Here is a statement of our shared aims for this project:
"The Leeds Mencap Apprentice Challenge is about bringing businesses and community groups together to support local people with learning disabilities, along with their families and carers.
Together Duke Studios, North Bar & Hungry Sandwich Club are aiming to raise £1300 for Leeds Mencap by selling collectable coasters in each of the six North Bars across Leeds."
For this, we needed a format that would encourage people to buy the whole set of 4 mats and have them relate together by using a consistent theme. The mats had to be laser cut, and so this placed restrictions on the way in which we could design.
After discussing some ideas, we decided to move forward with the idea of using half characters whose top and bottom halves would line up when all 4 mats were collected. We particularly liked the idea that people could mix different characters to create unintended combinations, and that this could encourage conversation and fun in the bar environment. We calculated that 8 characters, split into 16 halves, would be needed to achieve this effect.
We drew some quick sketches and came up with the type of characters we would want to include. From here, we developed an illustration that would be really stripped back to reduce the time spent on the laser cutter. This reduced, single line approach proved to be a unfamiliar but rewarding way of working for us, forcing us to try and strip back any unnecessary details while still giving each of the figures character and unique details.
Andy established the format we would be working to for the characters while I laid out a template for the beer mat according the specifications of the brief and laid out the type we would be using.
Using the same proportions, I created old man and hipster characters to join the set and began to make adjustments to the shoes of similar characters to create more variation within the set. While Andy completed the full set of characters, I started to place them into the layout. We had to draw a diagram to make sure that all of the heads and legs were separated onto different mats and that everything would connect as we wanted it to.
This was our first draft of the mat design.
We found that a lot of the line work on the characters had to be cleaned up to avoid duplication delaying the laser cutter. Andy made sure that all of the shapes were fixed before I placed them into the layout.
Here was our initial set of characters.
Feedback:
There was some initial concern over the way we had portrayed some of the characters, and we were asked to alter some of them to avoid causing any possible offence due to the mats being in support of a mental health charity. We toned down a lot of the childlike qualities, especially in the character with the donut. We also used a single stroke for the eyes instead of double to make the characters more friendly. We were also asked to make the characters larger in the composition.
so again, andy focussed on altering the characters and making the alterations as we had been asked. I increased the size of the characters and distributed the text differently. Here were the new characters and composition
Feedback:
Seeing these changes, they really liked the new characters and had the idea of cutting notches in the mats so that there would be no gap between a character's top and bottom half. The idea was that this would encourage people to connect them together. To better do this, we were asked to remove the inner ring entirely and push the characters right to the edges. The text could then be slotted between them on the 4 corners. In an initial test cut, we found that the outlined text did not reproduce well on the laser cutter and so we had to use a single line replacement font which would produce a finer cut.
This was the final design they were happy with, and after some initial test cuts we were given the go-ahead.
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