With ‘The Big Idea’ project presentation over, we have moved onto our final major project which is student set. I have until Thursday to choose or create my own brief which I will explore and develop over the next 5 weeks. This project is my final chance to demonstrate the skills I have learnt over the last 3 years at university. It’s a scary thought but I am very excited to explore the freedom of this project and select a brief that I am enthusiastic about. I will research the available briefs on sites such as BriefBox, YCN, D&AD, ISTD, Penguin etc. Each of these sites have a large collection of live briefs from companies like John Lewis to Desperados.
I really enjoyed working on the competitions for one of my previous projects and felt that they were perfect for this project too, in contrast to writing my own brief. I looked at BriefBox first and found many which appealed to me. Some of these included;
A visual identity for painter & decorator Alison
Alison Bow needs a visual identity for her painting & decorating business. She is looking for a bold, playful and contemporary design which is needed primarily for business cards to hand out to potential clients. She is interested in strong use of colour, geometry and pattern within her work and would like to reflect these elements in her identity.
Deli & Co revitalisation
Deli & Co sell fresh, high quality sandwiches, wraps & rolls. They have asked that you design a print that will feature on their takeaway food wrapping papers. They are keen on bold & modern graphics & icons. Remember to include the Deli & Co name & think about icons that would represent what they sell.
For this, I would adapt the brief to stretch across the five weeks and redesign multi touch-points for the deli shop from a website, points of contact and packaging. This would be a very creative and fun brief to dive into.
A bicycle rental shop in Amsterdam
A bicycle hire company in Amsterdam would like a custom logo design. Canal Cycle is situated in a popular tourist area within the city & would like to appeal to visitors with a strong & modern, typographic logo. They would love a logo using custom type, so be creative & bold!
For this, I would again extend the brief to reimagine the shop window, website, bike identity, logo and multi-touch points for the shop.
A virtual tour map application
Mi-Guide are bringing a virtual tour to your city through an app, and we want you to design an interactive map that showcases the best bits of your town. This app will aim to show visitors the popular landmarks as well as the best views that only the locals know about. Consider an interactive interface and easy to follow diagram, & think about the different features that the app could offer to show the most popular destinations, even giving tips whilst out and about.
Although I am intrigued to explore the possibilities of each of these briefs, and I may do so in the future as side projects, I will continue to explore the briefs from the competitions section of the course from D&AD and YCN as their briefs are more thorough and can be submitted for official marking for a chance to be awarded internships and graphic designer positions within the chosen company.
D&AD are a not for profit company. Any profit goes into the D&AD Foundation and New Blood program which help the next generation get the most out of their creative industry. The foundation itself help promote diversity an stimulates a more sustainable future.
There are three sections to D&AD, the awards, festival and academy.
The festival is a great way to meet people from the industry, there are big named judges and there is the chance for a ceremony to look and evaluate your creativity. If you are lucky enough to win one of their awards, D&AD will do their best to remain in contact with you and will assist you with interviews and mentor you as a creative to help you progress further in your chosen industry.
We looked at some of the available briefs given to us last Monday, firstly:
Monotype
Expressive communication through typography. I thought this would be relevant in response to the recent events in Paris and other countries where ISIS have caused terrorist activities. A possible approach would look at or express the negative behaviour from the minority towards muslims and other religions as a cause of terrorist behaviour from extremists groups who use religion as a fake front for their actions. However, this is a sensitive topic and can cause controversy over many ethic groups. This can also be a great way to express attitudes towards the Syrian Refugees whom are being housed within the UK. Positive expression and awareness could have beneficial factors to help and support the refugees and aid their settlement into the community.
The judging is completely anonymous and so if you have won an award it truly is because of your creative ability.
Criteria
Does it have a great creative idea?
Is it well executed
Is it on the brief
The idea is king – “Bake the idea before you ice the cake.” without an idea your designs fall flat and unrefined.
“A strong idea will always beat something that looks nice.”
Be bold
Treat technology with caution, with apps – what is the core insight, how does it connect people to the situation or task at hand?
Focus on the brief first not the technology you want to use
Do more than the brief
Surge – Powered by BBC – Gold Award winning D&AD Concept
After our lecture, we had workshop to analysis the D&AD’s own brief given to us. We were asked to look through the brief and highlight any important words and sentences that we felt structured the brief. We were asked to choose 16 words from the brief, then from this 8 words. In the end we ended up with 2 very important words which we felt best explained the brief.
In pairs we used these 2 words to create insights and an idea to pitch to the year group.
