018). This has been a colour that I’ve found myself drawn to so far within this project, so I feel as if orange should definitely play a part in the colour scheme I use. 

The colour Yellow, is a complicated colour that can be seen as happy and friendly but also a warning (Cao 2018). I think if used well, yellow could be another integral colour to ensure my outcome looks positive and happy, giving people a sense of joy when they look at it. 

Blue is a colour, often used by banks etc, as it is said to be seen as safe and inviting (Cao 2018). A feeling of safety and calm is something i really want to promote within my outcome, while making it enticing for people to get involved with it is also very important to me.

Pink is a colour that can be seen as feminine but also is said to remind people of their childhood (Cao 2018). My outcome wants to help people get back in touch with their inner child, so i think this is another colour that would be good to use, however I may need to use sparingly so as not to make the outcome seem too feminine and therefore off putting for some. 

I tried out some colour combinations to see what looked right to me, while using Orange, Blue, Yellow and Pink as reference.

Fonts

I liked the shapes I could make out of the word play within my painting, and was particularly drawn to the play I painted where each letter was a different colour.

I took this idea further and used illustrator to try out some variations of showing this word alongside some colour options. I also experimented with some ready-made fonts to see how they looked with the multicoloured letters. I want to ensure the fonts I use are friendly, welcoming and fun. I think that they want to seem childlike and happy but without becoming too scribbly or over the top. 

I found a font named ‘Ofelia Text’ which felt happy, welcoming and fun, especially when paired with the multicoloured letters. It has a range of weights that give it a nice amount of flexibility and the letters seem to subtly interact with each in a way that is playful, but still very clear and readable. This is not necessarily the font I will use for this project, but a definite option. 

I sketched out the word play, making it thick and bold like in the painting i had done. The letters looked strong and sturdy but lacked a playful nature. I tried adding faces to them, as faces are such an integral part of my project. After adding a head and face to one i also added hands and feet, turning the letters into playful character in different playful poses, with their bodies being made up by the letters. 

It took a few attempts to get the figures into poses that i think worked well and fitted with the shapes made by the letters.

I then used procreate to trace over and refine these drawings to see how they would work as a kind of logo for my project. I tried out different ways of making the letters, from recreating the paint lines, to making them crisper and more into outfits for the characters.

I think these are quite a fun and playful way of showing the word play. I guess I could use this idea on any word and each time it would reveal a series of strange and playful poses. It is definitely something that I would have to use sparingly however, as I think its impact would be reduced the more places this idea was used. I would probably want to stick to 1 or two words made like this. 

Sustainability

The sustainability and impact of my installation is very important to me. I am a firm believer that as a designer I have a responsibility to ensure my designs have a low impact on the planet, and create positive impacts where possible. Therefore, the sustainability of how I create my installation is something I will be investigating. 

I spoke to the Sustainability Collective – who Alice recommended as great people to talk to around this area. 

I asked them what I should consider when it comes to my installation and what material I could use. I am still unsure whether my installation will use electricity or be mechanical so wanted to consider the sustainability of both options. 

Their advice was:

Physical:

What we would suggest is drawing up a material palette from which to make the model, focusing on low energy materials that are non toxic, and can be re-used, recycled or biodegrade and that services are provided to do so.

In the Circular economy we have 2 distinct cycles that material and material value works in. Biological and technical. The biological cycle largely stems from materials that come from and degrade in a ‘natural’ environment. These can be self explanatory like woods, but also include more exotic materials like eggshell composites. Then there’s the technical cycle, which is for materials that require human intervention to continue throughout it’s stages in the cycle of material. This includes plastics, metals, and glass. 

All of these materials need to have a planned end of life, that retains the most amount of “value” (variety of potential futures) for the material. There’s lots of techniques for doing this, however the primary suggestion we can make is to not create ‘monstrous hybrids’ by combining materials the 2 different cycles. An example of this would be utilising a polyurethane coat on a wooden material. It means that the coating cannot be removed without damaging the wood, and that the wood cannot be degraded without damaging the environment it’s in. Alternatives do exist, such as mineral oil to preserve wood in a non-toxic manner, and some man-made or even petroleum based materials fit within the biological cycle. The best example is PVA, used as a wood glue but refined from petroleum, it’s able to be broken down by bacteria as they would wood.

