Design for Distribution - Starting points

There's quite a few starting points from the 'Cool Climate' brief that I'm liking the sound of.

• Find a jumper you like
• Face your elephant (already been done to a really high standard though) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXfEF-T9OA
• Never stop dreaming
• Think
• Share stuff

Im not sure wether I can answer these without climate change in mind, some of the issues here are easily applied to any situation.

I am feeling quite positive about facing the elephant, as it has associations with facing your fears or worries, it doesn't seem like something I'd get bored with.

If I discard the sustainable context for this however, it does leave me in a similar position as before.. what the hell is the context going to be then?

Regardless, I'm going to generate a whole lot of ideas based around these concepts tomorrow before I go to work, and hopefully get a few story boards posted as well. I'm falling into the trap of note taking and not designing again.. Need to keep an eye on that!

Design for Distribution - Thoughts so far.

Okay, this post is for my own benefit more than anything else.
The past few days have been a rollercoaster of over thinking and worrying about the future. This obviously stems from last weeks session when we were encouraged to think about these questions as a spring board for the 3rd year, me being me I have totally over thought them, and ended up in a state of absolute confusion.


So. 
I want to do motion graphics. The problem with this is that motion graphics is as all encompassing as graphic design itself. You can make anything move if you want, illustration, info graphics, photography, typography.. whatever you can think of. So specialising in motion graphics isn't really specialising at all - or so it seems.


Anyway, this is the first brief and statement of intent I wrote for this project...






I think the indecisiveness brought on by the last week followed through when I wrote this very vague brief, and I have since come to realise this is not what i want to do. If this is my dream brief, why am I doing something I don't want to do? And what then, do I really want to do?


At this point I kind of went back to the drawing board, or the writing board... and started to think about what it is that I want to do. I find it very difficult to make decisions like this, it's like I'm committing myself to something for the rest of my career, when in reality I'm not at all.
Anyway, I came up with a fairly similar but different list of things that I want to do, but as well as this I now understand why I want to do them, and why they are necessary for my personal development as a designer. 


I also realised that want I want to do right now is what's important. Yes I want to develop my branding skills and yes I want to learn Dreamweaver, infact I literally have to, as a strong web presence is essential to where I'm heading, but I don't have to do it right now! Right now, I want to become very closely acquainted with After Effects - which is what I'm going to do.


What I want to do

• I want to get better at After Effects
• I want to expand my knowledge of branding, but NOT right now.
• I want to build a web presence, but NOT right now.
• I want to create short pieces of animation as this will help me progress faster.

What I want from a brief

• Content already available to work with.
• Starting points that will allow a set of pieces, rather than one long one.
• Context is not predetermined, and comes as a response to the evolution of the project.




• eradicates that idea of making an ident for the sake of making an ident etc..

I looked again at all the competition briefs, and at the recommendation of a few people, took a look at the 'Climate Cool' brief.

The nice thing about this is the 15 seemingly quite random and disjointed statements for use as starting points. I struggled to get my head round this at first, purely because there is not a product associated with what they are asking. Actually, it's literally just hit me that this brief is about a message, obvious now I've seen it - I cant believe I was so blind! Last year I was all about the message. I loved it. If a piece wasn't saying something important it had no purpose in my eyes. So that's what I need to do now.

I need to have something to communicate, and my vessel for this is motion graphics.

If I wasn't writing this down I would never have got here.

Next step... 

• What do I want to communicate? 
• What are my starting points?

 To be continued...

Design for Distribution - What and why?

First session back after easter, and we came with the 5 briefs chosen over easter from an extensive choice of competitions. These were the filtered down to our favourite 3, you can see mine below. I chose them all for different reasons, and did keep in mind that I could combine elements from each to create my own dream brief.

We began to fill in sheets that raised questions as to our intentions as designers, and through this determined what would be necessary to include in a dream brief.

Not as easy as you might initially think. I found the process more confusing the longer we went about it.

I began to question the things I'd written down initially, and therefore spent a lot of time worrying about what I actually wanted to specialise in, rather than focussing on writing my own brief.