Article in Product Design UX UI, Design categories.

Design Challenge: Week 2

Here at Fueled, the design team tasks themselves with a bi-monthly design challenge. The task is simple; we take a little break from projects and compose our own dazzling take on a proposal — taken from a pool of challenge ideas. We have just 2 hours to tackle the brief. However, there are no winners in the design challenge. It proves invaluable to us to share our ideas, explore our processes, and grow as designers. This week's challenge proved to be a lot harder than previously anticipated - sometimes the simplest concepts are the hardest to achieve.

The Brief

Take two subjects, images or logos and fuse them - creating a new one.

The Submissions

Glenn Hitchcock

"Not going to lie, this was supposed to show 'negative space' of a fountain pen with two bunnies forming the nib. BUT, I added all the etches for the ears, and then the tails to make the bunnies more prominent, but it ruined the pen look. So I flipped them and voila, what do you know, a martini glass. So I filled it. Bottoms up."

André Gonçalves

"So in an attempt to spur some creativity I used a 2-word generator. The words I got were Cloud and Taco, so I tried to blend them together. The shapes compliment each other quite well. I found the design worked well as a wallpaper or wrapping paper. This aesthetic or drawing style isn't something I'd usually go for, using the pen and pencil tools in Sketch to create a random, sloppy style rather than pixel perfect shapes. The type is Proxima Nova, customised in a similar style. I found with this challenge, without a specific goal in mind I get lost, so using the word generator to provide some rigid rules was a lot more helpful than just thinking of two shapes that fit together."

James Lindsay

"So I may have gone for the most cliche double fusion option, with a wine glass and a wine bottle. There's a pub near my parent's house called bottle and glass, so I messed around with that concept. I played around with different shapes, flutes and glasses and such to see what best fit the brand. I think the result is very in keeping to what you'd expect a wine bar in Chelsea to rock. I experimented with the branding, playing with the muddy grey/dark green palette. Quite reminiscent of Bang and Olufsen branding. As part of the identity, I liked the idea of a slight angle of the mark, as a metaphor for entering a wine bar - and leaving with a slight merry jaunt."

Mike Barton

"So I tried to work with a 2-word generator to inspire some ideas, but nothing popped out to me. For example, 'Cow' and 'Laxative' didn't spur much joy. I ended up resorting to choosing an animal. I wanted to do something musical and found that drawing a Treble Clef by hand using the pen tool in Sketch resembles the posture of a swan, and so I tried to blend the two. I wanted to avoid compromising either the swan neck or the clef too much (hence the slightly shorter body) and tried to be as minimalistic as possible. So here you go, wonderful swanny music"

Ryan Murphy

"So first of all, words are shapes. I have answered the brief. Although, I kinda read the brief too quickly and only had a bit of time one morning to complete. I quickly worked this up. The words represent the bar of chocolate and the last square are the contents. I found that I played more with the colouring and the styles; they loosely equate to what the bar is. I found the lines used in the L and T balances the letters nicely. Gives a good weight to it. Looks chunky."

Andrew Power

"Well, there wasn’t much to my design. I was having trouble picking what I was going to do so Andre gave me Panda and Clock. I spent forever trying to change a pandas face into a clock in a Beauty and the Beast cogsworth kind of way and that was a mess, and eventually decided to try and draw the full body of the panda and work it into its stomach in almost a Care Bears kind of way. Overall, not super pleased, and I don’t think it works but as a cute little brand, it's okay."

Alex Lockey

"So this week I slightly cheated and submitted two entries. The first one is, I must admit, is on my Dribbble. As soon as I saw the brief this popped into my mind. We did this logo for Velvet Palette, one of our previous clients, as part of a wine appreciation tool. The pose of a man and a woman in an embrace, as well as the swill of the wine as its poured into a glass really compliments each other. I took the original designs, tidied it up a bit and mocked it up into some real concepts. My second design fits the brief a bit more with a playful fusion of a whale as a pair of scissors. It would work well as a kids wallpaper."

Dan Makepeace

"So for my submission, I decided to fuse a smartphone with a suitcase. I ended up thinking up this entire concept of a smart tech suitcase that has clever features, like telling you the weight of your luggage and tells you the contents and stuff. Even with Face ID to unlock the case too, who knows. I tried a few different icons before settling with this concept. Looking at it now though, upside down it kinda looks like a frog doing a breaststroke. "

Prekesh Chavda

"Well, I too went for the 2-word generator to give me some ideas. In turn, I got the words 'Falcon' and 'Alchemist', so naturally, I drew a falcon's claws holding onto a boiling flask. I wanted it to be fully filled and cut away to look like a fused shape, but I ran out of time and finished it off as it was. I added the talon behind the flask as refraction to help give it some depth. "

Sean Kerry

"So for my first submission, I kinda felt like I cheated because I did it in about 30 seconds. It's a single piece of spaghetti (done with the pen tool) or a noodle in the shape of a chair. It's not really a proper fusion of logos/objects, but I felt like it was good enough laid out to look like something else. It could work as the mark for a new trendy restaurant maybe. My second submission is a bit more concise, with a bloodhound with a magnifying glass, Felt like it could be for a detective/private eye agency. Took a bit longer than the first, messing around with the shapes to get the balance right."

Next Time

We'll continue to complete a new challenge every other week, so keep those eyes peeled for our latest submissions.