Designing your biggest fear

Mad Scientist Laboratory by Fectiv

As designers, it is important for us to keep experimenting with new techniques and ideas, and of course, keeping design fun. That’s why every month, the Fectiv team has a design challenge, that we call the Mad Scientist Laboratory.

So what is this Monthly Mad Scientist Laboratory exactly?
To give a bit of context: Fectiv is a team of four designers that mostly specialise in UI/UX-design. The team consists of Laura, Anne, Astrid and Jonas (that’s me), and with this monthly challenge, we want to add a more playful and experimental side to our designs that we normally don’t explore when working for clients. It’s also a chance to try out new techniques, insights and styles that we are not familiar with and share these with each other, for inspiration, fun and exploration purposes.

Each Monthly Mad Scientist Laboratory has a theme and a specific set of requirements to draw us out of our comfort zone.

This Laboratory’s theme was:
- “Our Greatest Fear”

This Laboratory’s requirement was:
- “ the end-result had to link back to our name”

Anne’s Greatest Fear

My greatest fear is not being relevant anymore to my boyfriend, girlfriends, family, at work, and etc. It’s quite easy to describe my fear, but to actually visualise it (with my name!) is a completely different story.

I came up with the idea to use the alphabet. We aren’t able to do much without language, so letters are essential to us, which is the opposite to my fear: being absolete. That’s why my design is an alphabet, but without the letters “a”, “e” and “n”, because you need those to write my name.

Want to see more of Anne’s work? Check out her website at http://lacapitanne.com/

Astrid’s Greatest Fear

My greatest fear are needles, which I associate with traumatic experiences, lots of pain and some sort of mutated feeling. When I think about needles, I feel fear, oversensitiveness, weak and I turn pale.

Because of the reasons described above, creating something about my fear is a bit difficult, so instead I decided to focus on the way my fear makes me feel. I made 6 visuals:

1st visual: Feeling smaller and smaller.

2nd visual: The same as the first visual, but with a more horror-like effect. It’s like I’m hiding in the dark.

3rd & 4th visual: Wanting to crawl in the corning and hope that everything disappears.

5th and 6th visual: My name gets smaller as it approaches the middle, a fear that keeps making you smaller and smaller.

Want to see more of Astrids work? Check out her portfolio at: http://astriva.be/
You can also find more of her work at her Behance: https://www.behance.net/astriva

Jonas’ Greatest Fear

I really like pizza, so I imagined a desolate place deep in the middle of nowhere. It turns out that in this desert (I really hate sand, so it kinda fits), your last hope for pizza in the world is out of business, and you have nowhere else to go.

The whole picture is a hopeless situation where you feel isolated, alone, without any way of getting out, and no way or plan to find your way back into the world while the darkness is ready to fall down on you without knowing what’s about to happen next.

Want to see more of Jonas’ work? Check out his portfolio at: http://frontend-dev.ida-mediafoundry.io/ida-portfolio-jonas/index.html
You can find more of his landscapes and illustrations at his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonassimoens/?hl=nl

So what do you think? If you like it, be sure to give us a clap!
See you next month!

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