At the begin­ning of February I star­ted a bit of a career shift. From spare-time designer and full-time web editor, to full-time designer. My new job meant I moved halfway across the coun­try to Lancaster (aka the Frozen North), for a job in Academia — at a design research centre called Imagination. Yes, a designer for design­ers, aka a glut­ton for punishment.

Now I’m afraid this does mark a depar­ture away from govern­ment consulta­tions. I hope to get back to work like that at a later time, but now is not it (at least. if the govern­ment is coöperative — consulta­tions these days are in general too specific, delib­er­ately so, to be mean­ing­ful). Added to this is that the task is simply too huge for a one-woman show. To do it prop­erly it needs to be a team effort — many hands would make lighter work of sourcing the right consulta­tions and laws, writ­ing the summar­ies and design­ing them for optimum read­ing efficiency.

But back to design. My first big job was to create the right signs, décor and wayfind­ing for our Service Design confer­ence. Our build­ing has wonder­ful spaces — huge tall rooms clad with Scandinavian pine, and airy glass parti­tions. We’d not yet taken full advant­age of these and I wanted to create some­thing strik­ing. So we took the exist­ing brand­ing and ran with it.

Do you know how diffi­cult it is to find perfor­ated hard­board in this day and age? Well, now you do. Thanks to Simon for putting the frame together and spray-painting it for us in time!

And if anyone wants shop display pegs for their garage, I still have a box of 100 under my desk.

PNG Digital did the print­ing and put the display up, display­ing (hoho!) no end of patience to get the result we wanted! That’s all cut vinyl on the windows and cut paper adhes­ive on the walls. The detail these guys put into the job was noth­ing short of amazing.

In the end the only thing that didn’t work out was the idea of having guid­ing lines on the floor. The elec­trical tape we thought would do the job was too see-through on concrete, and didn’t give the solid colour we needed to complete the look. But everything turned out alright on the night:

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Corinne Pritchard

Information Designer at Simply Understand

I believe design and design­ers can and should make the world a better place. I love design­ing things that help people under­stand complex ideas.

Latest posts by Corinne Pritchard (see all)

• Linked — 5 September 2016
• Designing a fash­ion website — 26 October 2014
• Service design confer­ence — 9 October 2014