Ons Plek: stunningly transformed

The new face of Ons Plek

 Courtyard: before

 Courtyard: after

 Celebrating the new look

Pam Jackson: the happy director of Ons Plek.

Wow! I was recently at Ons Plek to celebrate their fresh and vibey new look. When we were revamping the safe room, I contacted Aidan Bennetts to ask his help with some foldable furniture. Next thing he rocks up with sponsorship and a very skilled team from Chevrolets Ute Force, and the whole courtyard gets re-tiled, and painted, with added details such as window planters. (Stunning detail photos of the renovation are to be found on the Ute Force website) And Aidan managed to get famed street artist Faith 47 involved, who painted a striking mural on the front facade. Ons Plek is now an eye-catching and memorable feature in the Fringe District. Amazing what creativity and design can do! Catch Alma Vivier's cool article about the process in the January issue of the City Views news paper.

The official name for the resource centre in Mfuleni has been decided upon, and the next step is to design a logo. Inspired by the centres strapline "empowering ourselves so that we can reach and teach others," we decided to use a star-related concept, the idea being that the teachers, being trained by the centre and using the centre, will become stars, and so will the children they teach. We kept the logo in the same colour range as the Sasdi logo so that they will live happily together in Sasdi's brand stable.

The beginning: Sasdi Resource Library at Mfuleni

The first day at the Centre. It is located on the top floor of a beautiful  an popular pre-school that Sasdi built.

 Two young volunteers about to start sorting out the  book shelves.

The toy shelves before work started.

I have started a collaboration with Ali Corbett of the Sasdi Foundation on a resource centre they are equipping in Mfuleni, Cape Town. The resource centre will loan educational toys and books to pre-school teachers from schools in the community, for use in their classes. The teachers will also receive a training course in how to better learn and play with their wards.

Sustainable packaging makeovers

Michelle Baron: Kleenex tissues

Vaughn Gunnell: Robertson Spices

Katie Mylrea: Albany Bread

I gave my third year Visual Communications students at Vega the Schoolof Brand Leadership in Cape Town the brief to find an existing pack design on South African supermarket shelves and re-design it to make it more sustainable. So many of the products on our supermarket shelves are over packaged, or use packaging that is not recyclable. They were encouraged to use the principles of re-use, reduce and recycle in order to achieve this.

Vaughn Gunnell tackled spice packaging. His idea was to use used tetrapack packaging, which is hard to recycle, clean it, coat it with another layer of branding, and re-use it for the spices, which he aptly named “Second Wind.” Vaughn became so passionate abut packaging that he studied another year of it ai the Institute of Packaging.

Katie Mylrea re-designed bread packaging, as the current plastic packaging is one of the items that often litters our streets. She proposes a wax coated paper packaging, which is pre-perforated to be re-used as sandwich packaging. She added fun facts about endangered animals as the design element on this packaging.

Michelle Baron suggested a way to improve disposable tissue packaging. She made her packs out of recycled cardboard, which when the tissues run out, can be re-used as postcards. The idea was to send the postcard to the person who made one cry in the first place, to get things of ones chest. The packs came in different variations, all depicting a different tragic situation.

All three projects were nominated as Loerie finalists, and Michelle Baron won a bronze Loerie with her set of tissue packs.