My Story: Graphic Design Festival Scotland.
“The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design.” — Massimo Vignelli
Days running up to the festival.
Prior to attending the festival on a trip to Berlin, I was lucky enough to stumble across a creativity festival. The festival was based in a very unique space within the centre of Mitte and made for interesting viewing.
“Future does not arise from fear of the unknown, but from the courage to face the challenges of our time.”
Some of the installations and ideas based throughout the festival were very creative and thought provoking. Objects such as a fire axe with a megaphone substituting the head to portray a bigger message about the impact of free speech. The Festival offered a spiritual body of work and encouraged a relaxed atmosphere in which guests could directly interact with artist to gain perspective and context to the works on display. Experiencing a festival of creativity in another country began to open me up to new thoughts and provided the ideal inspiration for coming back to Glasgow to attend Graphic Design Festival Scotland.
Upon leaving the festival you are handed a small gift which I found profoundly inspiring.
In the small package was a number of seeds and on the back the following was written. (Translated from German)
“No problem for innovative and creative heads. Trade fair now with mother nature. Uhhh — a strong opponent! Or maybe a driving force? Here’s how: Develop an exciting project that you would like to implement at some time, then throw the seeds at a suitable place in the earth and you’re off.
Who is the first to reach the goal? Who develops the better strategies to grow strongly? When you are done before the plants are in full bloom, you have won and if not, the iron gesture of Mother Nature:
Never Give up! Have lots of fun together!”
This overwhelmed me with a great sense of ambition, anticipation, and motivation for this coming year of university.
Graphic Design Festival Scotland
Day One
The lighthouse in Glasgow hosted the week long event. This is a very unique space known for being Scotland’s centre for design and architecture. The day began with all of the mentors for the two day live projects giving a rough overview of their businesses and what work they had done. My mentor was the graphic design agency “Tangent”. Tangent is a brand identity and graphic design studio founded and run by designers. They are a small scale graphic design studio that have delivered such memorable work as The Common Wealth games branding and the “People Make Glasgow” project that has helped Glasgow establish a more welcoming identity through design.
We began by working in a design workshop, with a team of around 10 other people, being mentored by Tangent. We were presented with a brief and challenged to present our ideas back to our mentors midway through the second day.
“Start something for yourself. This could be socially, economically, culturally or politically oriented. It could be local or global, physical or digital.
Identify an issue which needs to be solved or improve something which already exists. Build something from nothing and create an opportunity for yourself.”
I started by mapping some social and political issues out in Glasgow. I decided to focus on underage drinking. After doing some research and thinking about other issues, I took focus on a youth centre in my hometown. The centre does fantastic work but doesn’t have much of an online presence. I felt that with a design intervention this could be a great idea to not only to develop the reputation of the centre but to hopefully attract more to use the services by creating a more appealing branding.
East Kilbride Universal Connections offers a wide range of services, provision and learning opportunities for young people in the East Kilbride and Strathaven areas. Range of activities and learning opportunities for young people is S1-S6 and offer some targeted provision to P6/7 and 16+ young people. By breaking down my goals and objectives for the project it allowed me to tackle the problem in bitesize chunks.
Day Two
On the second day we began more work on our presentations in order to present them back to our mentors. By this time I had generated my idea and vision to put forward. My idea was to implement a rebrand of the centre and to provide a programme of design solutions that inform and guide clients through the services in the centre, provide consistent awareness of services, as well as working with staff to support their user interactions. The users themselves would be involved in design and development by being given opportunities to expand their knowledge and experiences, and gain a sense of pride in their communities and a range of useful life skills. Alongside this I had the idea of developing an app called “Universal Connection”. The idea for the app came when I noticed the mission statement of the centre.
“Youth Learning Service is a catalyst for engagement, participation and informal learning opportunities encouraging young people and their families to achieve their full potential in a safe, fun and supportive environment”
I felt that given the mission statement of the organisation, their digital presence had to be improved in order to provide them with a platform that the centre could expand upon. The App concept I designed would allow the facility which is one of Scotland’s largest youth facilities to grow to it’s full potential. The branding would be consistent and put across the centre and social media. This would allow users to interact with other members and help create a growing community platform that would allow users to book on to events and interact with other users/staff in the centre.
Getting feedback from our mentors proved to be a vital piece of experience for me. Given it was a two day project the brief was challenging but I felt it really demanded that we think expansively as it was so open. It taught me that it was very important that if an idea wasn’t working initially to not spend to much time dwelling upon it and move on to explore new possibilities.
“Never fall in love with an idea. They’re whores. If the one you’re with isn’t doing the job, there’s always, always, always another.”
— Chip Kidd
Day Three
STV Creative Workshop
When we entered the room we were put into small groups of 4/5. We were asked to pick up two or three random objects from a table, which we would have to come up with the idea for a new project. Our group chose a skull, phone and rubber duck, which we developed a concept for a cold call answering machine to divert unwanted calls to a device that would talk back.
After completing this task we were asked to move on to the next table so we would be paired up with a different product. We had to pitch and present a marketing/advertising campaign for this service. Which was called “Mexican Cow Tours”.
We began to map out our ideas under different categories. By brain storming and throwing lots of ideas up onto the wall we began to craft our identity.
We opted for a more humorous pitch and presented this back to the “client” which got some great feedback. However shortly after this the next task we were challenged with was the curveball of a sponsor being put in an hour before the final pitch, this was to simulate a real world situation where major changes must be implemented at the last minute. Our curveball was that PETA decided to sponsor us… this was extremely challenging as the whole premise involved cows being used as transport in touring rather than a bus service.
We had an hour to think and come up with a way of reframing our idea and concept and pitch back to our client…
However, we managed to change our campaign into a more friendly experience more based upon looking after the cows and doing good whilst still sticking to most of our campaigns underlying objectives. We ended up being the winning group with the best pitch. We landed the job ! (If it was in the real world). We each were rewarded with £20 of vouchers for a local art shop in Glasgow. With this came a great sense of accomplishment and pride due to the challenge that was presented to us at the last minute. I feel this workshop gave me the most vital experience of anything I experienced throughout the festival. It was such a real world scenario where anything can change throughout a project at anytime and it was all based about how quickly we adapt to change to conjure new ideas successfully.
Day 4 — GDFS Launch Night
This was the final night announcing the winners of their international poster competition. I attended with one of my friends who had gotten through to the final 500. This meant his poster would be displayed in a gallery at the lighthouse that is left for some months after the festival finishes. This night allowed me to meet up with classmates, friends, lecturers, mentors and other designers in a much more laid back setting. I met some new people and made some great connections with local design agencies.
My experience of Graphic Design Festival Scotland has been hugely insightful and motivational. It has taught me that if I wake up every day with determination that I will go to my bed each night with satisfaction. I leave this week with a new sense of drive and purpose toward chasing my ambitions within my career in design.
