BYU-Idaho Graphic Design Alumni

[gallery]Deciding what to do for the BFA was half the battle. I chose to do an experiment to design one tomato sauce package in one day for fifteen days. The purpose of this project was to discover my design process, how long it takes to complete each step, to figure out if there is a limit to quality design solutions, and to stretch myself in a way that I had never been stretched before. Every day I kept track of the time spent in each phase.

In the end I discovered that I could come up with a package in one day. The hardest part was to stop after 24 hours because I wanted to keep pushing the design until it was good enough to sell. The more packages I designed, the more ideas I kept having. In the beginning I spent more time in the research phase than at the end because the subject didn’t change, and because there were some days I had a design I couldn’t get out of my mind until I made it from the sketches and research I had done previously. Overall the majority of my time was spent in the production phase.

These are the statistical results:
Time spent researching: 5 hours and 38 minutes
Time spent sketching: 29 hours and 59 minutes
Time spent in production: 95 hours and 3 minutes
Total time spent on th 15 packages: 130 hours and 40 minutes

Each tomato package was its own challenge. One of the many lessons I learned was that good design is just as much about what I put into the project as it is about what I put into myself. Finding ways to be inspired on long projects increased the flow of creative ideas.

Posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:08 pm by Michelle
Filed under 2009 Graduate
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