Final installation

The design is finally up! Because of the size (32m long) it took nearly two days to install, but it was worth it... It really lifts the central dining room area of the school and when the sun shines it throws shadows on the floor and brightens the sky.


Due to the stairs and the walkway at the back of the space you can see the window up close and personal. Here's a detail of the design to give you an idea of what it looks like from those vantage points.

Thanks to the help from students this has been a great project with a fantastic result.

Dividing the design up

My work on this project is pretty much done now. I had to send the final file off to the company who were producing the adhesive film, and they divided it into sections that matched the beams and structure of the rooflight. Here they are in yellow - they used that colour so that they're immediately visible and different to the other colours in the design. The printers then know where to divide the design up, and which bits to cut out.

Finally the colour is right

The right result, at last! This is part of a full size sample - it's bold, it's colourful and it 'sings' - perfect.


This small sample is at the other end of the scale - it has 25% white behind to back up the colour. This looks fine, so I take it to the Alec French, the architects who drew the original designs for your school and they are happy with it too. Now I have to ask for a full scale sample to be printed to make sure that it works at the correct scale - I think it will look even better HUGE.


This small sample has 100% white behind it, and goes completely dead and black when you put it up to the light. If you had this in your dining room rooflight, you would feel depressed within seconds.

Colour tests

The next thing is to make sure that the printer gets the colours right. The printer has to digitally print all 96 panels on a transparent material so that it can be stuck onto the glass in the rooflight - so it's really important that this stage is done properly. The photo above is the first sample I got back. You can see that it's nearly invisible, so I needed to somehow get the colour deeper and more vibrant.


This second sample is miles better. The difference is, this one is printed first with the colour white, which gives the other colours a background so that they show up more. See how the reds and light blue are looking really rich and deep? But what about the dark blue that looks almost black? Won't that be too dark in the dining room? This was my worry, so I ordered another set of samples, this time with different percentages of white behind, starting with 25% (transparent white) and going up to 100% (opaque white). I want the colours to look bright, but not too dense. It's always a compromise.
Let's hope one of those will be ok!

Final rooflight file

The next step is to put all these elements - lines, shapes and gradients - together, to create the final file. As you can see, I've changed the colours so that they look more like the original colours that your schoolmates chose a very, very long time ago!

Working on the digital file in Illustrator

As the students and had done the artwork as a hard - not electronic - copy, the next task for me was to translate this paper drawing into a vector file in Illustrator, so that it could be blown up as big as a swimming pool with out pixelating, or going 'blocky'.
I started by scanning the lines from the original drawing in, to make it as true to the original drawing as possible. Then I 'drew' these lines in Illustrator and filled the shapes in as dark blue. It's all untidy at this point, but it will come together, promise.


The next thing to do was to get the coloured shapes in place. Don't worry - they're not going to be this green! I used that colour just for this step, as it shows up alongside pretty much any other colour and I needed to see what I was doing. At this point I'm not interested in choosing the colours precisely - just getting the shapes in place.



This was the hardest bit. Your schoolmates said that they liked the blended look of the design I proposed, so I wanted somehow to create that effect. It took a while, but I think it was worth it, as it gives the shapes a 3-D effect that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

It might look real... but it isn't!

It's all starting to look like a proper building up at your new school, instead of gaping holes and cement. Now you can really get a sense of where the glass is going to go, and how your design will look. To help you along, I've transposed the design into the atrium with the help of Photoshop. It's not perfect, but it does give you some idea about how it will look.