RSA Engage Leeds

Last night down at the Whitecloth gallery was another one of RSA's Engage events which is a combination of speakers pitching their ideas and the chance to network with like minded individuals. RSA is ultimately all about coming together to create/ share/ talk about ideas for social change. As this is what a lot of my practice revolves around this year, mostly my CoP but also my extended practice, it was a good chance to potentially get involved in some live briefs and to make contact with those with a similar mindset to myself.

Got Your Back

John from Eskimo Soup, a social marketing agency, discussed his idea to create a trusted social platform that people can turn to when they are dealing with issues of mental health. The network is to be for students and co-written by them also, by getting other students involved it creates a more accurate database of information regarding any issues users may encounter. I feel like this idea will work well purely because of how most current, social media networks are a battleground where any goes, public or not, people can often feel subjected to criticisms and judgement from others within the network, friends or not.

Me and John both spoke briefly one to one about his idea and about the potential for me to be involved within it, as this could become one of my live briefs for my extended practice. Not only that but will give me the chance to get experience of a real world brief and to make both friends and contacts for the future.

Fuel for School

Fuel for School was set up by ex headteacher, Nathan Atkinson, who stumbled across a few separate problems during his time there that he thought he could solve through one idea. 

1. Remove hunger as a barrier to learning

2. Highlight the importance of nutrition and the associated benefits linked to learning

3. Highlight the vast amounts of wasted (yet perfectly edible) food across our local and wider communities.

The concept behind this is to feed school kids using food that would have unnecessarily gone to waste otherwise. There are currently 10,000 children signed up who benefit from his programme.

The Soft Road

Melanie and Neil Kirkbridge created The Soft Road in the hope to bring light to the benefits of meditation in everyday life. 

'The Soft Road is a platform for personal and cultural transformation that helps people and groups thrive in creative action. On The Soft Road we set out an Experience of Life that unwinds stress, unlocks creativity, develops intuition, and builds resilience. These inner resources create a foundation of stability and adaptability that deepens over time and brings greater ease to every day.'

They spoke a lot about bringing meditation into the workplace to improve overall well being for each individual which is something that really resonated with me and some of my work from previous years. This links in perfectly also with the RSA student awards brief I intend to do about well being in the workplace.

I spoke to both Melanie and Neil after their talk about our experiences with meditation and I felt like they had a lot to offer, so much so that we discussed them potentially coming to the university to do a small talk/ session about meditation.

Elevator pitch

Today's task was to ultimately learn how to write concisely about our work as this is key for things like our websites/ Instagram/ portfolios etc. We had take a favourite past project of ours and write in one sentence for each what/ how/ why?

I chose my self initiated brief from the end of last year, the Cocoon.

What is the core idea?
How does it work?
Why does it work?

Initial Pitch

To help reduce stress in everyday life. By giving people isolated, quiet time to themselves. Because stress has been proven to be prominent in working environments.

Improved Pitch

Cocoon is a low cost, high quality piece designed for IKEA that helps to reduce stress in academic and professional environments. It creates a private, isolated area where individuals can take a break without leaving the work space. Tackling stress on a daily basis, creates a happier, healthier workplace.

Doing something this has proven helpful for me in understanding the very basic core of what is needed when writing/ talking about a project. Often I find myself writing too much, some of which is not always that relevant or necessary. But by following this structure of what/ how/ why helps me to be as concise as possible which will useful in the future when describing portfolio work to potential clients etc.

You've got (real) mail

The week long task was to create a list of people/studios/ whoever it is that we admire and to choose one or multiple to contact. This did not mean sending over an email to someone, we instead had to physically create something tailored to the person on the receiving end, whatever that might be.

Just to name a few, my list included:

Craig Oldham
Andy Puddicombe
Brian Eno
David Berman
Nancy Bernard

Out of these I was most interested in Andy Puddicombe, he's someone who I admire for a number of reasons. Being the co-founder of Headspace, a meditation app I use on a daily basis, his whole attitude towards life is something I aspire towards being like. Even just a conversation with him would be ideal, which is why I aimed my project towards making contact with him.

He brought meditation to the masses, without the stigmas surrounding it which made it more appealing to a wider audience. In short, whole concept behind the app is to be more mindful in everything you do, which ultimately brings about it's benefits; reduced stress, better sleep, less negative thinking.

