Rational
This brief aims to give myself as a designer to step out of a comfort zone and research and create something that has never been personally done. The project aims to reflect the season of autumn whilst also engaging commuters as they pass by the shop window. This gives the chance to work at a scale that has never been attempted before and to work with new mediums and materials.
The initial thought after reading the brief was to bring the online world to the physical one. This lead the project down a path that ended up at the idea of showing shopping reviews (online) offline in the shop window.
It could be an idea to show all reviews that have the same title. whilst looking at the website there were at least 5 reviews that just said "Amazing".
Crit with Lee Goater
Lee Goater is a graphic designer working in branding and art direction. He helped the group and myself to come up with some ideas that met the D&AD brief and were exciting. He toned down our ideas and brought them out, with myself he told me to design the John lewis brief full size as if it were the actual window. he also helped me think of how the window can interact with commuters.
Research
A look at John Lewis's values and products helped define what the brief was working with. Whist looking at some products it was
research on existing window displays for John Lewis was done.
Product research was done to influence the path the design would take. The products shown above were thought to create an autumn garden scenario. The leaf blower allowed themes of magic to be thought of, John lewis has stereotypical "magical" themes in their christmas adverts so why don't they expand this magic not just to window displays but to other seasons.
Development
The first step was to actually measure and visualise the space specified in the D&AD brief the space was actually a lot bigger than I thought. For this brief I thought it was important to work to scale as attention to detail could be executed and the display could be envisioned by the judges much more easily than if a scaled down version.
The idea for the crated tree texture came from messing around with a cardboard coffee cup. The nature of the cardboard meant it was easy to tear in certain places to achieve a tree like texture.
I made a small prototype out of cardboard and this was evidence enough that a large scale tree would work.
Time for this project was mainly taken up by a vast amount of cutting gluing and sticking rolled up cardboard together. This process caused many complications when it came to standing the structure up but weight was balanced by adding branches to the relevant areas.
Spray painting the tree with a mixture of tree and autumn like colours was executed, the greens and oranges helped connote the season that the project was being created for.
It was impractical to work at university due to space restrictions so I took the tree home and continued to work against my bedroom wall as if it were the window display.
Autumn is a time of colour and the main concept running through this project is colour too, leaves that reflected the colours and beauty of autumn were laser cut out of orange yellow and vermillion paper.
A lot of leaves needed to be cut and the process of doing one sheet at a time was taking too long so i decided to tell the cutter to do multiple passes thus cutting through various sheets of paper. I also utilised the full usable space of the laser cutter by placing piles of paper next to each other and creating a larger cutting file.
This caused some leaves to be sacrificed as the cutter didn't know were the edge of each pile of paper was. This was ok though as the amount of leaves that needed to be spread across the floor was very large and the broken leaves could easily blend in in context.
Meanwhile another tree was erected on the opposite side of my room and some grass was cut out of cardboard. Since the concept of this brief was to show someone using a magical leaf blower that was "magically" adding colour to the scene, half of the project needed to be black and white. Grey leaves were subsequently laser cut using the same process as before and half the floor sprayed white and scattered with grey leaves and the other half having colour.
A washing line was hung and clothes were placed on it. Since I couldn't get hold of actual John Lewis products I used my own clothes to display the concept.
The background of the display would be a big printed autumn scene but due to time and budget restrictions this aspect of the project needed to be implemented digitally. I stuck sheets of pink paper to my wall to allow the camera to easily identify the background and to make the image easier to work with in photoshop.
The first step was to actually measure and visualise the space specified in the D&AD brief the space was actually a lot bigger than I thought. For this brief I thought it was important to work to scale as attention to detail could be executed and the display could be envisioned by the judges much more easily than if a scaled down version.
Initial ideas were done in thumbnails and not really thought about too much, this was a conscious decision. I wanted to experiment and see what I could make without relying on the preparation too much as this may narrow the creativity. There was also the fact that I had never approached making a window display and because I had no access to the actual end environment for the work it was hard to really do preparations. This brief is mrs of a concept suggestion than a end piece that could be displayed.
The idea for the crated tree texture came from messing around with a cardboard coffee cup. The nature of the cardboard meant it was easy to tear in certain places to achieve a tree like texture.
Research on working with cardboard backed this up and showed that you can create a variety of different textures by tearing the top layer off.
I made a small prototype out of cardboard and this was evidence enough that a large scale tree would work.
Time for this project was mainly taken up by a vast amount of cutting gluing and sticking rolled up cardboard together. This process caused many complications when it came to standing the structure up but weight was balanced by adding branches to the relevant areas.
Spray painting the tree with a mixture of tree and autumn like colours was executed, the greens and oranges helped connote the season that the project was being created for.
It was impractical to work at university due to space restrictions so I took the tree home and continued to work against my bedroom wall as if it were the window display.
Autumn is a time of colour and the main concept running through this project is colour too, leaves that reflected the colours and beauty of autumn were laser cut out of orange yellow and vermillion paper.
A lot of leaves needed to be cut and the process of doing one sheet at a time was taking too long so i decided to tell the cutter to do multiple passes thus cutting through various sheets of paper. I also utilised the full usable space of the laser cutter by placing piles of paper next to each other and creating a larger cutting file.
This caused some leaves to be sacrificed as the cutter didn't know were the edge of each pile of paper was. This was ok though as the amount of leaves that needed to be spread across the floor was very large and the broken leaves could easily blend in in context.
Meanwhile another tree was erected on the opposite side of my room and some grass was cut out of cardboard. Since the concept of this brief was to show someone using a magical leaf blower that was "magically" adding colour to the scene, half of the project needed to be black and white. Grey leaves were subsequently laser cut using the same process as before and half the floor sprayed white and scattered with grey leaves and the other half having colour.
A washing line was hung and clothes were placed on it. Since I couldn't get hold of actual John Lewis products I used my own clothes to display the concept.
The background of the display would be a big printed autumn scene but due to time and budget restrictions this aspect of the project needed to be implemented digitally. I stuck sheets of pink paper to my wall to allow the camera to easily identify the background and to make the image easier to work with in photoshop.
Refinement
Here you can see one of the boards I submitted to D&AD that show development The background is a simple setting to contrast with the attention to detail on the trees. I also photographed a human to act as a representation of a manikin, she is holding part of a hoover that is used to represent the leaf blower that could be implemented into the scene.
Final Idea
Working on this project gave me the chance to work with
materials I had never worked with before creating trees from cardboard proved
to be an enjoyable task but brought with it various problems with balance.
Working with a glue gun and at a scale of a couple of meters high and six
meters across proved to be challenging but beneficial as personal preparations
can now be though of if a project like this was to be undertaken again. The
overall result looks good and reflects what I set out as aims at the start of
the brief. It is clearly an autumn scene that tries to capture the magic of
John Lewis whilst being visually engaging and eye catching to viewers.
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