The worldwide banking corporation HSBC is moving its UK head office to Birmingham! This is a significant event for Birmingham and HSBC as the revival of the Midland Bank which was bought by HSBC in 1992. Their new headquarters will begin construction in June 2016 and will be ready for early 2018. To commemorate the event HSBC are burying a time capsule at the site where their new headquarters will be built. For this they have commissioned the School of Jewellery to create a medal to celebrate the event which will be placed inside the capsule. This was then put to the students of Design For Industry to come up with a design. When I first received this brief I was a little lost. So I started off by doing my research and looking into the history of it all. I found out about HSBC's values in supporting business's world wide and also their commitment to the community. So I started to think about a few of the things that could represent this visually on my coin. I decided that the best way to record Birmignham was to go out and take pictures myself! So I headed out to look at the old Midland Bank headquarters, to the town center and the beautiful town hall. Then on to the more recent iconic buildings of Birmingham such as the Library and then to finish off my tour back, to the Jewellery Quarter and the recognisable clock tower in the center. Below are some of the pictures I took. Once I had compiled all the pictures that I felt represented Birmingham I got to work in my sketchbook on trying to work out a rough design for the medal. Then I took to Photoshop to arrange a composition and back to my sketchbook to finalise a design. Now that I had my design and images ready I opened ArtCam to create the relief. I tried to work in layers, and made use of the Clip Art folder to save my background relief so that I could work with it, and add the library pattern on top. I flattened an area to place the HSBC logo on last and used vectors to get rid of unwanted blemishes in the design. I used the edit tools to smooth out areas and carved into the Midland Bank Limited title to make it clearer to read. I could then save this to my clip art folder and work on creating the medal shape and other details. To finish off the design I added the text to the reverse and rendered the final design to present to HSBC. It was such a surprise to hear that my design had been selected It was really exciting to think that my design was going to get made in silver, and eventually would be buried in a time capsule under the city of Birmingham. One day if that capsule is dug up I would like to think that the people looking at the contents will find the coin and be able to look back at the images and get a picture of what Birmingham was like in 2016 and appreciate the beautiful architecture. I was going to wait to post this until the medal was finished but instead I would like to share it with you now. I can then keep you updated on the progress of the coin as we go through manufacturing testing, filming for HSBC and hopefully get to show you the final piece!
Thanks for reading!
1 Comment
Patricia And Alan Wills
4/3/2016 10:10:00 am
Wonderful achievements Stephanie.
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