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Branding:
Initially I felt we needed to make Little Inventors seem, closer to home. It's a worldwide organisation and I felt scrolling through the website slightly intimidating. If I felt this then certainly an 8 year old could feel like this too. It was important to me that the children felt their ideas were being taken seriously and that they knew we were there for them.
Therefore it seemed only logic to give our Little Inventors project branding a Scottish twist, instead of relating the branding directly to Edinburgh Napier. Once we all got on the same page we started to design the logo.
Moving onto the logo, we worked well together as a team, we did like the colours that Little Inventors used so we wanted to remain with those. We had just begun looking at making a playful font for the logo, then we’d met Chelsea.
She outlined that we needed to use the same fonts, colour pallet and character, and showed us some examples. This resulted in us replacing the “Little” with “Wee” and giving the Little Inventors character a highland cow hat. Highland cows are such an iconic Scottish animal, and we thought he added an endearing edge that children would enjoy.
Lara illustrated the lovely highland cow, and as a team we noticed it isn't as simple designing in conjunction with the copyright rules from Little Inventors. I found it difficult to find a balance between us adhering to the rules Little Inventors set and communicating with Chelsea from Little Inventors. Chelsea has since resigned from Little Inventors and I think we got lost in translation once she approved the logo.
Management:
I found designing together as a team straightforward, we all have similar tastes. What needed the most TLC was management and organisation.
Therefore to make sure no aspect of the project was neglected, we delegated management of each sectors. I managed the First Years. Lara, Oxgangs, Jordan, Exhibition and Kat Social media and Little Inventors collaboration. This management style should guarantee no stone will be left unturned when planning. We also assigned Jordan to answer any emails addressed to the account, Kat was the main point of contact for university publishing and I the main point of contact for grants and budget.
Once a week we where in the school, and from gaining experience in the school our plans changed. We had to be flexible because we where constantly met with new information. I like to be organised lists, spreadsheets, the works, but this project thought me that when working with children nothing is predictable.
I later found out, during lockdown, that you can make all the lists you want but nothing beats the ability to be flexible and sometimes its okay not to plan ahead, sometimes you just need to take things as they come.
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