TDR Workshop Outcome

Today Ian Anderson came in to set us a brief which is going to be 2 days, with a presentation at the end of day 2 with our pointless task & documentation in a PDF.

So at the beginning he gave us a talk about the two days...

A presentation of clear concise & thinking problem solving!
As good as we can make it. Spend more time thinking outside the box.

Do something pointless for an hour, then present it tomorrow.

This is a learning opportunity, no right or wrong.

Document - key think it to show how pointless your task is... Its not about work. You need to tell a story developing a narrative to show how successfully pointless is. Don't explain what you've done! Why have you done it? Why am I been asked to do this? What does the client really want. 

Making or breaking the brief.
Why do they want what they want?
How far do they want to go?

If you break the brief, you need to make sure its of value to the client.

5 min presentation.
Any documentation.

Pointless task
Documentation - Can be anything.
Presentation - Always the most important.

In the presentation you should start at the end. This is what it does & this is how I got there.
Don't make them wait for the punch line! Let them listen to the rest of the info relating back to the punch line.

If you have doubts about conveying this message clearly then you need to rethink!

Thinking helps focus creativity.

Documentation needs to convey an interesting way of other show how pointless your task is.

Write a song
Infographics
Short Film
Concertina

Examples of pointless task.
-Cutting grass with scissors - stop frame - grass cellotaped to a book. This is pointless because you would never be able to cut it all.
-Press the return key as fast as he could - recorded self - bleeding on the paper.

Don't get nothing out of it..
Need to think about how well you could document it.
Interesting presentation.

Pointless has no value to you.
(Jump up & down) Unless you was a trampolina

Generating content.
Interesting way to document.
Numbers are good.


Pencil Sharpening - telling audience make the think - had 100 box of pencils but only got through 9.
How many trees in a pencil?
How many trees in a rainforest?
How many pencils to get to moon?

Nothings pointless, don't over think it.

Creative block - best way to solve a problem is that you can't solve then solve another problem.

What can I do in 1 hour?
How can you plan your time?


Then we went away and started deciding what we was going to do...

I made a mind map of ideas I had. 

My favourite was the hole punching or drawing a circle over & over again in the same spot.

I really wanted to drive somewhere to see how far i could get in one hour and see if I could get back but I think this idea has gone past the point of the 1 hour pointless task.


So I went to go get a book from the library that I could buy so that I could destroy it. I liked this idea because then the book would become pointless and therefore wouldn't suit its purpose as half of the words would be missing.

Then I decided how I could document this process, I decided that I would have the circles from the to be pointless book & also if I videoed it I could see how it developed just incase I forgot got inspirations from it afterwards. Mainly as backup...

When starting the task the pen went through the pages very easily & I worried that the book would run out before my hour, but then as I got further down the book and the pages wasn't flicking out any more and the whole process was so much slower, the pen broke 3 times and it was carving creating ash rather than cutting the pages....

The book had different types of paper in as half way through it has photo pages. This obviously had an effect on the timescale of getting though the book, which was a good thing as then I didn't run out of pages.




Something More Development

So firstly I decided to mind-map what I found from research about what is bad about water companies...And then what I could do make the problems solved within my water company.

So I decided to work on names:

So I was thinking of water mainly...

The first name that came to mind is Waterwise... Although I typed it in Google and this was already taken.

I thought this would have explained my brand perfectly as it is about teaching others to use water wisely.

So I thought about joining words together, so I thought about what I wanted to portray in my brand:

Educate
Communicate

So then I thought of:
Watercate, which would be joining all three words together, although then when I thought about it I realised that this wasn't obvious and therefore wouldn't be effective.


Aquatect this would be another name for water and we are looking to protect the future of water.
Although this is the same problem as before so I decided to forget about joining words to create a new meaning.


I then started thinking about what the main focus of the company is.... And then I thought about the idea of having smart meters, where is can see where the most water is been used within the household. So then people can act upon this and make it a focus within the cut down...

So I really liked the idea of using Aqua as the meaning of water as it has a more effective outcome..

Aquasmart.

This is very strong this communicates water smart...
Perfect for my brand.

I am now going to move on as this has taken a long time so therefore if I keep thinking about it I will always find faults...

Now for Logo Development:

 

Intern Magazine Brief

Before the brief, Alec gave a talk about how he had got to where he was today in his career.








Boat: Travel magazine
         Had Purpose of been a part of & was passionate about.
         Each issue goes to a different city.
         September 2012 (Athens) Political interest at the time.


After 9 months of interships she decided to set up his own magazine. No other magazine.
Dual Purpose to get the brand our there & lead form kickstarter campaign.


Having an issue zero - allowed other press to see work.


Distributed first issue self-time consuming ideas of which other publications would sit next to best where it would sell well.


Sponsorships - adverts, but designed in house. Tricks & Tips to build in.

Intern - is a magazine about unpaid internships.

images are crisp & typography pulls it together.



