AIGA Professional Series: The Business of Design in 2012

I attended the AIGA Professional Speaker Series event on Wednesday night. The Professional Series is essentially where designers and entrepreneurs alike meet to speak about the design business. This event, in particular, allowed designers from a number of businesses to hold a panel discussion about what 2012 holds in store. 

            The moderator for the event was Eduardo Braniff from Imagination. The panelists included Juan Rosenfeldt from FreeRange, Chris Do from BL:ND, Bryan Neff from Innovation Protocol, and Scott Meisse and Wendy Thai from Ferroconcrete. This was my first live AIGA event and I honestly didn’t know who these designers were, nor did I know what business they were from. However, I recognized the fact that I need to get myself out there, I need to start meeting designers, and I need to start getting to know who they are and what they’re businesses are about if I want to become a successful designer and entrepreneur myself. This event sounded like it would be the perfect way for me to start networking and I jumped at the opportunity. I can honestly say that I learned a great deal about some of their business practices and what they’re looking forward to in 2012.

            One of the topics that came up was branding and Bryan Neff from Innovation Protocol was the first to speak about the subject. He described branding as being behavior moving and spoke about how 2012 is going to be an era based on emotion. Their Strategic Brand Development methodology holds that with branding, an audience should trust and believe in the designer and design group to give them exactly what they need. Wendy Thai from Ferroconcrete jumped into the conversation and explained how 2012 is going to be a time of digital push for designers to really go above and beyond what they know and to push the boundaries of technology today. This year holds great challenges for all of us, but we should never forget where we, as designers, came from: print. She stated that print has a tactility that connects us to each other and that now, through our advanced technologies, were facing a loss of human connection and interaction.

            Branding was the prominent topic of the evening and it was said that the biggest challenge of branding today is how designers utilize their capabilities to match emotion through a variety of platforms. Designers have to keep in mind the best way to represent their client and they have to know what applications are the best fit for the client’s project.

Chris Do from BL:ND spoke about the idea of radical differentiation which is how one stands out and apart from the crowd in a world where it’s difficult to stand out. He posed questions about how a business becomes a place that does it all and how a business positively transforms their client’s experience. He was basically saying that we have to have an honest business relationship with our clients; we need to tell them exactly who we are and what we do. In turn, the client will tell us about their project at hand and they will be honest to us about their budget, how many other design firms are pitching ideas, etc. It will allow us the chance to make well informed decisions on whether or not it’s a good opportunity to pursue or if we should ultimately walk away from the job.

The main message that the panelists wanted to convey is that 2012 is going to be a year of teaching and a return to basic human principles of inspiration and humanity. We need to be genuine and ask questions and delve deep to find out as much information about a client’s needs as we can in order to provide the best solution possible. We need to ask ourselves if we are aligning culturally with our client’s businesses and if we are the right fit for meeting their needs.

One of the attendees posed a question regarding a recent post from the CEO of Twitter and the idea of “Rockstar” designing. Juan Rosenfeldt from FreeRange tackled the question and spoke of how 2011 marks the end of the era of “Rockstar” designing and 2012 marks the beginning of the era of team designing. The creative team is coming together more now than ever, but the reality is that even though teams are working more closely together, we still need superstars like Jack Welch and Steve Jobs to keep us on our toes.

            Designers are service providers. We are in the business of providing a service to our clients. We do not create our own expression with a client; we create an expression of the client for the client. As designers, we are continually learning with every client and with every project.

There were so many topics that were discussed that night that one really had to be in attendance to fully absorb all of the information that was being discussed. Wendy left us with something a client had said to her one day. Her client told her that having the right tools doesn’t make a client a designer, it makes them dangerous. It was a great event and I was able to speak and network with a number of designers who attended. We also received a book courtesy of Innovation Protocol that discusses their Strategic Brand Development methodology in more detail.  

I’m definitely looking forward to attending more AIGA events and I’m excited for the 17^th Annual Y-Design Conference at the end of March.

1.25.2012

Today, we all had to present our 40 concept sketches to Jimmy. The Dream Act had plenty of pros and cons to choose from, but creating sketches for the ideas proved to be much more difficult than we anticipated. Some of our sketches even came out to be similar in nature. We were supposed to collaborate on all of them, but we thought that as preliminary sketches, it would be beneficial to sketch 20 each and work from there.