Mechanical fastenings are useful for their ability to be undone and even reused multiple times, and they can provide much stronger results than glue, but require a little more planning and space, which is why we see the use of adhesives in modern products. An M5 bolt has a shear (tearing) strength of 200+ kilos, and a tensile (stretching) strength of 5 tons. 

Re-using materials, especially locally sourced ones, is a good way to reduce the environmental impact of what your creating, and forms part of the circular economy’s idea of ‘no waste’.

In terms of paint, they are all in essence a carrier for pigment that bear different properties depending on what medium they’re suspended in. Acrylic paints will introduce particles of acrylic into the environment, and whilst the impact cannot be specifically measured the problem of microplastics is a river made by many tributaries. Depending on the permanence of the paint that you want to introduce chalk might be a viable option, as it has no volatile organic compounds (airborne compounds harmful to animals) and some places have been able to spray it to create markings. That being said, chalk requires extraction of raw materials, so performing sustainability to the nth degree might prove more difficult. Still, the best option for a sustainable paint may be chalk based, there are aerosol cans that do this, which could be used with stencils to create more accurate, but repeatable work. 

Energy:

The topic of energy is an interesting one, and energy generation is identified as the largest factor in a transition to a sustainable economy in the latest IPCC report. The simplest solution is a green energy tariff, that allows for the payments for electricity purchased from the grid to be from renewables exclusively. If you’re being powered by a venue or a nearby establishment, providing payment for the use of electricity that includes them moving to a sustainable tariff may very well be the easiest option. 

However, the energy sector is at an exciting time, as the movement from power plants to renewable energy takes the mentality away from economies of scale to the reliability and flexibility of a distributed and decentralised network. For the first time in over 100 years, communities have the potential to generate and maintain ownership over their own electricity. It might be possible to utilise this paradigm shift and provide a utility for the nearby stakeholders, as the batteries used for storing energy could also provide the opportunity to provide light in the evenings, or charge people’s phones. Alternatively, energy generation installed on the structure could sell electricity back to the grid, and this could go to offset the cost.

It’s important to be aware that the rules of ensuring the life cycle of a material still apply. If  these were to be used on a sculpture then they would need to be taken somewhere to be used afterwards. Despite solar panels “only lasting 25-30 years” they are only at 80% efficiency when people tend to consider them ‘used up’, so the commitment is larger than a small project might be able to provide. Whilst wind turbines have a smaller environmental impact versus energy returns, they tend to not do well with the variable wind directions and speed that can be found in cities and built up areas, instead working better with wind in a single direction at a fairly constant speed.

All these factors will need to be weighed up when deciding on the best decision for your specific scenario. If your project is about the interaction between individuals and the dependency on one another encouraging play, then can I suggest using people to generate the power. Either generating electricity or mechanically moving something, this might work well with your project, but would require some investigation as to how it would work.

My sustainability plan

From this advice I think the idea of using electricity to power my installation will make it hard to also ensure the structure is sustainable. Using green power as suggested would be a good alternative, but i think in this instance i should be able to navigate a solution that doesn’t require power and therefore reduce the unnecessary impact of my outcome. 

Paint seems to be something I am going to have to research further, as I think the colour of my installation is a really integral part and not something I am able to compromise on. 

When it comes to other materials to create the installation, it seems like wood is probably the best option for sustainability durability and also to allow me to cut it into shape easily. I still plan to research other options however to ensure this actually is the best solution. I think trying to source reclaimed wood is the best way to go. I don’t need each piece to be the same kind of wood or even the same thickness or weight. In some ways I think the interaction between different woods and possibly even different materials will be quite interesting and playful in itself. 

Reflection

With colours and fonts there are so many options it can feel hard to choose. I have created a few things this week that seems to fit the playful feel i am looking for, so I think I need to not overthink my choices and go with what feels right. These are also things I can edit further down the line if I need to, but that I would like to choose now to help me shape the next steps of my branding and the look of my proejct.

References

CAO, Jerry. 2018. ‘12 Colours and the Emotions They Evoke’. Creative Bloq [online]. Available at: https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/12-colours-and-emotions-they-evoke-61515112.