Wee Beginnings

I was excited to be a part of the project that helps children become more creative. I worked with children in the past and always loved it. Preparing art and design activities for my 8-year-old nephew always brings me joy and makes me more creative myself. I was looking forward to starting working in a team and meeting children from Oxgangs Primary.

Brand identity

We started with making research about Little Inventors. We went to their website to find out about their events, exhibitions and founders. We found different challenges and resource packs that would potentially be useful in our project. We noticed a few projects realised by universities. We focused on how we could make ours more exciting than theirs. We decided that we should create our own brand that would be related to Little Inventors and original at the same time. We started coming up with some concepts for the name and the logo and we settled for “Wee Inventors”.

Meeting with Little Inventors

We met with Chelsea Vivash, an artist and a designer who worked for Little Inventors when she was giving a presentation to 1st year Product Design students at Napier University. The meeting was organised to prepare our future students for what was coming in the next few months and give our team a deeper insight into our role in the project.

She shared some information with us that we were not able to find on their website. We showed her a few logo designs, but she instantly rejected them as they were not on brand. She emailed us fonts and character drawings designed by Dominic Wilcox and suggested that we could try to tweak them. After brainstorming and going through many different designs we decided to replace the original character’s hat with a Highland cow hat and use the same font for our “Wee”. That’s how the logo was created.

Work organisation

From the beginning, we knew that this project was going to be big, involve many stages and require a lot of our attention. That is why we decided to split duties. Jordan was in charge of the final exhibition, Kathleen of our workshops with 1st-year students, Lara of workshops at Oxgangs and I took care of social media, website and contact with Little Inventors.

I was also the main photographer during workshops at school. However, before we could start taking photos we had to create, print, deliver and collect photo permissions.

Because we were communicating with others via email, we made Jordan responsible for reading them. Lara was a point of contact for the school and I was in charge of the communication with the university’s institutions. As we were planning to apply for different grants, Kathleen became responsible for preparing and writing applications.

We were granted our own space at the Bright Red Triangle office. We started every day with a meeting on a cosy sofa. We would take 30-60 minutes to discuss a plan for the day to make sure we would not miss anything important. As we were responsible for different stages of the project, we would help a person in charge of the current stage.

I really enjoyed having our own space, where we could share ideas, talk and work together. I think we got organised fairly quickly, what made our work pleasant and easy.