Week 03 - Development
Weekly Learning Outcomes
This week the creative practitioners answer the following questions:
What is your development and reflection process?
How has production, risk, failure and your own personal ambition affected the outcome?
TUTORS ADVICE
Be experimental, bold, playful and consider how embracing risk, and the possibility of failure can aid project development and has the potential to benefit and steer the direction of your final outcome.
Webinar Lecture - Stuart Tolley
Week 3: Peer reflection, thinking by doing, testing and refining design
I caught up on this week’s lecture which gave more examples of self-initiated projects. These are the examples that caught my creative eye!
Teeter-Totter Wall - Rael San Fratello
This is an outstanding example of a self-initiated project. The architecture studio Rael San Fratello has been researching the border that separates Mexico from the USA. It was created and presented in response to then-president Donald Trump and his ‘building the wall’ and is a simple idea but a very symbolic example, especially as it was assembelled on the last day of Trump’s presidency.
Self-initiated projects - Competitions and a chance to flex out creative muscles
As well as self-initiated projects, Stuart encourages us to explore competitions as a chance to develop design projects and practice creative briefs as another avenue of exposure.
Fedigoni 365 - Competition for creatives
This competition is open to all UK based creatives. This year, contributors to the project – ranging from various artistic disciplines – were asked to interpret their image of love, covering romantic relationships, heartbreak and platonic love. In keeping with the love theme, calendar sales will aptly benefit the British Heart Foundation this year.
36 Days of Type
36 Days of Type is a project that invites designers, illustrators and visual artists to express their unique interpretation of the letters and numbers of the Latin alphabet.
This is a yearly competition for desigers to explore the creative boundaries of letterforms and typography by challenging participants to design a letter or number each day for 36 days. The result is a global and simultaneous act that showcases the ability to represent the same symbols from thousands of different perspectives.
A great creative brief to participate in.
Design Failures
We also discussed how important it is to evaluate your work and we saw examples of advertising that hasn’t worked.
Strand cigarettes advertising
The tagline was ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’. This taglined failed the brand and caused a massive impact on the product.
Gap Logo (2010)
I love this logo example as I remember when this happened. For some reason, Gap changed their logo (massively) but consumers hated it, and the impact was a drastic failure for the brand and within a week it reverted back to the original.
Mini advertising
This shows how the design feature of the union jack lights (which look really cool) actually were indicating the wrong way, and very confusing despite the fact that there must of been various levels of concept and product testing this was never picked up.
Keep exploring, keep experimenting, to keep creative.
As the lectures suggest, it is good to use outside sources to keep creating. As well as supporting local charity projects that you might have a personal interest in, there are many other competitions that might help maintain your creativity with the possibility that this may give you exposure and lead to projects of a similar nature.
References
365 days of type
https://www.36daysoftype.com/