Container

I attended a lecture by Container Plus that was based on collaboration within design work. Louise Vormitag who came to do the presentation advised that one of her colleagues she works along side now, Nicola is in fact an old college friend. After graduation they were scared about going into the world of work - as anyone would be- and decided to stick together as they had done work together during their education time. Although working as a team they produced two portfolios - one each - and when one of them had a visit with design directors they would take the other portfolio with them. With doing this they got some work.

One of the first projects the pair worked on was for Selfridges, it was designed for the cafe. The design was in the windows and they were drawn directly onto where it was being shown so the drawings and designing of the whole thing was sort of like a performance and people used to gather around and watch. I thought this was great as it was just something that wasn't planned but turned out to be a great success.







Working in a collaboration has many advantages as you help integrate each others strengths within your design work.

Another piece of work they did as a pair was for the launch of the Volkswagen Fox, they were given four rooms to design at the Copenhagen's creative lifestyle hotel. The idea that they went with was using playing cards as their basis so each room was given a suit and a whole story was shown using imagery in a very illustrative manor. The club room had a seductive feel, they brought people in to do the textiles side of the room.

After many projects had been done and they had a good client base they decided to extend the size of their business which unfortunately didn't work out too well. Although collaborative work has its advantages it can also cause problems especially if a dramatic change is made. The relationship between two people suddenly increased to many different relationships with more opinions and ideas which resulted in decisions being harder to make. Louise continued to work with Nicola after the break up of the company just after a year and also with one of the other women involved in the increased company. This is where Container Plus was formed as it is known today.

Louise shown us lots of her work and a lot of which I thought had a lot of variety in the medias used. This shows why collaboration is such a great thing to encourage. We as students are constantly being encouraged to work with other students on projects and I personally have found it a great opportunity to develop ideas. The majority of my work this year has been collaborative and I do recommend it to anyone as a student as this is how it works when out in the world of design.