Collaboration // Sophie + Tamar

Collaborate with someone outside of the programme

For this brief, I have decided to work with someone I know from the printed textiles course, Tamar Attia.

Why did I choose her to collaborate with?

• an enthusiastic person not afraid to share ideas, and excited to try new things
• her work is very expressive and vibrant, thus I think our styles would complement each other
• working with patterns would be really interesting, as that isn't something I've done a lot.
• I really like her designs!

A preview of Tamar's previous surface patterns:

Her work comes in different forms, such as collage, felt material, monoprints, linoprints. One thing I haven't done enough is experiment with different mediums... I think this will be a good learning curve for me and a way to venture into new materials.

As soon as I asked Tamar if she would be interested, she immediately said she would love to, even though she doesn't need to do it for any of her modules. Enthusiasm is key!

Initial ideas and discussion

We met a couple of days later and had a discussion about what direction we could go in. I explained that I'd like to make one of two options:

• branding
• publication

From this Tamar said that she would be interested in rebranding, as it's new to her and it would be a clear brief as it would be a preexisting brand. But after some discussion about concepts, we were leaning more towards campaigns and ideas of informing:

• plants - how to look after indoor potted plants, as this is something people struggle and fail with.
• fun revision books for young students, as a way to engage them with visual learning material
• science simplified - for adults who are curious about how the world works, but can't remember much of what they were taught in school.
• childrens book - use illustration and fun layouts to entertain young children.
• raising awareness of dyslexia and other learning difficulties, or creating material for young people struggling with them.

We agreed that one of these ideas would be better for a collab than rebranding.

Revision

• we discussed this idea further and tried to grasp an idea of what content would be needed by visiting the BBC bitesize website.
• We then decided that it would be difficult to create a small publication as there needs to be a lot of information for school subject revision... our budget wouldn't cover it and we would be out of our depth with so much to process.

Plants

• This started off as a very basic idea: but we got immediately inspired by the many plants I have dotted around my bedroom, and I brought up how they are proven to increase health and workflow in various ways.
• From this we thought: create a small book or publication that informs the reader about the benefits of being surrounded by plants, as I'm sure that a lot of people won't be aware of them.
• This would be in the hopes of improving people's office spaces and work performances... while keeping them healthy. We would also include the initial idea of showing people how to look after various different types of plants.
• An added note: Tamar uses a lot of leaves and plant-like shapes in her work, so this seems well suited to her style.