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.

The Vote

My next job was to get more students involved in the whole thing, so I scaled up two final designs agreed on during a meeting with your head teacher Ann Duff and head of art Sue Lovell.
I decided to do a full size panel of each design, so that you could get some idea of the HUGENESS of the finished project. You can see these hanging off the balcony in the top photo.
Well. The result was an overwhelming YES! for the one that your school mates had liked best all along. Just goes to show that they knew what you'd like.
I'm looking forward to the next stage now - interpreting the design digitally into an ENORMOUS file that will then be printed...but that's another blog entry...

I worked up the design - as you can see in the top three above - changing the shapes a bit and deciding how to do the 'shading' so that the coloured shapes linked with the clear parts in the design. I always design with the structure of the building in mind - in this case there's 48 X 2 sections of glass, so the beams are an important part of the design. When I was happy with the result, I scaled it up to 1:25 to give me more idea of the scale.
Now I had to present the design to Miss Duff and Mrs Lovell to make sure they liked it and wanted it all over the school dining room roof!
Everyone was totally enthusiastic, saying it was fantastic that the school would have something influenced by students in such an important place in the school. So you can pat yourselves hard on your backs, well done!

Your favourite designs

You all liked the bottom two design ideas best (see below), and split into groups to scale the designs up 25:1. That means the atrium roof light is 25X the size of these - still huge!
Scaling up designs gives you a chance to make changes, and to see if they 'work' on a bigger scale. Sometimes designs look good small, but don't look very good when they're big. We made a fair bit of mess in the library, but the results are great.
At the end of the workshop, you unanimously agreed - and that included Mr Peplow - that you preferred the bottom one and that it would work better in the dining hall space than the circles.

Some ideas emerge...

Here are the four design ideas Striking Glass came up with after seeing your classmates designs from the first workshop (see post below). The bottom two were chosen by the students as their favourites. They were seen as a lively and fitting centre piece for the dining space in your new school.

Now it gets real - site visit!

First of all the obligatory Health and Safety saw us all putting on welly boots, hard hats, bright yellow waist coats and even gloves (yes, in case we fall over and put our hands onto something sharp...) I think everyone looks rather dashing myself.


This is your future dining room space. The space above everyone's head, right down to the green digger at the end is where the atrium window is going to go. I think everyone got a sense of just how BIG this window design is going to be. Scroll down to the first entry if you want to see the architects' drawing of the atrium, to compare his impression with the reality.

1st Atrium Design Workshop

So what didn't you like about your current dining room? It's always good to find that out first, so we can work towards creating something you do want... I learnt that it was dull, cramped, sometimes cold, used for everything under the sun - and even smelly! The things you wanted in the new dining space sounded much more positive - colourful, lively, upbeat, yet also relaxing, orderly and calm. You stressed the importance of space and you wanted a stand out statement that was exciting and inviting.
So how do all those ideas translate to colours and shapes? We talked about the different colours and the feelings they evoked. You thought the 'cool' colours - blues and turquoise - were calm and relaxing, and the 'warm' colours - red, orange and yellow - were lively and active. The shapes you preferred were the flowing, organic ones - you weren't too keen on the sharp and orderly geometric look.
Next the students had a go at designing very small, scaled down versions of the atrium - and here they are! As you can see, lots of different exciting ideas... which ones grab you the most? Leave any comments below - they're always helpful.

What on earth is an atrium, and how do you design one?

This is what your new dining space will look like. See that glass roof? That's the atrium. It's as long as Easton swimming pool - 32metres - and needs an exciting design inspired by students to make it special to your school. Once the design has been chosen, it will be carefully scaled up and digitally printed onto transparent film, which will then be stuck on the underside of the glass in the atrium. Think stained glass windows - but for the 21st century and ENORMOUS!

In case you're wondering, I'm Milly, and I'm a glass artist here in Bristol. My job at Filton is to gather lots of ideas from you, and then distill them into several designs for you to choose from. I'm really excited about this project - the dining space will be at the centre of your new school, and it's a fantastic opportunity for students to have a hand in a HUGE piece of artwork that will be the first thing that people see when entering the building. First impressions count - let's make sure it's a good one!