LorraineDesign

Well, Randy posted a comment today on my first post about this event announcing that the photos were up on our flickr page. His questions reminded me that I had originally intended a follow-up post with more info on the event, so I thought I'd answer his questions here. Unfortunately, since it's been a while since the event, I'm forgetting a lot of the little details, but will share the Big Things that I took away that night.

For those not familiar with Meet the Jurors, we began the evening with a happy hour and followed it up with short presentations by each of our Jurors. This year, they included Pum Lefebure, Alan Leusink, and Stanley Hainsworth. Each one gave a short presentation on their background which was followed by a general Q&A session with the audience.

For the most part, the event was purely eye-candy. Each juror showed a sampling of their best and often award-winning work. I can't say that I personally found anything inspiring about their experiences working in each place, however seeing the work was in itself highly inspiring for me. Aside from just enjoying listening to why a project turned out the way it did or hearing funny anecdotes about clients, I also really enjoyed hearing each one's philosophy.

Stanley opened the event discussing his work for Nike, Lego, Starbucks, and more recently his own studio, Tether. His approach to client relationships (whether he was working in-house or beginning his own start-up) is that it's not so much about design or the brand, as it is the brand's story. You, the Designer, have to find what story it is that the client has to say and manifest that throughout the visual language of company. In essence, we are all storytellers--no matter what medium we work in. He discussed the recent throw-back to Starbucks' old logo and explained that for a promotion, they were reliving the company's start with the release of the new brew that debuted at the same time (...just to paraphrase: it made more sense when he told it than I do here). He also discussed the company histories of Nike and Lego and how those impacted each brand's look while he worked there. This led me to think about the clients that I've been working on lately, and I discovered that the projects I'm most proud of with my current job have been the ones where I was subconsciously doing just that. (I say subconsciously because I hadn't thought about treating the role of the Designer this way in those terms.)

From Pum's presentation, I mainly gained a lot of inspiration on how to carry a clean aesthetic across a wide variety of clients and still ensure that you are tailoring your work for each one. Design Army just has a ton of really awesome work. But it was also interesting to hear about her transition from working in a fast-paced ad agency to deciding to start up her own studio in partnership with her husband. Her story caused me to think a little more about the different places that I have worked and what did and didn't fit with my personality at each place. So that invoked some good reflection.

Alan's presentation seemed to focus more on the work culture at Duffy & Partners. Two big things really stood out to me in his presentation: 1) their concepting phase for each project and 2) their collaborative culture. I don't want this to sound as if I'm coming down on where I work, because I'm not, but one thing that we really lack in my department is the time to really develop a concept before beginning work on a particular project. Again, I realized that the projects I'm most proud of allowed time and research into developing a solid concept, but for the most part, it seems we're usually too fast-paced to allow for that. In any case, I really loved hearing how Duffy begins each project with research into each project/client and uses that research to develop a mood board (I think they had a special name for them) to present to the client. Sometimes, clients were invited to participate in this stage, but in any case the boards are presented before any design options to gauge if they are on the right track. In the examples he showed, a direct link could be seen between each board and the final project.

As for the collaborative culture, Alan talked about how only after all of the designers at Duffy stopped trying to compete internally and began working collaboratively and openly did the firm begin to reap success. I think this is especially telling. Often, as designers, I think we get too caught up in keeping our ideas to ourselves. Our profession is so competitive that we start to self-destruct our studios/departments by closing ourselves off to our co-workers. On a related note, Andy Rutledge wrote an excellent article discussing the pitfalls of this approach entitled My Precious. In it, he compares an Idea to Gollum's lust for the One Ring. I think that this protectiveness to an Idea coupled with our competitive nature sets up huge roadblocks to creative advancement. So it was nice to hear how one firm was able to turn that around.

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