Product Design at Coco Lighting Ltd

June 2019 - Present

My role at Coco Lighting is a member of the small but skilled in-house design team. Coco specialises in LED conversions and re-engineering but deals with a wide variety of lighting-based work. As Assistant product designer my responsibilities and day to day work were varied and helped build a wide range of skills.

Early on at my time at Coco Lighting, the company was looking to update their installation booklets to give them a uniform and professional look, as well as get clean white background images of each of the products. I suggested that we create accurate 3D models for the products and use those for renders and wire drawings to be used in installation instructions and other places as needed. Over the next few months, I created detailed 3D models of our entire product range, I then used these models to make detailed line drawings to clearly illustrate step by step how to install each product including wiring diagrams.  I then used the same model in a standard set of 6 angles for renders to give a consistent look to all our product images. Examples of the models can be seen throughout this page.

One of my regular responsibilities is to design solutions for our customer’s re-engineering enquires, as a lighting specialist company one of the main enquires we regularly got was customers asking for solutions to convert their existing light fittings to LED or update them. This involves coming up with a solution that works within the constraints of the original fitting or sometimes creating a suitable additional enclosure to house any additional components while also matching the original output or to their new requirements. In the example to the right, we had a customer approach us about spotlights they had currently using halogen bulbs that he wanted to convert to LED. To best illustrate our proposed solution we thought it was best to model the fitting and show the new components in place. The extra work helped the client understand exactly what we were suggesting, how it would look once finished, and the considerations we took when it came to the cooling and other safety needed.

A slightly different project I was involved in at work involved us improving our factory and main office facilities. We wanted to create more room in our assembly area, create a new canteen area for the factory workers, and build a new meeting area in the main office while also improving the acoustics of the room. The MD Kevin Cooper asked me to 3D model the existing areas then create altered versions based on the rough brief I was given. For the new kitchen area, it involved removing some existing walls and adding new ones. For the assembly area not only did I need to pitch a new layout but calculate the existing workbench area and figure out the best configuration to maximise the bench area in the new design as well as make it flexible for all possible uses. The main office became two projects at once I approached my manager with an idea, while I was already building a size accurate model of the building, I could spend a little more time to get it as detailed accurate to allow us to also use the model to render products in situe as during a pandemic it was the safer option and gave us the opportunity to see how new products we were developing would look once installed. The assembly area and kitchen area have been built based on my modes, and we are in the middle of proceeding with the main office project.