Keywords:
Designing:
Aesthetics: How something looks/appearance, e.g. colour, shape, size, texture etc.
Render: The addition of colour, or texture, to enhance a sketch to help communicate factors such as material or shape.
Tone: Lightness or darkness of an object or design, often used to show shadow and emphasise form/shape.
Texture: The surface quality, e.g. soft, rough, smooth, shiney etc. Materials have different textures.
Form: The shape of an object, e.g. femine, masculine, round, square, natural etc.
Scale: Size - this should be in mm (if very small), cm or m (if very large). Never inches.
Nesting: Similar to tessellating shapes together, nesting refers to fitting patterns, such as the outline of a product part, onto a piece of material as many times as possible with minimal waste.
Timbers:
Softwood/coniferous: Trees with needles - like your Christmas tree. Quick growing, making them cheaper than hardwood.
Hardwood/Deciduous: Trees that lose their leaves in the winter. Slow growing, often taking 80-100 years to reach maturity.
Knots: Dark circles found on timber, formed from where branches would have grown on the tree.
Bark: The rough, dark, outer layer on a tree.
Solid wood/Natural wood: Timber/wood formed from trees. The trees are felled, the bark removed and the timber cut into pieces for use.
Manmade boards: Boards made from timber/wood, but it has been processed, generally using glues to help form them. Plywood, MDF and chipboard are common examples. These often use scrap material.
Warp: Natural timber can warp meaning it no longer lies flat, but instead curves slightly.
Grain: The lines in timber formed as the tree grows, the ends of timber has rings from where the tree has grown wider, and the sides show this in lines.
Felling: Cutting down trees.
Conversion: When a tree is cut down and processed (converted)into useable timber such as planks. This process includes felling the tree, debaring (removing the bark and branches etc.) and then cutting it into parts for use.
Deforestation: When large areas of forests/woods, including rainforests, are cut down. This often happens because the trees are wanted as a timber sources or to clear the land for use such as to build on or for farming.
General:
Target Market: The main user a product is designed for. Often age, gender, income, location, ability and interests are considerations to ensure the product is suitable for them and they will want it.
Sustainable: It will not run out. For example, trees can be sustainable as we can plant more.
Renewable: We can make more of it, again trees are renewable as we can plan more to make new ones, cotton used for clothing is also a renewable source.
Finite: A source that has a limit, and once used cannot be remade. Fossil fuels (gas, oil and coal) are finite - once we have removed it all from the earth it will not be replenished. It is ‘non-renewable’.
Nesting Shapes saves material which reduces cost as less material is needed.
These products are the same, but have two very different target markets.
Different types of tree have different coloured timber and different grain patterns.
Notice the knot and how the grain moves around it
Deforestation, like that shown below is a big concern, especially for global warming.