For our first Product design unit, we were asked to create a lightbox that had a scenery of a place/landscape that is special or important to us but didn’t get the chance to visit because of COVID. We first searched up images of three different places that are special to us and chose one of them for our lightbox design. I chose to feature the landscape of an island of Maldives—which we were planning to visit again. I split the image into five layers, ranging from the background (sky), palm trees & bushes, wooden houses, the beach, and seawater.
I learned and developed various skills in this project including the skills I learned using Adobe Illustrator, using acrylic paint & masking tape, and separating an image into layers, etc. I developed numerous skills that had to do with using the Adobe Illustrator, since I’ve never used it before; which includes but does not limited to changing the color of the outlines of icons/shapes, creating shapes and adjusting their sizes, as well as turning solid icons into lines through a quick process of image tracing and expand. To make our lightbox layers, we found icons from a website called Noun Project and learned how to join icons together to make out the features of our lightbox layers.
My biggest obstacle was adjusting the size of the palm tree icons that I selected. At first, I chose a really realistic palm tree icon that I favored, and they looked perfectly fine with the bushes icons until I realized that the trunks of the trees were too thin; meaning that there’s a big chance that they will break apart. I tried to adjust the width of the tree trunks, but it doesn’t work since they are already connected and grouped with the bushes. As result, I deleted and re-did the entire layer, which surprisingly didn’t take me much time to do so. I picked another palm tree icon that has a wider tree trunk and repeated the steps I did last time, which gave me the final product in the above photos.
Something I’d like to change about my lightbox is that I would make my second layer higher (the palm trees and bushes) or make the palm trees bigger so that there wouldn’t be so much “blank” space in the upper part of my lightbox. Since I joined these icons with a rectangle I can simply change the height of the rectangle to make it happen.
Overall, I think my lightbox was a success because it turned out to look pretty similar to the actual image I chose. The LED light behind the palm trees and the orange acrylic paint in the back made it look relatively like a real sunset—when the lights are switched on. The sizes of my lightbox layers are also just right to make out the image and are all able to fit inside the box.