The one thing I thought of that could be a way to contact him was to put to life an idea I had as an extension to the app and propose it to him. Currently Headspace is only contained within the app, but he does suggests doing smaller exercises throughout the day which is where my idea came in.

I haven't made this yet simply because I didn't want to just settle for an idea for the sake of ticking a box. As this idea only came about last minute I figured if I was going to do something I wanted to put a solid effort into it. I feel like this could become a bigger project than just this task in itself.

THE IDEA

The idea is to bring the mindfulness exercises that are part of the app into the physical world with a set of small cue cards. In a way like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. If you're stuck creatively, these cards are little suggestions on how to spin the problem around, help you out in one way or another.

So I thought that these could be little physical reminders that would assist with day to day life. Phrases that would evoke a physical/mental response.

These are something that could also be embedded within environments so that every time you open your laptop or go to brush your teeth, it'll hopefully make you a bit more mindful in everyday tasks.

My plan from now is to develop this basic design further and actually produce these as a small pack, which will form part of my proposal of the idea to send off to their headquarters in the hope to spark conversation.

Summer plans

This summer is something that I aim to utilise much more than I did last year, with third year fast approaching, soon will come a full time job within the industry and this is something I want to experience long before going into it for real. After having made contact with two industry professionals, so far there has been a discussion of an internship with an old friend of mine at M&C Saatchi Berlin for this summer which could be very beneficial to me. Moving away to another country again, being much more independent and most importantly getting a feel for how the creative process works within the industry.

My own personal design work is something I've always somewhat neglected within my own time, but something I plan to do over summer is to work on a couple of projects that I've had written down for a while that I think could help to build up my portfolio of work. Linked in with this is S.O.D, the exhibitions are taking place over summer which will have both mine and Jon's work within them. There have also been talks of potentially Yann, who runs S.O.D, coming over to LCA to run a workshop on social oriented design to give people more of an insight into how it works and also give people the option to build up a team over here in England. This could ultimately lead onto setting up a S.O.D exhibition over here which would help spread the word of the collective.

Having already decided what I plan to do for my dissertation in third year, this is gonna help to give me a head start on the essay and the large amount of research I aim to do. I plan to take out books for the duration of summer to get a start on looking more into my dissertation question. If I can aim to get a large chunk of my research done then come the start of first semester in third year, it will give me more time to manage other briefs and to work on them alongside CoP which is a big portion of my overall grade.

Future plans with Craig Oldham

Unfortunately I wasn't able to organise the interview for before the deadline of this module as Craig has been busy being down at D&AD festival along with lecturing and a few other things but I hopefully plan to still organise a time and date to do the interview.

Both me and Connor are planning to interview him and because of this we discussed potentially organising to interview him together, this could be interesting as we'd both have our different questions and topics we'd like to ask about. It would also mean that we could produce something together from the interview, maybe a practical piece the same as we have done with our individual PPP interviews that would be a combination of our efforts and styles.

End of Module Evaluation

At the beginning of the year I was thrown (through choice) out of my comfort zone and into a completely new working environment with completely new surroundings, ways of living, friends and tutors. As scary as it was to begin with it was what I would consider the best decision I could have made, it helped me to develop as a person in general becoming a lot more responsible for myself and my finances, but also helped me develop hugely as a designer, with my practice. Having the option to experience new culture on a daily basis helped to widen my scope for ideas and insights into how people in other countries live, design and work. Although I'd only been living in Leeds for a year previous to moving away, having lived in a north of England for my entire life, it wasn't as big of a change in comparison to moving to Oslo. The university life itself was much, much difference to here at LCA, the daily schedule, the ways of teaching, the university environment etc. As opposed to working on multiple briefs at once we would typically be working on one brief for 2 months at a time, this had both ups and downs to it. Naturally, the workload was of course much easier but it did mean my creative process changed somewhat drastically. Typically within first year I had the bad habit of rushing into my ideas without being as thorough and conceptual as I should have been, but given the timescale we had for projects in first semester it meant I spent a lot more time going slowly through the research and idea process. This ultimately resulted in every design decision being more concise and informed, which of course had a future impact on this years modules, CoP, PPP & 505. 

