Design students have a lot of bottle

Before Christmas last year, second year students on the HND in Interactive Media were introduced to Duncan Hewitt – a 3D designer at Albino Igil – a Derbyshire-based company which provides 3D imagery for clients and concepts for product design.

Duncan set the class of 10 students the challenge of producing an identity for a bottle for a drink of their choice. Over the last 13 weeks, students have worked not only on their 3D design skills using programmes like LightWave, but they’ve also tested their marketing and website design skills.

Duncan visited the class on Thursday (26 January) to see their final product designs and each student presented their product and identified their marketing concepts and ideas.

Wai Hung Tsang, 25, from Boughton, presented his drink idea – called ‘Prima’, based on the concept of the body’s seven chakras, bringing in the seven colours of the spectrum and associating the relevant coloured fruit and vegetables.

Wai Hung said: “I notice that today in society people are consuming too much artificial sugar within drinks. I wanted to base my design on healthier ideals such as the body’s chakras and healthy ingredients which produce natural sugars.

“It was interesting to push my skills further than just the design side of things and think about how to effectively market a new product. It was quite challenging as my skills are strongest in 3D.”

Duncan said: “Everyone has done a great job of following my brief and I’m very impressed by the range of designs. Every one of them is so very different and the students have shown a real breadth and quality of skills in such a short space of time.

“I was impressed by their attempts are marketing their designs further, especially as this isn’t something they’re used to doing on their course. A really wonderful mix of fresh ideas.”