I love to design things that have a lot of meaning to them one because the show you the work you have done and two because to everyone else it seems as though it is just a picture at first but then when they start to look closer at the design, they uncover more and more about what the designer has thought put into even the littlest of things.
To this design in particular I put in a lot of religious and philosophical reasons. Starting off with the koi fish meaning in Japan is good fortune or luck they also are associated with perseverance in adversity and strength of purpose, the Koi fish symbolize good luck, abundance, and perseverance. The ying-yang sign in the middle means balance and the koi fish imitating the symbol itself. Also, the outline of the design is a cycle as it represents the circle of life in Buddhism. There is more to it, but try to find it out yourself, what do you think it might mean in your point of view. That was just the designing part of the whole thing.
Next, after I had perfected the design I did it on the computer again. Now doing it on the computer is a lot more difficult than doing paper to pen. Quite a few things were changed when I designed it on the computer. To make things make sense I had to put a circle on the outside of the koi fish instead of cutting around the outside of it because there was an area of difficulty in that that could’ve gone wrong. Wanted to make it very detailed, therefore the lines of the fish shaded in were also there to make it pop out. Also, on the whitefish I wanted to color in the eye but didn’t because I knew it would be too much white so kept the filling blanc but the outline of the eye is still there. This goes to show how you have to pay attention to every detail as when they add up altogether it makes it a lot better than if you didn’t.
The thing that we had to do next was to solder the LED light and the USB cable together. This part was pretty easy for me as I had watched my dad do it before so I kind of already knew what to do as I had seen it quite a few times in action already. Just show that even looking at someone else do something can help you in the future as you never really know when it will be useful.
After that the design was cut out and shaded by a laser cutter, we had to assemble the bottom bit of the design in my case the black part. It was pretty simple but a bit fiddly as you need to put the light in the place where it was cut out just right or it might make a gap at the bottom because we needed to insulate the USB cables (as if the negative and positive cables touch each other it will cut short and the bulb won't work again) and the masking tape might stick out.
That was pretty much it. But all of this was just an overview of the project there was much more that happened and took quite a few weeks to do it too. From this, you can get that you must pay attention to detail a lot to make something special and look interesting.