It has also meant that I've began to enjoy the research side of things more, which is why I
enjoyed doing the CoP module this year more so than within the first year. Usually research is something I would do for the sake of doing and try to rush through this stage, but when in actual fact I've realised this year it's the foundations for everything you do within design. Reading more into my question this year for CoP meant that I better understood what I was talking about, using more books and research studies which I took an interest to helped me to inform more of what I was talking about. Whereas within my first year essay reading back through it this year, I felt it was much more subjective and less supported than an academic essay should be. But ultimately, my essay this year had a much bigger impact on my practical side of things, the thought process behind my final concept was hugely informed by the theorists, psychologists and existential thinkers that I made reference to within my written piece.

Screen printing is something that I'm glad I've made more of a focus on this year, it's something that I've touched upon within first year when we had the traditional print exhibition last year. Although the piece for the exhibition came out roughly how I wanted it to, screen printing was still something that was intimidating to me; I would avoid at all costs simply because I wasn't too confident in the process as a whole. But over the summer and also for the traditional print exhibition again this year, I created a lot of prints that helped to improve my confidence and skill using the traditional print room to a point of where I was able to help out others within my class that maybe were struggling with certain aspects of the process. I think this has been a big benefit to my practice this year and going into third year since it now opens up the option to have screen print as an option of producing my work with ease whereas typically I would have avoided it all together. 

A big difference between this year and last was the interaction we had to make with industry professionals, having to make contact with one or more people to ultimately interview them and make a create report from. Having really only worked and been within my own little bubble within first year, it was somewhat intimidating to venture out into the real world to make connections and speak to those who have plenty of experience and therefore knowledge behind them. 

My first taste of this for me was becoming part of a collective during first semester in Oslo, the collective name S.O.D was a group of people who come together to design for social issues in the hope to make some form of change to people and society as a whole. Becoming a part of this meant I was able to work alongside industry professionals, tutors and also other students, all of who had their own thoughts, views and experience of design and the industry itself. But this became a much bigger focus in the second semester when I made contact with two professionals from the industry; an old friend at M&C Saatchi Berlin and also Craig Oldham from Office of Craig. Although very intimidating to begin with, both of these were an inspiration to me for different reasons but it was great to make contact with them to learn more about them. Having made these connections hopefully going into the future they're people who I could keep in contact with to ask for feedback on projects, possibly get an internship with etc.

Overall this year has been the biggest change for me in most areas of my practice, it's had the biggest impact but has been the most beneficial. I think going into third year my practice will be more thorough and informed. But there is one area that I think I need to improve in if I want to make the most of third year to utilise the time remaining on this course. This is my time management which is one key area that I want to focus on, balancing out my time so that I don't make the mistake of putting my full effort into one module and less into another. Finding that middle ground of being able to spend an equal amount of time on projects on a daily basis will help to ensure that I can make the most of each brief and ultimately the course.

Final Creative Report Piece & Evaluation

The video is essentially a mockup of how I envisioned the interactive billboard to look and work, every time that someone taps the board a new question would appear and tap again for a the corresponding answer. Although this output wouldn't necessarily appeal to everyone passing by, those who are designers or that maybe are interested in that field of work may be interested enough to read more into the interview the same as you typically would with a book interview.

When asked for feedback on my final creative report a few comments included:

"The way it's displayed as texts makes a lot of sense to me, it creates the personal touch that you get from texting a friend or family member"

"I like how you displayed it as a billboard advertisement given his job role, but I don't think it's something that many people would interact with. Often people will go out of their way to read an interview in a book or online, but not many would do the same on their way to work or waiting in a bus stop".

"I think this is something that you could have potentially taking further and created an animation of maybe in After Effects or something alike"

My creative report is something I think could have been stronger as a final piece, although the interview itself covers quite a few areas of interest to most designers such as portfolio, internships and the overall creative process, the output could have been more considered. As the feedback mentioned the visual output makes logical sense and is well justified but I feel that it could have been taken further and had another step further to the interactive side of it, giving it more purpose, potentially a more fun side to it.

Further development

The example above is what I was aiming for with my idea output, to have a series of posters dotted around on bill boards and to create a story of them by having one lead on to another.

