First Design Class, First Project

My great grandmother's Irish Luck Locket

For my first design project I was assigned the task of making a 4x6" postcard based on a piece of jewelry.  I chose a family heirloom, my great grandmother's Irish Luck locket.  I choose this item over some of my more contemporary jewelry items because I love the story behind it.  My great  grandmother was from Ireland, as was my grandma.  It has been handed down for a few generations and I am the fourth generation in my family to receive the item.  I love the locket both because it has been in my family for a long time, but also because of the era it was designed and created in, the Edwardian era.  I also like the details the jeweler decided to include on the face of the locket, the image of my great grandma, together with the stereotypical wishbone and shamrocks.  The reason I like the Irish symbols is because their presence here predates their later mass appearance in popular culture, and thus their heavy association with Ireland.  Thus, I have with one piece of jewelry both a family history and a piece of authentic Irish iconography that predates the mass produced Irish symbolism.  On a bit of a less serious note, I also love the fact I can wear this little bit of history around my neck and tell the story to those who ask.  

Now back to the assignment, I was told to use this object to create a postcard to, "... highlight the image that best captures the essence of the object".  The only constraints given were that it must fit on a 4x6" postcard.  After giving this assignment some thought and evaluating what few design tools I had available to me at this point, I decided on simply hand sketching the necklace onto the postcard with graphite, just as the original jeweler who created the item would have done before he/she created the locket.  I chose this option over simply taking a picture and pasting it to a card, and over using a more colorful option, as the simplicity of the grey and white colors I believe spoke the design of the locket and was a throwback to the past I mentioned earlier.  Below is the image of the postcard:

graphite on 4x6 postcard

The backside of the postcard hold the initials of my great grandma that were originally hand engraved (no computer aided engravers in 1910).  I cannot imagine how arduous the engraving must have been for the artist, because just sketching the image of the initials onto the postcard took me a very long time, and I was able to erase the mistakes.

From here our next project was to take the item and create and advertisement/brand for it.  Our final submission had to be 11x17" and could take on either a vertical or horizontal orientation.  After giving this assignment a ton of thought and sketching some ideas I finally settled on advertising the necklace itself, foregoing the other ideas such as advertising for antique jewelry, specialty auction houses that sell antique jewelry, or even specialty insurance companies.  The fact that the necklace told the story of multiple eras held some intrinsic appeal for the locket, but conveying that idea was challenging, should I show the era when the necklace was made, the antique tools it was made with, someone older gifting it to someone younger?  I wasn't really sure. 

Then it hit me that the different generations have all lived through their own history, world war one, world war 2, vietnam, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the technological era, and the informational era.  But how to show the necklace moving through all of that history also presented a challenge, do you show a historical timeline with photos and move the necklace through all of them, and if so does that become confusing?  Is it to far removed from the idea of selling the necklace?  I think the answer to that is yes, it looses sight of selling the necklace and focuses too much on the story.  So, then what am I trying to say and who am I saying it to?  Who would buy this necklace and where would they look.  I thought initially of fashion magazines, but then decided they would be too trendy and contemporary of a setting.  Then I thought of where companies like Christie's Auction house or Sotheby's would advertise, magazines like the Robb Report.  I also thought of the online one of a kind retail forum know as 1st Dibs.  More than a specific audience I focused an creating an ad that would appear in either one of those publications, who already had established their book of business with buyers interested in one of a kind historical items.  I also began to think about what my personal favorite thing to do with the necklace is, to wear it.  I wanted to show the necklace as it was meant to be used, as an accessory, but also somehow include the historic value of the item.  The idea occurred to me that women have been wearing this necklace through all of their respective eras and the necklace worked with what ever they were wearing it with because the necklace was timeless.  Below is the final product:

Design Project #2

The women have all decided to wear the same necklace through their respective eras and then passed it on to the next, thus the necklace is timeless.  I printed the photos in black and white and left the necklace in full color so that it stood out and was the thread that tied all of the photos together.  

In hindsight I should have made the word timeless larger, as it was huge when I was an inch from it, but disappeared when I was five feet away.  But overall I was happy with the end result.