Eastbrook Comprehensive School and Donna Fullman

Duration: 1 day
Teacher: Mike Ruggieri (Head of Department)
Students: Year 8

Donna Fullman is Design Director of graphic design company Eyefood Limited. Eastbrook is her old school.

Activity

Donna began with a talk about her working methods, illustrated with a walkthrough of a recent corporate identity design for B4Baby, a client specialising in baby products.

She then introduced her task for the students: to design a corporate logo. She gave the class a choice of three briefs - identities for: DC sportswear Co, a New York streetwear label poised to launch in the UK; DC Channel, a hobbies and crafts satellite TV channel; or DC Unisex, a body spray.

The class were divided into three teams to brainstorm the briefs. Donna started each group off by leading a class brainstorm for each company. Then each team was split into pairs to continue brainstorming and develop some of their ideas through drawing. The students were encouraged to use a variety of media: pastels, felt tip pens, paint, water colour pencils and so on.

After lunch, final design ideas were pinned on the wall for a whole-class evaluation. Each pair was asked to explain the thinking behind their idea. Donna in particular asked the class to look at all the logos together to see if three unique companies were being communicated clearly.

Feedback

Designer

Donna felt that her aims for the day - to give students an understanding of how she works and to encourage them to use creative thinking and have fun - had definitely been realised. In particular she felt that presenting one of her own projects had been a great way of giving them an insight into her working process, which she felt was beneficial to them all - not just the ones intent on pursuing a career in design. 'Maybe one day they'll be the commissioner of a design agency. Now they'll have a better understanding of the work that goes into design,' she explained.

Teacher

Mike Ruggieri felt the day had been a great success, particularly because 'introducing someone who's a professional raised the status of this activity. Donna had kudos before she'd even walked through the door!'

He said he'd learnt how valuable it was to spend a concentrated block of time on an activity, and he confessed to being pleasantly surprised at how well the students had concentrated.

He also now felt that corporate identity design could be taught a lot better by having more time spent on it and also by giving greater consideration to target audiences. He said he would like to run similar activities with other year groups.

Students

Lydia, Jason, Natasha and Thomas answered a unanimous 'yes' when asked if they'd enjoyed the activity. They enthused about the opportunity to work on design for a whole day. As Thomas put it: 'It means you can keep on track with your thinking'.

Brainstorming collaboratively was also greatly appreciated. Seeing Donna's B4Baby project had been illuminating: 'I was surprised by all the stages a designer has to go through. I thought you just had to come up with one idea,' confessed Lydia. 'I didn't know that you had to consider so much', added Natasha. They also hadn't realised that a designer must continually consider whether their logo ideas work in a variety of scales and formats.