When I asked for feedback on the idea, considering that Tim mostly works with digital advertising, people suggested maybe creating an interactive bill board where people could click to reveal the answer to the burning question. Or possibly to just have the conversation automatically scroll upwards showing the questions and answers.

I decided to go with the interactive side of it where it would be something that people could tap to find out more of the conversation as they please. This format is something that people said would be more interesting than just to have a static billboard advertisement.

Ideas and development for my creative report

Considering the format out of interview is essential as just creating a book for the interview for the sake of it isn't putting it to the best of it's potential. So I thought about other ways I could display the interview, given that he works in an advertising agency, immediately what came to my mind was TV ads, bill boards, social media ads etc. These could all be potential formats in which I could display my interview to give it some more context.

I realised there was probably too much content from the interview to do this as there is almost 1500 words, so I went through and picked out concise, quotable answers in response to my question that I thought could work as individual ads on their own, but that come together as a series of poster ads.

Example of quote ad

Another thought was that considering Tim was an old friend of mine, I thought of incorporating a personal touch to it, something to signify that it was a bit more of a casual chat in a way as opposed to a formal interview. The fact that it was a back and fourth question and answer interview reminded a lot of a texting conversation, I figured this could be the format of interview and could give the text some more context.

Texting conversation ad

When discussing the idea with a couple of classmates they said although the idea works it looks somewhat empty with the majority of the page being blank. A suggestion was to take snippets of a literal text conversation with messages above and below the quotes but maybe blurred out so it doesn't distract from the important message. This would give it much more context but also look a lot more appealing with more blocks of colour introduced to the page.

Putting the whole interview into a text gave it much more context, I blurred out and turned down the opacity on surrounding messages so it didn't take away too much from the important bits of text.

These would be individual posters that could be displayed on bill boards. But for it to make sense I realised they would have follow on from one to the next. To solve this I thought of possibly visualising a route of advertising bill boards in a animation. Possibly taking pictures every couple of steps to create almost like a stop motion video of me walking through the streets and coming across each of these ads on a separate bill board that will make up the full conversation.

Full interview with Timothy Alexander

Interview with Timothy Alexander

How important is social media in terms of getting yourself out there and creating an online presence?

It's something that I've never really made a big deal of, I appreciate the fact that it's important but a lot of the time I've come across people that seem amazing and perfect over their Instagram but in real life they're nothing alike. Ultimately it's not the be all and end all of things, having a very cool looking online profile doesn't make you any better of a designer.

What’s involved in the creative process for you?

When its a creative brief, I'll usually only spend a couple of hours with ideas. But when its creative on top of strategy, the strategy you can spend an hour and a half talking about people, figures, the world etc. all of that effects the strategy. Then you'll have to creative to run through and say this is the print ad, this is the digital version. It does completely vary depending on the project.

What essentially does a copywriter do?

They take care of the text, the headlines, the body copy, all the text that appears on an ad. An art director takes care of look, feel. Together they go through casting a little bit, together they also come up with the idea. The idea is never just one person's idea, it's the team’s idea and the ultimately the agencies idea. So egos are out that door! All the work is the agency's work, if you're feeling a little more egotistical then you can get your own office space, you put your name above the door and you create your own agency.

Considering you're such a big advertising agency, are awards something you actively strive for?

A lot of the work we've done recently within the past year or so wouldn't be award worthy I don't think, although we may be sending off one piece for Film Craft. But in terms of awards for best ad and such, a lot of the stuff we do, we likely won't be sending in. Saying that, the only one really worth going for is Cannes Lions; that's basically the Oscars of advertising. It's normally a big film festival, but they celebrate advertising during that week also. If you ever work in advertising and produce ads, they have something called the Young Cannes Lions which I've just entered into this year and from there you get a brief that you have to solve within 24 hours which you would normally work in a team for. I'm aiming to choose to work in print and to do that I'll work with a copywriter and I'll do the art direction to produce ideas and if it wins your phone will be buzzing none stop for weeks until someone gets through to you and goes "here's a bunch of fucking money, move to us". To get chosen for something like this is a big thing, you're up against thousands of other people all wanting the same thing. D&AD is also another good one to work on. There's one here in Germany called ADC, the Art Directors Club, very similar to D&AD. Red Dot awards is another one but is more to do with products, I actually have one of those for communication for something we did for a satirical Germany political party. Basically my job was technical realisation, maintaining the technical side for their stream.

