Twice a year we release an exclusive Material Board. It’s a unique A5 frame featuring cutting edge materials, re-imagined by leading lights of the design industry. Previous process and material boards have been designed by artists and designers such as Matt Busher, Alexander Taylor, Ben Reece & Jeff Knowles, Demelza Hill and Anthony Burill, but for Material Board #6 we challenged London-based agency Accept and Proceed to create something amazing.

XPE foam was chosen as the base material, which is low in density, flexible and exists in a variety of colours and grades. After selecting the material, Accept and Proceed began to explore the protective and transportable properties of foam.

David Johnston from Accept and Proceed explains their thought process around the foam: “It’s often used as a protective material and we wondered what would be the most fragile item that you could protect… and we came up with this idea of an egg.”

The Material Board concept was then developed from the egg: an A5 sized foam case within which sat the egg, encased in foam. A screen printed card sleeve over the foam case completed the Material Board. From seemingly ‘ordinary’ materials such as foam and an egg came a concept all about a precious object in luxury packaging.

On 22^nd May we travelled to Perfect Poultry to meet chicken farmer Ian Bell. Housing a total of 44 types of bird, choosing an egg from the huge range of breeds was a difficult task, but we finally decided on a Cream Legbar egg, which is very light turquoise in colour.

Over 200 blown eggs were meticulously cleaned, filled, lacquered and hand painted before dry transfers of a Nirvana hash tag and a ‘limited edition’ series number were carefully applied to the surface.

The foam blocks were crafted with a CNC router to produce the recessed areas that hold the egg in position inside the box, whilst opposite ends of the foam pieces display two different finishes.

To see the meticulous processes involved in making Material Board #6 and featuring an interview with David Johnston from Accept and Proceed, visit our YouTube page to watch the video.

Material Board #6 is, says David Johnston, all about the preconception of a material: “I’d like people to think about how they can use materials in different ways and the ways you can work with Nirvana in different ways.”

For more information on Nirvana’s Material Boards, or to request a physical copy, please e-mail info@nirvanacph.com.

Posted 01 December, 2016 by Jack Cassel-Gerard

Material Board 06: Foam and Eggs by Accept & Proceed