Project 3 Reflections

I had heard about “the big letters project” as it was sometimes put from my upper classmen friends who had taken BDS. Honestly,  I was more excited for this project than most people. I just loved the big, graphic element to creating large letters that would serve a purpose on campus. I was even more excited when I found out my group was assigned the word “compress” because I knew there was a lot of potential to put it in a creative, compressed spot on campus. Compress seemed like an easy word to work with. 

Before constructing the larger 3’ models each of my team members constructed 3” models of two of the letters from our word. I constructed “m” and “p.” Both letters seemed easy to construct and were very sturdy. I knew the general idea on how to construct the larger ones, but it proved to be harder than I thought while working in a group. We thought it would be easier and faster to construct the letters with tape instead of glue, but this made the letters very wobbly and fragile. Since the tape would show through if we painted them, I suggested that we cover the letters with paper to make them look neat, unified, and not have the tape show. This was a lot more difficult than I thought. The paper sometimes came up short and did not cover the edges of the letters completely so I had to cover the edges with more paper. This made the paper look like it was just trying to cover something up instead of unifying the whole pieces. Unfortunately the letters did not come out as sturdy and cleanly covered as I wanted, but I think the clever placing of them in the stacks of the Watson Library made up for some of it.