The purpose of the zenith project at freestyle is to, “ignite your passion and elevate your skills and experiences
to create your ultimate and most successful Freestyle project.” The zenith project is just a project where the student gets to pick what they want to create, it’s structured this way so we are more passionate about our project.

What did I chose?

For my Zenith project I chose to design my family a family crest. Well, I didn’t really chose this project. My dad has been asking me to make him a family crest for like 6 months now, since I was able to chose my project he asked me to make the crest. I was initially only going to design one crest but it wasn’t big enough to fit the scope of the project so I decided to create 3 different designs. For this project I structured it like I was actually hired to design something for a company. This is a big risk for me because I haven’t shown my parents that much of my work at freestyle, they have seen some of it but this will be a new process. It was challenging to accurately represent my family then share it with them because all of us view are family a different way and would represent it a different way. I started by making my three initial designs which I will show below, then my family gave me feedback and I hanged a lot of things.

Initial design

Crest 1

The idea behind this first crest was to represent all of my families hobbies. At the top is a watercolor painting I made of a mountain me and mom hiked to in Alaska to represent that my family likes to hike. The boat, jet ski, and surfers represent all of the water sports that me and the rest of my family like to do. Then at the bottom I have two race cars because my brother and dad both like to race and do track days, they are car people. I also added me biking because over quarantine I started road biking with my dad and mom. The outline of the entire crest is the outline of the fantasy football logo because me and my dad love playing fantasy football and we bond watching the games together.

Crest 2

For this crest I decided to make an illustration of my core family members favorite animal. I made the mistake of guessing my families favorite animal because I got three of them wrong. I had my dad as the Tiger, my mom as the bear, my brother as the buffalo, and myself as the coyote. I obviously got myself right but my brother wanted to be the tiger, my mom wanted to be a lynx cat, and my dad wanted to be a dragon.

Crest 3

The concept behind this design was to make an abstract design that represents my family heritage. This design is loosely based off of the shape of a T because my family’s last name is Teksler. I made the top part look like a viking ship because my moms side of the family is danish, the star and hexagon pattern represents my jewish heritage because the stars are 6 sided stars or star of David’s.

After this first round I got a lot of comments and updates all 3 of these designs. Here is the next round of revisions.

Crest 1 Revision

Crest 2 Revision

Crest 3 Revision

The chosen one

After I showed my family all of these final designs they chose one and gave me more feedback to improve upon it. They chose design two as the best, this one was also my favorite. I took all of the comments and here is my final Zenith family crest.

Reflection

Once we had all finished our zenith projects in our elective classes we were assigned a zenith reflection in English. I will link the audio recording of my reflection down below.