Jimmy thought the sketches each team presented were ok, but he didn't think any of us really had anything solid so we were asked to produce another 40 sketches due by the next class. It came as a slight shock that we were to produce another 40 since the first 40 were rather difficult to come up with, but it will be worth it in the end. In order to come up with a great idea, you need to have a lot of ideas, right? We'll see how round 2 goes!

1.23.2012

Good ads and bad ads. We see examples of each on a daily basis, but what is it exactly that makes an ad good or bad? We spent most of the class time reviewing ads in magazines. A couple of my classmates volunteered to help spot good ads in magazines and we all went over them in class with Jimmy.

All of the teams were also supposed to have all of their research ready for our current project. We are to take a social issue and create 2 full scale black and white newspaper ads on the positive and negative sides of our issues. My partner and I chose to create ads for the Dream Act. The pro side would focus on how passing the Dream Act would actually help stimulate growth of the economy. The con side would focus on how passing the Dream Act would increase illegal immigration and how they will overrun our colleges and universities.

1.18.2012

Freedom of expression. What exactly does that mean? Freedom to express our feelings and opinions without the fear of persecution? Censorship? Big Brother? We started the class period with a simple question from our professor: did any of us do anything this past weekend like community service to celebrate MLK day? The first response from one of my classmates happened to be about the situation with SOPA and PIPA and it sparked an interesting conversation about what it was. A couple of my classmates gave their opinions about the subject and before the conversation got ugly, my professor stepped in, but it really just got me thinking about how much freedom we actually think we have. I haven't really looked into the SOPA bill as of yet, but just something to keep in mind guys, no matter what we do, we will always have some sort of censorship. So long as a society wants to continue to be a working society, there have to be limitations on what we, as citizens, do. Not to say we shouldn't be allowed to freely express ourselves, but we have to be held accountable for our actions if we know that we're in the wrong. This is also not to say that jail time is the correct way to deal with the situation, but it's not surprising that its being used as a solution to the problem.

The rest of the class time was spent discussing our first project which I'm excited about! It will require a lot of time, research, and energy, but we get to work with a partner and design a campaign about a controversial social issue occurring today. We went over the specs of the project and basically just started researching about our topics. This project will be a challenge, but it will teach us a lot about issue advertising. My classmates all have different topics that are interesting and I'd love to see what solutions they come up with and the campaigns they present.

1.11.2012

Advertising is all around us. Today, advertisements can be seen and heard through all forms of communication and the media. People simply partaking in daily activities are constantly being bombarded with a slew of advertisements on the radio, television, billboards, in magazines, on the internet, and through one of the most powerful methods of advertising, word of mouth. 

We, my classmates and I, were given an assignment to bring 3 ads to class that we thought were great. We also submitted written documentation about what made these advertisements so great. I chose to look through different types of magazines where the target audiences were completely different. I looked through Parents, Spin, and a Southwest Airlines magazine. I found numerous ads that were good, but only a few that were great. The advertisement I found in Parents magazine was the best of the 3 ads I presented. It was an ad by Lego duplo toys and it was actually a calendar chart to keep track of the progress made throughout Lego's Great Play Challenge. By participating in the “Great Play Challenge,” parents/participants are not only increasing playtime with their children, but they are also helping their children learn developmental skill sets. As a bonus perk, once an activity is completed, the participants are automatically entered for a chance to win prizes like Lego toys and money. The advertisement is carefully and strategically created by using images of both boys and girls playing with the Legos, easy to follow 3-step instructions, a catchy phrase "so many ways to play," and a panel that shows the outcomes of the challenge.

In class, our Professor, Jimmy Moss, had a couple of my classmates act out a mock pitch. They had to basically pitch their idea to the client of what their advertising campaign would entail. They did a great job for being put on the spot, but it really did show how difficult it can be to pitch an idea because one has to be precise and dead on to sell their idea. 

Overall, the class period was well spent. Jimmy didn't go off on too many tangents this time; we pretty much stayed on target for the duration of the class. I'm looking forward to an interesting quarter with Jimmy as my professor in not one, but two classes!