Our words were Courage and Industry
Our insights were Embrace Change & Comfort Zones
Here is our creative team’s concept:
C R E A T E H E R E
“A creative matching service to encourage long-lasting relationships between old and young professionals alike”
We drew on dating sites such as match.com, POF (Plenty of Fish) and Tinder to produce a creative-industry equivalent service where young and old professionals can meet and exchange experiences and tips with other local creatives. Refinements such as age range, gender, distance, experience in years and even a chosen industry.
For example
Simon (23) who is currently in his second year of Product Design uses the service to find a creative between the ages of (25-35) in Graphic Design with 3 years of professional experience to improve his industry networking and ask for guidance and feedback on any recent projects.
Application:
We felt that a Tinder-styled app that could display a short portfolio of one creative’s ability where another creative could swipe to match with potential networking associate, would be appropriate and could encourage the user to match based on the creatives work, not personal appearance. This procedure would maintain professionalism throughout and help creatives to find and discover local ability easily and efficiently.
From this quick exercise I feel our creative team worked well on the apps potential and I feel it would be a great project to experiment with during our spare time. Submission is March 2016 and so it is possible to get our concept into practice in time for submission.
Further note
“All the best ideas had a great insight” – Insight is import as it’s how a recipiant can relate and connect to your solution and outcome “All the best ideas had a great insight”
Share your ideas, don’t keep them to yourself, to get peoples views
Be original – Don’t rush into your first idea, usually others will have thought of it.
Our next project, Competitions,has a huge selection of briefs for us to chose from. This module will help us identify what type of designer we best fit by giving us the chance to experiment with different mediums of communication. This brief allows us as the designer to communicate the message through animation, campaigns, print, digital, social experiments and even radio. This module along with Real World will account for our Subject grade at the end of the year so fully exploring different mediums through experimentation and developing ideas clearly is important.
After looking at the briefs available from D&AD, YCN, RSA and Creative Conscience, here are a selection that interested me most.
Brief – Create a functional and structural packaging solution for a new range of Saucy crispy, coated fish.
I was interested in this brief as packaging design is a relatively new area of design for me. From field in year one I worked with product designers who did a lot of packaging design which I found fascinating. The Saucy Fish Co’s brief want the designer to focus less on the brand identity and work towards the structural form of the product. This is a unique and different technique to what I’ve previously worked with and feel it will help me to understand materials used and their environmental impact. From my last project Real World and my creative teams concept ‘Sustainabox’ we researched into sustainable materials which will be useful if i decide to go ahead with this brief.
Brief – Creatively re-launch Grand Café coffee to improve engagement with current and new customers.
After looking at UCC Coffee, I found their brief fitted my area of practise better. Re-launching their Grand Café coffee would allow me to experiment with their brand identity colours and packaging. Their creative objective is to visually revitalise the brand, creating designs that will help communicate what Grand Café is and the good that it does. UCC want to move Grand Café coffee from being hidden in a cupboard underneath the counter to having pride of place on display in their customer’s outlets! I feel this brief would give me freedom to explore my creativity and allow me to demonstrate this through various mediums.
Brief – Deliver Orchard Pig as the craft cider equivalent of contemporary craft beer – we want to become the Notorious P.I.G.
Orchard Pig was another favourite. The traditional beverage Cider, was not as common in the urban cities and more known in country pubs. After looking at this brief, there was a lot that could be experimented with such as the bar equipment and touch points such as the glass and beer mats the consumer would have. I found this exceptionally fun at first but later discovered that they wanted to steer away from any form of re-branding or new designs and focus on the delivery of their products instead such as an animation, carefully placed posters and through the touch points as previously stated. I feel that the overuse of the pig identity to be demanding which I think would become flat.
On Friday we were introduced to our next project, Competitions. We were given a double sided sheet with the briefs from many different companies. The companies were;
Ford, John Lewis, Adobe, D&AD, The Telegraph, Toms, Desperados, Nationwide, Crimewatch, Doc Martens, WWF, Walkers, Toyota, The Saucy Fish Co, Orchard Pig, HSBC, GAP and more!
Over the weekend we are to choose a selection that we appeal to most, research into each one and then make a final decision on which brief we want to do. On Monday we have individual tutorials to discuss our chosen company brief.
I feel this project will be very interesting as many of the briefs are design- orientated. At this point in the year I would like to play with a few of the briefs to help support & build my portfolio before my graduation and internship next year.
Ben Walton 
Recent Comments