How you sell yourself is also really important.

As a creative person you can always fix something, you can always improve it, you can make it better, always. But there's such a thing called time and that's a pain in the ass sometimes.

When you work on ads, or in advertising there is always that knowing in the back of your mind you're making something. You're piecing it all together, the idea, to going on the shoot, to then dealing with all the post production shit, which can be a nightmare, all the cut downs, language variations but then at the end of it you have some tangible, something substantial to appreciate.

Rule #2

Good ideas get killed all of the time and there's nothing you can do about that. On a daily fucking basis, you could have the best idea and it could get shut down, whether it's the vision, the budget or whatever.

Obviously as designers we get creative blocks all the time, so how do you best cope with them?

You need a stimulus for it. Walk around, get outside, do fitness, meditate, whatever you've got to do. You need something else that's not going to be in your room, in your office, you maybe need another person to buzz ideas off always helps. Maybe sometimes look online, but not too much because that can sometimes have the reverse effect, making you feel bad about your own work when you see really good stuff online.

What motivates you to push your ideas and your practicing constantly?

It's the drive for always wanting to produce something, I always want to make something, I always want to finish something. Solving problems is exactly that, making something to fix the problem and that is just the way I've been programmed. Whether I do that with music, if I feel the need to emotionally get something out there or if I have a business problem that I need to solve with an ad. Solving problems is something that really motivates me, it keeps my brain ticking.

Pitching, that's when things are completely different, it takes a lot of time that you've got to devote to it. You spend a lot of time going insane, scratching your head for ideas. On the run up to a pitch, especially during pitch week, you'll get taken off most projects and will have to put your full effort into the pitch. The volume of work you do during pitch week can get crazy, re-doing and improving the stuff you've done already.

So what do actually have to do within that last week leading up to the pitch?

You start losing your mind a bit, that goes without saying. You have to refine your ideas and make sure that every visual looks the best it can. The way that I work, I would normally do really quick sketches and whack them into Photoshop, roughly lay it out and then that goes away for maybe 6 weeks and everyone's happy with it... until pitch week. "Yeah you've got to redo this again". Always improving, proof reading, cutting films etc. You've got to be fast, in that final week you've got to be precise and get things done quickly. Get that shit finished!

The actual pitch itself is okay for me, being a musician I'm somewhat used to playing in front of a few thousand people. Always got to remind myself to speak slowly, less dialect, which is especially difficult when I'm with someone like you who has very similar ways of speaking.

Having been in Berlin now for 5/6 years, how is your German?

We don't go there about that. I mean I can understand it; I can speak it but I don't really just because I'm not that good at it. But I've only ever really worked in English speaking offices, here is the first office where my entire team is pretty much German but they do speak English to me, just to make things easier. But sometimes meetings when we all meet up to discuss projects, it usually is in German so I've just got to understand what they're saying.

But advertising in general, unless you're going for like a national agency, there you would likely have to speak German. Since here we have people from all around the world, we tend to speak English.

Something I'm aiming to do over summer is to find internships, how would you typically go about getting one?

Do you have LinkedIn? If not, then get on that and do a shit load of stalking, you want to look for a load of creative directors. You've seen some ads, a poster or some design work that you love, you look up that agency then from that agency, who worked on that bit of work? Normally it'll tell you the creative director, art director etc. for that project and from there you look for those people. Find them on LinkedIn and suggesting you coming in for two weeks and then from there haggle your way into an internship. Even if it's going down to a studio, unpaid, chilling there and finding out how they work is beneficial.

You'll of course have to sell yourself along with this. Showing off your work in a PDF, keeping it concise probably no more than 25 pages max and also a covering letter letting them know why you want to work there.

What specifically would you recommend including within your portfolio?

Experience, education, skills, work but write this in your style of course, allow your personality to shine through it whether that means using slang words or whatever. Always have a bit about each project, but not too much because when you go to interviews you'll likely talk about these a little more in depth. Each project on mine is just one page depending on how much work was produced for the project. Even include little projects, if you can do things such as sound editing pop that in as well, if you're a musician or whatever put that in, because that'll help sell you as a person as well.