I wanted to revisit my envelope design and found another flowery wrapping paper, but this one was slightly different, with a beige background and more delicate looking flowers, it actually resembles the ground. So I thought it would make a good envelope.
Tag Archives: Exercise: Visualising your ideas
Exercise: Visualising your ideas – Design 4
Having found an image of a spade online I quickly saw how my first spade design did resemble a handbag rather than a spade. So worked on elongating the handle, changing the shape of it and making the spade part a more shaped piece rather than a square. I liked the brown paper and green for the handle of the second design so kept these as features.
I did find that I had to crop the folded paper slightly to get it to sit without being visible before opening. I wasn’t sure if this would mean that I couldn’t get the 4 chunks of 120 words in the small space, so I designed text boxes in word and wrote 120 words in each cutting them out to see if they’d fit into the spaces provided.
Exercise: Visualising your ideas – Design 3
Rethinking the idea of an envelope that looked like ground it occurred to me I could try just a simple brown paper envelope. And that I could write on the envelope a slogan or something about the volunteering task so people knew something about what the thing inside the envelope might be about. I wrote in pencil “Save Your Park”. As a rough idea.
Looking at this in reality I wasn’t happy with it, I didn’t think it would grab people’s attention and therefore attract new people in the way the brief described. So having a little think I thought maybe adding some grass like green card onto the brown envelope would enhance it looking like a spade cutting into the ground. So I gave it a shot on a new envelope.
I still wasn’t convinced this actually looked any good, rather than looking like something aimed at children (which would be fine but the brief didn’t say the target audience were children).
I was showing a friend the design and she said it looked fine, and then I asked her what did she think it was. She said she thought some kind of bag and that the spade didn’t really look like a spade in terms of it’s handle or bottom half. I agreed with her and so suspended working on the envelope to print out a picture of a real spade to use for redesigning the leaflet.
Exercise: Visualising your ideas – Design 2
Feeling happy with my first plain paper prototype I moved onto trying to find different kinds of paper for the design.
My initial thought was to try and create an envelope that could look like/represent ground that the spade was cutting into (as it would look if you were digging). I found some flowery wrapping paper that looked quite fresh and thought that might work.
However seeing it in actuality, I thought it didn’t really look like earth/ground the spade was cutting into and the spade poking out the top actually made it look more like a handbag design. The blue and pink give it too girly a feel and I felt like this might be off putting for any guys receiving it in the post!
I found a sturdy brown paper/card I’d kept from something to make the spade from and I felt like this would help it keep it’s shape and made it look for spade like. I coloured in the handle green as often spades have coloured handles.
At the time I felt okay with this particular spade design so moved on to trying to design a better looking envelope.
Exercise: Visualising your ideas – Design 1
So back to the drawing board I thought about another shape that went with the idea of volunteering to help in a park and it occurred to me that you might practically use a spade to help with gardening, and I thought what if the I designed a leaflet shaped like a spade.
I started off just doing a sketch and then making a plain paper prototype using 3 pieces of A4 paper. The basic idea I had in my mind was a leaflet in the shape of a spade which folded in half and opened to reveal a folded piece of paper which had the chunks of info on and contact details. I also thought this would work well within an open topped envelop/pocket so you could see the handle of the spade sticking out but not initially the whole spade.
happy that this sort of worked I set about thinking about types of paper, colours textures and making a variety of prototypes until I found one I was happy with.