In product design, we created a bluetooth speaker that’s unique and can almost include all kinds of designs. I chose the graffiti aesthetic, and combined it with the American basketball culture (Canadian, actually). As a Toronto Raptors fan, I told the story of how Toronto Raptors went from being underestimated, to making a surprising comeback, and finally becoming champions on my speaker. During the designing and creating process, the part I most struggled with was the graffiti text. Creating them costed much time and effort, to trace them one by one on Affinity Designer. After I finished them, the pieces were lazer-cutted out and unfortunately, was burnt. I therefore had to print them again, after communicating with Mr. Layman and other teachers, I spotted why I was failing: The machine automatically selected “fill” when printing so when it did finish the pieces looked burnt. All I had to do was to change the setting to “line.” I had to wait around 2 days after submitting for it to print so it costed many valuable classes to finish. If you’d ask me what I would change if I were to do the whole thing again, I would say the graffiti part, without hesitation. First of all, as I mentioned, they were plenty of work and failed attempts over failed attempts. Although I still managed to finish the class before online learning, I was still pretty behind compared to other people who had finished much more earlier and had moved on the the writing section. Second of all, they didn’t look so well. I expected them to look cool with the bright red “exploding” over the wooden piece, but instead they looked just like text with a special font, and the paint didn’t look so “exploding” after all.
In conclusion, despite having multiple failures with the graffiti, I feel that my speaker is a success. I am proud of how it tells a story of a team that was underestimated, and playing music on it was much fun; surprised of how popping and spectacular the sound quality was.