It may seem like a small detail, but it felt important and timely for us take the opportunity to experiment with a new way to visually represent the essence and brand of UX London. Enter, Stage Right, Jon Aizlewood and Kyle Bean.
Dream team
We’d worked with Kyle earlier in the year. He produced some beautiful illustration work for our new website - as seen in our Penguin case study, amongst others. In house here at HQ, Alis, Kate and I worked on a brief. We wanted the project to capture one of our core values at Clearleft: “Learn, share, learn share” - a value that spawned the creation of UX London and so many of our other events.
Then we invited Jon on board to work on the design side of things.
Here, Kyle and Jon share their insights from the project, along with the images and video that captured the creation of our lovely new stage set. It was a great project to work on - fast paced, full of creative freedom, but with some tricky practical and logistical constraints thrown in…
At the same time, I also did some research into LED lighting as well as CNC (Computer Numerical Control) cutting, as I liked the idea that the boxes could be lit up by battery powered coloured lights and be made from solid plywood panels with the letters cut out. Over to the Clearleft team.
Following their brief to Kyle, Kate and Alis roped me in to help on the design front. The concept of activity blocks meant the cubes could be rotated to show one of four faces options at any given time. To further the playful, toy-like aspect of the piece, we agreed on a series of abstract icons that were in keeping with the content at UX London. That left us with a bunch of faces still to use.
Together we went through a really fun session mapping out the various permutations of each cube and the options for each, in order to provide Kyle with a clear brief on the number of boxes needed and what would go on each. We ended up adding another cube to account for a range of words and tags, including UX London, Clearleft, and ensured it was future-friendly by ensuring the #UXL20XX hashtag could be used up to 2020. Always thinking ahead!
From that point on it was a case of making everything and finessing the details and testing various things such as the wood finish, adhesives and and the radio controlled lighting.
Simple as that!
To find out more about Kyle Bean's work, visit www.kylebean.co.uk
Related thinking
- Tiny Lesson
Designing a Utopian layout grid: working with fluid responsive values in a static design tool.
