aspire to enquire

Martin Winters asks...

Like some sort of internet celebrity, I had an email over the weekend from Martin Winters, a student at Stockport College. He's asking; "Blogs - Good or Bad?"

I answered some questions for him, which he's now put up on his blog alongside lots of other far more insightful responses. 

Hooray!

I'm sure that's not true, but still, quite a compliment! 

So I'm off to intern at Public Zone for a few months and learn loads about interfaces and digital campaigning. 

Once I've found somewhere to stay, I'll be really excited. Plus there's a picnic next week. Smiles all round.

D&AD New Blood 2009

We had a stand at New Blood last week, in the boiling-hot-but-much-better-space-than-last-year Kensington Olympia. 

I think we all found it similarly awesome and daunting to be alongside creative students from around the World, all showing the results of years of studying and working. 

Our stand design strategy this year was to invite people in with an open central area and lots of little things to play and interact with around the space. I would say that strategy was 60% successful. There's clearly a balance to be struck between inviting & intimate and big & visual. In many cases the best new blood winners were all four of those things. Worth thinking about for next year's third years.

That's the other sad thing, that we don't get another go. I got the impression that those of us who didn't go last year were completely overwhelmed and awestruck by the scale and talent of the show and their position within that. It's a symptom of studying in a town with misjudged opinions of itself, I guess. Even though it's outside of term time, all 2nd years should come to get a sense of what's expected of them as New Blood next year. It should be a school trip.

Some more observations / tips:

1. People mostly check the name of the college before the work on display.
2. Covering your wall space with huge work stops people from going in for a closer look. 
3. Scottish (4 year) courses had consistently more considered spaces and work.
4. A well designed overall space was far more inviting than leaving it to individual work. 
5. Some work that we didn't take with us would have done really well. 
6. Too many students in front of a stand means people can't get in and look. 
7. Having business cards or take-away items that actually feature your work is a good idea. 
8. Print work was the main focus - real opportunities to show great 2.0 concepts.
9. Check that your power isn't going to be switched off before the judges look round.
10. Not many people seemed to be taking advantages of the talks and workshops. 
11. Stands worked better when they were staffed by students.   
12. Hardly anyone was using the #newblood09 twitter tag, or even tweeting about it at all. 

There are write-ups on Form Fifty Five, and Creative Review.

Did anyone else go along? What would your tips be?

The end of the beginning

It's been a while since our show in Cardiff wrapped up, but I thought I'd share some of the photos I managed to get of the opening and the space.

All the CSAD courses open on the same day, so there's a real buzz around both campuses as all our family and friends browse around.

If you could survive the awful music there were quite a few nice things to do outside as well; a barbecue, a 'make your own puppet' stall, and lots of cakes and drinks prepared by 2nd year students saving up for their big shows next year.

My space looked like this:

I thought it would be good to put a little link to my website, seeing as that's a lot of what I do, rather than just the graphics.

Here's some other parts of the show:

Gemma Roberts.

Matt Hilde.

Stuart Lee (same brief as my authority piece).

John Wiltshire, James Phillips, Adam Bourne.

Lots of people. 

Laura Scull

Jo Williams, Matt Hilde.

Dave Cuvelot.

Chris Welsby.

Matt Case, Becky Cooke, Gemma Siely and Ben Macey. Becky's piece was so good I'm going to do a whole other blog about it. You can't see it here.

There was loads more, Matt took better pictures than these. All in all, a fairly successful show.

Well done everyone and good luck with all your future endeavours!

D&AD New Blood 2009

I'll, like, totally be there, with 8 other friendly colleagues from the Graphic Communications course at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

You can look at my little profile page here. See you there?

Unashamed self-promotion

One of the things our tutors have been very keen for us to do this year is to start getting ourselves out into the world with nice looking portfolios and websites. Trying to get jobs and placements, and generally being more like professionals than students. Selling ourselves as the designers and enquirers we aspire to be. 

It's been a tough ask, but I think that when the exhibition opens on Saturday a load of us will be able to show that we've done just that, even if there's no other professionals there to see it.

In my own case, I guess I've kind of been 'getting out there' to some extent through this blog, meeting people I admire from the blog world and getting a chance to put my opinions together and discuss them in public. But the great thing about the uni requirements is that I've now also got a lovely little website and portfolio, which I'm very happy to announce today.

My home page hub of all things me: www.tom-harle.co.uk

My portfolio page: http://aspire2enquire.typepad.com/portfolio/

If you're reading this on an rss reader, you may not have noticed that I've also put a bit of work into the layout of this blog as well, with a cheesey picture of myself and everything.

