Monday, August 9, 2010

01 Panel Discussion

August 4


After showing my progress so far in the project, certain core points came out of the meeting. Everyone encouraged me a lot to bring out the ‘wild’ side in me, and to try to push my thinking beyond the restrictions placed by the client. As a designer I should be confident about my ideas and convince my client, and if there is something that I feel about, I should go ahead and execute it, if not for the client, then for myself.

Both Danika and Alison gave me some references to look up, and questions to consider. They asked me to think about patterns of people surfing the web, and what is it in a website that keeps them coming back. Each gave their own example, and it was very clear from those examples that the basis of the concept for the website is going to be such user flows.

Currently it turns out that what I have done so far is very basic, and not revolutionary in anyway. I do have some ideas, but they have not been defined yet in terms of a concrete branding strategy. There was a lot of debate over one such idea, which revolved around having monthly themes for the website and product range. What is the point of such themes? How are they going to be applied? Is the logo going to change according to the theme? If the theme is, for example, pop art, then how does the medium change the message? Does the firm do a lot of pop art? To someone the appeal may be purely visual, but to someone else, it could have a political context to pop art. Can the themes be more in context to the firm?

Though I unable to clarify then, I wanted to say that pop art was just one theme from the top of my head, and not necessarily something that I was going to execute. There were other themes that I had thought related to typography. Here again, they helped in widening my horizons, by giving me more outlets in which type could be used like the history of type, letterpress, printing and so on.

Here, I also told them about the idea of having a website which has a blog like and personal feel to it. This is where a lot of suggestions came up as to what people around the world are doing with the power of the blog already.

Another such idea was the fact that the value of graphic design comes across only when absent. And this is one direction that I want to work with. Mr. Ravindra had pointed out a very important question here. My ‘strategy’ up till now works around ‘users’ and not potential users. When a firm decides to do a rebranding, the purpose is to get more clientele. How am I going to use graphic design to attract such clientele? Currently it is word of mouth and the portfolio the firm has. Mr. Ravindra also reminded me that being revolutionary does not necessarily need to be something that has never been done before. Just because a t-shirt has been designed before does not mean that I cannot design one now. However, there should be some meaning in that, and an idea which makes it unique. He also told me to think about the content of the website, because that will gravely affect what I do with it.

Since I am rebranding a design firm, I should be able to go beyond the boundaries. My logo iterations till now were considered a bit old school, where the argument came up that the client anyway wants something which would last forever, and young doesn’t last forever. They also suggested that I push the idea of using his signature, because it had a certain quality which kept them looking at it for more time than my type integrations did.

Here I realised that this was maybe because I have not styled my iterations yet. They still have not been taken forward. A lot depends on how a logo is executed. I still have faith in what I have done so far, and will make it work.

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