Speaking from Experience

This next crit went really well and I received some good positive feedback to my work (see PPD blog for feedback and my evaluation).

 One important thing that was mentioned was that I needed to make sure the idea was fun and kept a good sense of humour and that I should work with the idea of the instructional images a lot more. 

At this point I chose to see if I could develop the money box idea away from emergency like fires and see if I could focus the whole thing around aircraft safety and change it to relate to saving money.

Above I was looking at trying to implement my ideas into the idea of one of the back seat pockets found in planes which holds the safety information and some other things. unfortunately I couldn't find any realistic way of making the ida work as a money box, especially as the items inside the pocket are very boring and couldn't easily be modified to become interesting or relative to the idea of saving. 

I decided to stick with the fire blanket idea and try to develop it further.

At this point I concentrated on looking at the instructional images and a website called airtoons.com (See design context for more information)

At this point there was another group crit. We each needed to have 3 A3 boards to explain clearly how the brief is progressing and what we intend to do over the next couple of weeks. 

I chose to base my boards on the idea of emergency signs to try and link the design in to my idea.

i chose 3 different types of sign to work with; The content board is based on a fire exit sign, context is based on a fire assembly sign and the method of delivery is based loosely on a break glass sign. 

The crit itself was really useful because it addressed my biggest concern at this point which was that I was worried about the crafting of the fire blanket box as it got more and more complicated through my development. We decided that I should scrap the idea of making the fire blanket myself and instead try to buy a fire blanket. I could then focus on developing the outside of the box and any products that come with it. I think this is a really good idea because it lets me concentrate on the actual graphic design instead of the product design. I think I will try to work with designed stickers to make my idea work and still try to create the booklet and chart to accompany the product. 

After the crit I found a place in Leeds that sells fire blankets so I took a taxi and picked one up. It wasn't really the dimensions that i was expecting it to be but the final deadline is drawing closer and I had to get a fire blanket to start working with as quickly as possible so I didn't really have a choice at this time.

Above shows my drawing of the box with the approximate dimensions (The box has rounded edges so the measurements could be about 1mm out). 

Here are some photographs:

Receipt

Front view

Perspective view

I started finding it difficult to design the box so I decided to try and focus on the other products which I would be designing to see how everything would fit together. 

The page above shows a couple of different ideas: The first is the original idea for the book or booklet and the one underneath is for some kind of poster. I really liked the idea of the big poster fitting behind the box and showing information and the chart because it almost looks like one large aircraft safety card but the biggest problem I can see is that it takes up a lot of space (about 2.5 x the box on its own). 

For this reason I came up with the idea of making a small, compact booklet that was designed as simply as possible and would come inside the money box. It could be stored there so that when the box is opened and the money is taken then the book falls out as well.

I realised earlier in the development that the chart being on the side of the box was quite ineffective because the box sits right up against the wall and it would be really difficult to reach and mark up. After this I decided it would either have to be seperate or feature on the front of the box. 

The above example is drawn to scale, showing almost exactly the amount of space that I have to work with when designing the front of the box. 

I have split it into 4 different stickers.

1 and 2 are the stickers saying EMERGENCY and SAVINGS.

Sticker number 3 is the chart. It goes up in measurements of pounds. Every centimeter equals another pound and then each centimeter is also broken into millimeters so that amounts as small as 10p can be marked on the chart. 

Sticker number 4 is a very rough idea for the instructional images based on the airtoons.com and the existing aircraft safety style of instruction. It shows someone unhappy in the first frame. The second frame shows a hand putting money into the box and the third frame shows a pen marking up to a point on the chart. The last frame then shows the same person happy after having done the last 2 frames of the sequence, showing that saving the money makes the user happy.

To take this further I could design the instructions as symbols instead of drawings but this could turn out to be less effective. 

I need to create as many visuals as quickly as possible so that I can evaluate which ideas work and which ones don't. This will need to be done over the next couple of days as I need to leave myself enough time to print and account for any mistakes.