Introduction
The Zenith project is the project where we have the most freedom to choose what kind of project we want to do. The purpose of this is for students to create a project that they are most passionate about and will hopefully be the most rewarding and challenging.
For my Zenith project, I created a company, called Seraphine Prints, which sells wall collage boxes. The inspiration for my project came from a few different places one including interior design. I have always been interested in interior design, but have never gotten a chance to do a project at freestyle that involves this. On top of that, I also wanted to create something that could be interactive and inspirational to other artists and/or customers. This was mainly because of my Advertisement project where I created an Ad for a company that allows people to customize their own shoes, and I really like the idea of allowing artistic freedom for a thing like this. Knowing I wanted to include these things I did some digging on Pinterest, mostly, to get some ideas for things that I could create. I found a company called Tezza that creates wall collages which I thought was really cool, though I didn’t like the price point nor did I like that all of the boxes were made to order only. This was when I decided I was going to make my own version of a company like this but with lower prices and more options.
Process
Planning my project took quite a while for me because I was originally planning on collaborating with two other students. About two weeks into the process, I decided to work alone which required me to make a whole plan with all new deadlines. Once I was done with that, I had already lost two weeks’ worth of work which meant that I needed to speed things up a bit.
My goal for this project was to create three boxes with three differing aesthetics and color schemes. Each box was to feature a wall collage consisting of photos and prints. To accomplish this, my first step was to gather more inspiration for the quotes and positivity that I wanted to include. To do this I created a Lennon wall, which I had the freestyle students create. My Idea for the Lennon wall was to have sticky notes with positive messages spread across, and I was going to set this up on campus to allow people to take one and then write a new one for someone else. Although I didn’t get an opportunity to have others interact with it, I loved seeing all of the messages that the freestyle juniors wrote and it was definitely enough to still create my prints.
The process for creating prints was fairly easy, though because I wanted to create multiple boxes, the pace was what made it challenging. Overall, I did end up missing a few deadlines, though I think this project definitely forced me to step up my time management skills. Apart from that, my project went fairly smoothly until school was canceled. When we were out of school and shelter-in-place began, was the time when I was supposed to go take pictures for my boxes. As you could imagine, this created some issues, as I couldn’t have friends pose for certain things nor could I go to certain places. I ended up having to use old photos, which created even more issues. I had to format photos that were taken on different devices all the same way while still ensuring the quality did not decrease. I ended up creating about 10 prints per week for 6 weeks and I was very pleased with how my prints ended up, even though I fell behind a few times.
After finishing the prints, I got to design a logo, create packaging, and a website. This was probably my favorite part of my entire project because it brought everything together and allowed me to see just how much work I actually did and also to finally share it with others. Aside from a delayed amazon package of boxes for packaging, this process was probably the quickest. I painted a box white and pasted my logo on the front. I also created a little note card that shows the customer how to use/hang the wall collage. To complete the packaging, I ordered my prints from Walgreens and featured them in the photos for my packaging. After this was complete, I used Wix.com to create a website for my entire company which I am super happy with. I spent quite a while on this because this is the part that will attract people.
Finished Product
Below are photos of my finished products thought hey are better represented on my Zenith presentation and my Seraphine Prints Website which are also linked below.
Reflection