The Pictorial Envelope project is one of my favourite's that I teach in my Photoshop classes. It also nearly always proves popular with my students, as it allows them unlimited scope for imagination and to juxtapose images and text and associated meanings in many creative ways. I can't claim total origin for the idea, as I first came across a version of this, as a student myself, for a painting/design summer project on my pre-foundation course at the City Lit in 1987. However, I've adapted this to the digital version that I have running on and off as one of our LOCN assessed projects at Kensington & Chelsea College.

Below is a section of the assignment brief the students are given for suggestions on how to approach the project. And then we have a very good example of a finished piece by Lem Lem Mebratu (who was a very good student a couple of years back). Finally we have a brief written reflection by Lem Lem, explaining the way she approached this assignment, the images used and concepts behind them, and the techniques she used to bring it to fruition

The Brief

Does the address and area or town where you live have a visual association? . Have you ever thought that the address has a strange or obscure interesting name ?. For this assignment you will produce THE FRONT OF AN ENVELOPE THAT WILL HAVE YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS IN TEXT AND IMAGES.

Name

This will be in text or text over an image (e:g the name 'Tony Bell' could be written over the image of a bell). Think what style of text suits the person who the envelope is for (Bold or Italic, hard or soft edged etc.).

The address:

Number of house: This could be repetitions of that number (e:g # 8 could be eight copies of the same image in your picture), or you could use association with a particular number ( e:g : 21 could be a door key to symbolise 'key to the door', 64 = the number of hexagrams in the I-Ching, and so onÉ.) think of the associations that bingo callers make with numbers.

Street/area name: Make visual associations with the names. Your choices may be obvious but they equally may be more obscure. Example: Oakley St in Chelsea could be the image of an oak tree or an oak cabinet or another association. Likewise, the area Chelsaa could be most obviously an image of the area, but could also be the archetype 1960's Chelsea girl, or Chelsea buns, or an image associated with the football team etc. All boroughs have a local history section in their Library that will have details on the origins of place names (I have been to the Westminster one). So try that route.

Post code: Could be tricky this one, but the more creative amongst you will find a solution I'm sure.

Puns: You can utilise puns in visually depicting the address. E:g 'Caught' could be used instead of Court . The word 'ate' could represent the # 8, and so on....

Other features

• An envelope design: This is the format that your design will fall within Think of special delivery, Air mail etc., the proportion must be to that of an envelope.

• A stamp: impose your head inside the queen?, or it could be a foreign stamp adapted to your purpose, or you could create your own first day cover

EVALUATION FOR ENVELOPE DESIGN - By student, LEM LEM MEBRATU

"To design an envelope that indicates and describes my name and my address with images instead of words was a challenge .The biggest difficulty lies on my name; being non-English I couldn't find its visual meaning. So I had to relay on its sound and find an image with a similar sound .For my surname I have used the meaning of it in my language (i.e., light). My house number and my building name are illustrated in one image, which is a combination of photos I downloaded from a picture book CD. And I have also used an image with similar sounding name as my building. For my road name I had two options both to take the name literally and show it's meaning or find out who it was named after to illustrate with their picture. For the second option I found out the lady who the road was named after was Lily Langtery a mistress of Edward 7th, but couldn't find any pictures of her on the net or on the books I looked at, I went along with option one. For my postcode I used two dices to put the numbers on them and used it as a stamp.

On the process of designing the envelope I have used colour adjusting, blending mode, effects and transforming .All and all it has turned out OK".