Group Brief:
It was then our turn to have a go at coming up with a concept for an independent magazine and develop a front cover, mast head and ideas for a kickstarter campaign.
We were told to get into groups of 5 or 6, I was in a group with the following people. Sam Walker Caitlin Walsh Mel Hardcastle Daisy Conway Amy Hill
I was unsure at first about working with my close friends within the course but it turned out that it had to be as tables just grouped up straight away so therefore, although I think we would have to disagree probably on decisions we can speak openly as we all have a close bond. So we can all say how we feel.

Everytime we came up with a concept at first we always looked for the downfalls within the concept. Although Alec came round and said you need to stop that because there is going to be bad things about everything you make!

This is the mind map we produced with all our initial ideas. This included a magazine about alcohol and it would feature a different spirit each week and talk about drinks you could make with this, recipes to involve the spirit and bars that specialised in it, but we disregarded it as we felt it didn't have longevity due to their only being so many spirits out there and we were unsure who the target market would be for this.

We also thought about a dinner party magazine which could include recipes, drinks, design based inspiration such as table settings, themes for dinner parties, etc. But again we talked ourselves away from this idea for many reasons and again one of these was being unsure of the audience of the magazine and if this audience would want to read about dinner parties.

From this we all settled on one of our original ideas which was to produce a travel based independent magazine but focussing on travelling within the UK. We thought of a name really quickly as we wanted to play on the 'stay cation' idea so we all agreed Stay would be a good name as it was simple, easy to remember, had potential to look striking on a cover and simply conveyed the idea about staying in the UK. 

We developed this idea quite quickly as we were all really interested in the idea. We worked through some of the points on the sheet we had been given out including concept, audience, aesthetic, etc. 

We had decided that the magazine would come out 4 times a year and so we played on this to turn it into more of concept and thought about basing each issue on the season that it came out, as this would allow us to feature all four seasons of the year. Each issue would include the best places to go during the season including events at the time and things to do and see during the time of year through the year. 

In terms of audience we thought the magazine would be best suited to young professionals who had busy lifestyles and so didn't have the time to jet off abroad for two weeks at a time, but did have time for weekend breaks within the UK. With this audience the sophisticated aesthetic we had been discussing would also be appropriate.

This lead us to our tagline of:

 'stay near, travel more'

Which clearly sums up the concept of the magazine. 

We started to talk in more detail about the aesthetic of the magazine and we agreed that we should put pictures up that people wouldn't think would be in England. As we are trying to aim to people that tend to want to go on holiday to beautiful places but believe these beautiful places can only be found abroad!

Then thought of placing the images as a full bleed with the solo title in the middle not taking anything away from the image.

She found the photograph above and we were all really shocked to find out that this was in Cornwall, so we felt it would be appropriate to use. 

We searched for photographs that would really stand out among other magazines and looked as opposite to the stereotypical British picture as possible. 

Here are some other front covers that we could potentially use for the different seasons. 

As we had finalised the aesthetic for the magazine we moved on to thinking about the Kickstarter campaign. Myself, Mel G and Mel H took charge of this and looked at some campaigns we felt were effective. 

We discussed a few ideas and agreed that it needed to feature us in some of the places that would feature in the magazine and initially not tell the audience that the places were in England. When we explained this to the group Caitlin had the idea of holding up an issue of the magazine that had a photograph of the place we were in on the cover and then we would slowly pull the magazine issue away from the camera to reveal that we were actually in that place. We all really liked this idea for the video so Caitlin mocked up a quick visual representation of this to assist our presentation later. 

Both Mels and I then started to think about what incentives we could give to people if they donated to our Kickstarter. We wanted these to be relevant to the concept of the magazine as the people that would invest would be the people that had an interest in what the magazine was about. 

We thought about the different levels of gifts as well as we needed cheaper, more mass produced gifts in addition to larger more substantial incentives. But all levels needed to bare relevance to the magazine. 

We settled on postcards as the smaller gifts as the idea was that the investors could send these out when they visited the places featured, as of course they would feature places that we would feature in our magazine. 

For the medium level incentives we thought about train tickets as this would assist the audiences travel to some of the places within the UK. And we also thought about free issues of the magazine as this is something a lot of others had done on Kickstarter and it seems very appropriate to give people that are interested in and invested the magazine so many copies. 

In terms of larger incentives this is when we got chance to dig a bit deeper so after discussing with Alec we thought about some of the iconic visitors attractions in the UK that many people would want to go to, as we could offer free tickets to these places. Alec really liked this idea as he explained that these are the types of places that would love to be featured in a magazine like ours as it gives them great exposure. 

So we came up with an attraction for England - Tea Factory Tour , Ireland - Guiness Tour, Scotland - Scotch Whiskey Tasting Experience and Wales - Cheese Factory.

We researched and found that all these places did exist before we selected them!

We also decided that we could feature a thank you page and include the names of the people that donated significant sums, as most people would like to have their name in a printed publication.  

Presentation

For the presentation we simply put the front covers on the projector and talked through our concept and kickstarted idea. Although we had a little problem with the viewing of the front covers I do believe that we pulled it off. Everyone had a little input so therefore it wasn't left to one person.