And my exhibition space is going to look pretty sexy as well. Come along (more info) and have a look if you're in the area. If you let me know when you fancy stopping by, maybe I can come and meet you and show you round everyone's work :)

The beginning of the end

We're preparing the space for our degree show this week. The space is usually a teaching studio so there's quite a bit to do before we can get our work on the walls.

You should, like, totally come along between June 13th and 19th.

More details here.

CSAD Summer Exhibition 2009

It's so crazy thinking how fast this has come along. All the third year courses at CSAD will be opening their doors to show their students off, from 13th-19th June.

If you're interested in coming along, the shows are open all week, but there's a special late-night opening on Thursday 18th June, from 5-8pm. 

Graphic Communication will be doing our own little invite for the show as well, which I'll post up soon. 

I will go to the ball

Graduation Balls, or at least Student Balls in some sense have pretty much plagued my life for the last 4 years. As a part-time Union officer at Sussex, I was involved more than I should have been in a Grad Ball for the year above me, then as a full-time Union officer I was involved a little more, and after a stress free 2007 I was back at it again for the Summer Ball for Art and Design students last year.

Our event last year looking a bit spacious

So now that my own graduation actually becomes a very possible reality, it's nice to be thinking about going along to my own grad ball. Seeing everyone for maybe the final time before we go our separate ways. Celebrating the amazing times that we've had at UWIC.

Sadly, neither of those last two things will be happening, as all 300 tickets for this year's Grad Ball are near enough sold out. And I've not particularly had an amazing time. 

Luckily I have a ticket, but I'll be amongst 10 people from my class and 5 or 6 of Alison's friends. In less than 12 hours, all 300 tickets have gone (I think that's under 10% of our year?), at £35 a pop.

I'm not really sure how this could have happened. Considering the prevalent apathy on campus, and seeing as the publicity amounted to a recycled facebook group from last year's event, what can only be described as the worst promo video for an event of this kind that I've ever seen, and a recycled flyer design from last year's event that we found at lunch today, I'm nothing short of amazed.

I was apprehensive about going, after we put so much effort into last years event and got very little back from it. I'm predicting being very picky on the night about how our event was better last year! But I'm going along nonetheless, and I'm glad I decided today! 

Whatever I think about the rubbishness of the event, the promotion, the online booking system, UWICSU and all of that, I think there are important lessons to be learned here:

• Regardless of past attendance, students do want this kind of event.
• If you can create enough buzz, quality is not important.
• Real-time feedback on ticket sales is very powerful in boosting sales.

It's basically persuaded me that we weren't wrong to spend months working on it last year, and that we could have taken the lessons we'd learned and done something awesome this year, for a fraction of the ticket price. Things that I'll no doubt bring up in conversation more than once in the next few months.

But I am looking forward to being proved wrong on 10th July, and having a brilliant night out.

Students and social media

A few interesting conversations whilst on my little London day out last week have had me thinking about social media type things. A few times, I felt that my opinions on the uses and powers of social media were being a little misunderstood, which made me wonder if I had the right idea at all. 

Here's the idea I have:

I read a great quote in Connect! Marketing in the Social Media Era from Carl Moggridge; "Forget Facebook and Twitter for one second and think about how social your brand is" - It doesn't matter where on the internet you are really, as long as you are doing something worth talking about. 

Does it matter if you've created something for the sole purpose of it being talked about (i.e viral)? No, I don't think it does, but the key will be whether that content is a genuine reflection of your organisation. Recently, we've seen a lot of viral activity that hasn't started life on any digital platform anyway, proving that it's the ideas that get talked about, not whether or not they're 'on facebook'.

Obviously, in the long term, being in the places where you are being talked about will enable you to talk back and engage people far more effectively, but no one is going to want to engage if you are perceived to be uninteresting or unremarkable. 

That's massively basic but important thinking for organisations thinking of setting up on Twitter. I'm so fed up of seeing organisations just pasting up links to press releases. But it's also massively important for us students too. 

A lot of friends of mine have said things like "I need to get on Twitter", and although I haven't been replying at the time, I've thought "do you? what will you do when you're on there?". If all people are going to do is treat it as another 'facebook status', I don't see why people don't just use their facebook statuses more. 

Twitter's great if you're trying to get out there and listen to what people are saying in the world you want to become part of, whichever world that is. I think it's a lot less great if you want to complain that you haven't started your homework yet. 

For me, it's not really about having an agenda, but definitely about having a sense of purpose.

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see"

- Henry David Thoreau

Ben Terrett has posted up a great blogging starter guide for students to start sharing their activities with the wider world. I think a lot of us are worried that we'll say the wrong thing and someone important will see it. That's been happening to me a lot recently. It is scary. 

But those important people are going to be equally concerned to hear about young people who understand the media landscape they'll be working in, who have a sense of their own opinions and interests, and who are not afraid to get out there and start conversations.