This assignment involved a literal stack of briefs to choose from, all hand-picked from the (by then finished) D+AD student design awards 2013–the point of this assignment was, of course, to select a brief and then follow the instructions as rigidly or as 'inventively' as we saw fit. I chose to create a construction hoarding for the in-development Victoria and Albert art and design museum Exhibition Road re-development (ending 2016).
The construction hoarding didn't just have to shield the redevelopment site from prying eyes: it also had to promote the museum–present and in-construction areas both–and entice people to pay it a visit. As such, my final idea was 'Windows into the future', whereby the 70m long hoarding (divided into repeating panels) would showcase a cross-section of the museum's content as revealed through–what else?–various window-shaped frames; perused by an collection of cartoon Kensingtonites (representing the cultural diversity of the area).
1) The panels that make up the final hoarding design–the ones at the top and bottom would occur at the
left and right ends of the hoarding, respectively, while the two in the centre would repeat multiple times
overthe hoarding's length, with different wall colours and artworks in the window-shaped frames.
The photos, by the way, are courtesy of the V+A museum's fantastic 'download stuff for assignments
for free' service, and therefore their work, not mine....
2) And here are the characters I created to populate the scenes, rendered from pencil sketches and fully vectorized on Adobe Illustrator. Putting all these guys together–and investing them all with their own individual flair–was certainly an interesting challenge (especially fitting together all the bits and pieces that made up their bodies and clothing), but I can now (almost) do vector characters as well as I do hand-drawn ones!