The feedback was very good and people said that they could see this magazine working in the real world. In terms of our cover the feedback was that the photographs were great and would definitely appeal as they did not like your typical UK getaway, although they thought that it looked a little high-end and therefore wouldn't appeal to the audience proposed.

People also commented saying that we could add info such as what to do when it is raining! This was really good feedback and would definately benefit us if we decided to take this brief further.



Evaluation
 
I am pleased overall with the outcome. I do believe that a group of 6 with the amount of work that was given left the work spread out thinly and therefore I didn't feel like I did a lot of work although I do feel that this had to be the case so that people wasn't hold each others hand while designing the front cover...

Designer Republic Preliminary Brief

So today we was given a brief from Ian form Designers Republic. This would determine whether we was going to be allowed to take part in the crit, as it is a session in which it needed to be a small & focussed group.

This is the brief been sent to us:

brief —give me something i'll want to keep forever.
tip — remember this is primarily a design communication design thinking workshop.

ok

researching me to make informed decisions
lateral thinking — what is it that I (ME) would / could cherish forever

if it's made / realised then all the better.
if it needs explaining, then you should find a way to explain it in the context of the piece rather than as a note attached to it as an excuse for not putting that thinking into the work

I then started researching into Ian & looking at some of the interviews he has done in the past.... From this I started making a spider diagram of all the things I had noticed he liked, was interest in or hated etc...

So after a few websites and looking at the TDR website. I have had a few ideas.. The thought of creating something he would keep forever, I would like to make something tactile, something different. Although I don't think I will be able to do this with the time restriction I have due to the deadline been tomorrow. Also, I don't want to spend too long on this exercise as if I don't get chosen for the workshop I don't want to be wasting my time.

My ideas so far:

-To make the Sheffield Wednesday Logo out of paper cut out.

-To do something about been up north!

-Something he could put photos in on his desk.

-Create a series of poster with his quotes or design rules...

I have decided that the most applicable idea, would be to create a series of posters that he could put in his studios with says he would believe in.

So then researching into believes & sayings of his:

The top section are some of the quotes I have pulled from his previous interviews. Then the bottom section is what I have molded them into, so I haven't just put his words & made them look pretty I have analysed his thoughts & hopefully portray them in a way that he hasn't thought about them before.



Now on to the designing, I didn't want them to be overcrowded & thought simplicity is the key. So therefore I have simply wrote the design rule on a blank background.

 

This was my initial idea of keeping the title alone. I am not too sure about the typeface, I am just going to try it with a coloured background to see how this will develop it...

 This is the water-colour background, now I have done this I think this leaves an abstract outlook & really grabs the attention with the bright colours. But now I believe I need a more hand rendered typeface to match the water-colour aesthetic.

I like the matching aesthetic with this combination, I feel the type also works better on two lines. I am going to do 5 posters with all different vibrant colours that would have to be screen printed so this will be valuable to keep.

Then I just followed this same aesthetic throughout the posters as I wanted to theme to be consistent & work as a set rather than just having something relating to the quote itself. The alignment of the text is changing to match the water-colour. Also so the posters are unique & not boring & set.

This is my mock-up of my posters. I have just joined together the mockup of a standard poster mock-up image. I feel these are eye catching therefore he would keep them.

I have changed the order of mu posters with the first poster being don't learn the rules do design. This is because when researching him he seems to strongly believe that you shouldn't be restricted by design rules. Then after the order flows in the rainbow colours.

I sent him this on Friday through email and waited for a reply.

On Tuesday I received this from amber...

Something More Talk & Briefing

Based at Munro House

Why do brands need your help?

NO LOGO - Book very crucial part of branding

What is a brand?
It is standing for something. A logo, a badge. An identity, looks & sounds.

Branding is a superpower.

Stand for something + Wonderful experience = People care.

Unveiling of product & how you open it. Apple products always have this effect, tactile packaging, taking off layers.

Only one supermarket can be the cheapest. They need a different point of difference, which needs to be a sticky point which is remembered.

"If you make something wonderful, people are more likely to listen"- Simon Mirrow

Brief
Rethink the brand of today to make them wonderful.

We are asking you to re-brand them as they have a lack of engagement, you need to make them exciting!

Not just about products.
What can it offer you! Rethink what these places are!


A quick guide of creating a brand...

Define
What should it stand for?
Whats are its problems?
The journey?
Why should it exist?
Make a record of exisiting painful experiences!
Why should people care? What is the function?
What makes you different?

Big Idea
Name
What you stand for?
You need to understand what you are about for these!

Naming
Says exactly what it does, or implied - associations.



Create
What does it look like?
What does it sound like?
What does it do?
TOV? Brand how you talk to people/personality




Build
Make stuff thats relevant.
Don't just do business cards.
Wall mural? Retirement.
How can your brand talk to people?

What brand exists today?
Plan for today not for the future. Keep it in reality!

24th November - Interim Crit
Names, research, rough sketches that we can talk through.
Lots of sketchy ideas.

@somethingmore_
designsomethingmore.com

Coke bottle top - life cycle of a bottle.

Physical experience - Tactile makes the brand.