Mencap

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Apprentice Challenge Brief Background: This is the first year of Leeds Mencap Apprentice challenge, in which teams are given £50 and need to convert this amount into as much money as possible for the charity. We were asked to work with Duke Studios and North Bar as a team to design, produce and sell a one-off run of collectable coasters to reach an aim of raising £1300 for the charity. Brief: Design a set of 4 collectable beer mats to be sold across the North Bar chain of pubs in Leeds. These will be laser cut by Duke Studios onto kraft board and distributed in a volume of 2700. The design needs to be simple as it will be produced in high volume and should be quick to laser cut, minimising the detail as much as possible. The design should not reference beer as may be sold outside of the bar environment. A consistent theme should run across the set to encourage people to buy all 4. Audience: North Bar attracts a lot of craft beer drinkers as it stocks a huge number of microbreweries and independently brewed drinks. Drinks tend to be higher priced than other venues and so visitors are likely to have disposable income to spend on the beer mats. Tone: Eye Catching Collectable Simple

Andy Foster & Martin O’Dea

Apprentice Challenge

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Concept / development After discussing some ideas, we decided to move forward with the idea of using half characters whose top and bottom halves would line up when all 4 mats were collected. We particularly liked the idea that people could mix dierent characters to create unintended combinations, and that this could encourage conversation and fun in the bar environment. We calculated that 8 characters, split into 16 halves, would be needed to achieve this eect. We developed an illustration that would be really stripped back to reduce the time spent on the laser cutter. This reduced, single line approach proved to be a unfamiliar but rewarding way of working for us, forcing us to try and strip back any unnecessary details while still giving each of the figures character and unique details.

Andy Foster & Martin O’Dea

Apprentice Challenge

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Response to feedback After sending over our initial designs a test cut was made we recieved the following feedback: + Concern over the way we had portrayed some of the characters, and we were asked to alter some of them to avoid causing any possible offence due to the mats being in support of a mental health charity. + In the initial cut the laser cutter caused the letters to ‘blow out’ so a thinner, single line typeface needed to be used instead. + The beer mats did not intereact with each other as well as hoped. A solution needed to be found to make the characters match up more directly and make this interaction more obvious. In response to the feedback we toned down alot of the child-like qualities in the characters. We also used a single stroke for the eyes instead of double to make the characters more friendly. We swapped to a single line font; Futura Line. By cutting a notch in two sides of the beer mat we were able to make the top and bottom of each card connect encouraging people to connect them.

Andy Foster & Martin O’Dea

Apprentice Challenge

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Final Product These are the final beer mats that were cut out of kraft board and took over a week to cut out the 2000 beer mats that were initially cut. These were sold across the six North Bar pubs in and around Leeds for a month. In total approximately 1,500 beer mats were sold raising £785.77 for Leeds Mencap. We were also really pleased to win an award for the most innivotaive fundraising idea at the Leeds Mencap award ceremony. Throughout the month we recieved alot of positive comments across social media sites and press releases from staff and customers. It was really rewarding to see images of people interacting with the format of the beer mat and even making their own characters on the back.

Andy Foster & Martin O’Dea

Apprentice Challenge

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