Designer Speed Dating

Today we went speed dating with our 'couple' (collab partner Liam) and met other 'couples' to discuss our idea proposals. This was incredibly useful and has helped me to come up with the perfect solution to combining mine and Liam's individual styles. While his work is very clean and digital based mine is almost the polar opposite which intimidated both of us. My initial ideas were blown out the window as he changed his brief to exclude the history links Brutalism has with communism, so I had to come up with a new concept which I was quite stuck on until today's session.



My new plan is to have some kind of sleeve or possibly a box to contain 4 separate books, each one focusing on one of the four Brutalist buildings Liam has identified around Leeds. Each book will be formatted however as a stencil, to be assembled into buildings by the reader, in each square of the buildings or side I want to have different elements such as physical textures of the concrete, painted colours matching swatches from the buildings and the bodies of text.

For the box/sleeve I want to combine sand with black or grey paint and cover it to give that concrete like texture, I want to have embossed in possibly gold (as an ironic statement) or white (in-keeping with the minimal/ communist feel) 'Brutalism'. I aim to keep this vague to convey how Liam had to go searching for these buildings around Leeds, around the type I want a rectangle space that hasn't got sand added to it so it's almost like a plaque on a building with the name.



This concept I feel perfectly fuses our two very different kinds of design as the overall aesthetic will be minimal especially the box/ sleeve containing the books, yet will contain my own elements of hand rendered collage and the fact the books are sculptural. It was other 'couples' that helped me add these details such as textures and colour to further work my own skills into the piece as opposed to just sticking to Liam's style.