A change of colour.

Recently after much deliberation, I changed the colours of my partners and my website. We both felt the original colours looked slightly dated and just didn't suit us. So now we have used a slightly softer palette, which I now feel 100% happy with. As a perfectionist when I am not entirely happy about something it will niggle me until it is changed. The colours now represent my understated, quietly confident approach to things while also representing Amy's loud approach to work. I am still very happy with the overall logo as although it is very bold, we are both very confident people in our own way so need something the represent this.

I am hoping with the branding used, when looking at getting a job in an agency, we can show this alongside our Twitter and Facebook account which will let them know we take ourselves very seriously when it comes to work. We feel the look now fits us as a team, while also looking modern and not too busy that it will overshadow the work. Fingers crossed it's not just us who think this! Below are the new colours, also take a look at our revised website at www.maslewskibowden.co.uk :

London!

So next week my class and I travel to London to visit some of the top agencies! I cannot wait, the live briefs have been announced and we shall be working on some to take down to present. The pressure is on!
We will be visiting Saatchi & Saatchi, RKCR/Y&R, Ogilvy, ASA and my personal favourite, Mother. It is here I hope to show them what I am made of.

Saatchi and Saatchi have set the brief for San Miguel, with the proposition being 'The Slow Beer'. There were no real stipulations for this brief so my partner and me pretty much have free reign. While this is quite a fun brief, I do feel that there is some hard work to be done to make this original, as Kronenbourg were responsible for the recent 'slow the pace' TV ad as you will see below which has very similar theme to what I will be working on:



So there as there are several competitors saying the same sort of thing, it will just be mine and Amy's job to try and make San Miguel stand out.

This brings me to a similar problem with our next brief to be presented in London for Mother. I can truly say I think this shall be one of the hardest briefs I will have worked on ever. It is for Moneysupermarket.com, for those who may not understand its status, it is in competition with gocompare.com (annoying singing moustache guy) and comparethemarket.com a.k.a. comparethemeerkat.com. While those adverts irritate me very much, there is no denying they work and as a result have had a mass amount of attention. Everybody knows their names. Now it is my job to beat this. Impossible? Maybe so. But I have no choice but to get on with it. I just hope I am not embarrassed in front of Tim McNaughton and Freddy Mandy at Mother! If me and Amy get this right, it could be our rise and recognition, but if not it could be a sharp shock into the realities that maybe all briefs cannot be cracked. As Mother is currently trying to work on it themselves, at least we will have their empathy! Fingers crossed something good comes from this!

Lastly we have a nice brief from RKCR/ Y&R for Interflora with the proposition being 'Get flowers delivered'. This is quite a nice, simple brief and this should be a nice one to work on.

All in all I am really looking forward to London, visiting there as a second year student I have a lot more questions I would like the agencies to answer, and with me graduating soon, I wish to see if I am at the right level to go into industry. I want to know what I need to work on as a creative to get my foot in the industry.

Another perspective.

On the 17th March my class were fortunate enough to receive a talk from Dave McDonald, a Graphic Designer come Art Director from Infinite Design and he came in to tell us about his journey and perspective on the creative world.

Beginning his journey at Newcastle College 1996, Dave knew he had a passion for Graphic Design which he wanted to pursue. So after some thought, decided to move to London where he thought he could build a career. After moving down there and working in two of the top agencies of that time, he decided he hated it, it wasn't him and he knew he wanted to get out. This shocked me, and did make me re-think my options. I always thought at some point my creative journey would take me to London and that I would love it because everybody else does. But nobody ever talks about the bad experiences, Dave said it like it was and did make me think 'there is the possibility London could be a bad move'. While I am not going to totally rule it out, I do think this talk will allow me to think a little more about that kind of thing, that what could happen is not as straight cut as I might have thought.

After his brief trip to London, Dave moved back up to Newcastle to work on his creative career. When he moved back he took his book around all the top agencies over a 12 month period, which to his dismay got him nowhere at first. They all shot him down saying that he wasn't good enough. But he believed in himself and pursued it, which landed him a job in Infinite Design and 9 years later here he was, telling us about his perspective on things.

He has had the fortune to work on a number of great projects such as the design work for Northern Stage, One NorthEast, the branding for End Clothing, along with some personal and freelance work. But he did give one example of where he had a bad experience. On being selected to do the front cover of The Futureheads new album as a freelance designer he was very excited to work on something which allowed him to basically do what he liked as a creative. But the experience of this was very different. He told of his horrible encounter with the manager of the music company who just was not happy about Dave working on the project. But Dave persisted, hiring his staff to realise the work, over a £1000 later, Dave was informed he had been dropped from the account and thus lost out on all that money along with the frustration of the whole project.

Dave said he was burned from this but learned a valuable lesson, to always agree costing before beginning the work, to make sure guidelines have been set and to make sure money is received at milestones throughout the project. This lead him to tell us about the cycle of work, that your personal work informs your professional work which in forms your personal work which informs your professional work. Which is very true.

This leads me to the end of the talk with Dave, a piece of advice to 'Why me?', why I should be selected over anyone else to work in an agency and this was broken down into attributes he felt were needed to get a job.

Personality, Portfolio, Passion
Relaxed, Professional, Honest
Genuine, Confident, Receptive
Brave, Committed, Positive

Then lastly, just to be myself!

While this was a lot to take in, the talk from Dave was very helpful. I have came away from this of a much clearer idea of how I should approach things in the creative world, and I would know to get the money up front for freelance work now!
Overall I think Dave now has it sussed after the experiences he has had, while I am sure I will have some good and bad times to come which I will learn from myself, I am just glad I was able to understand it a little more so I am not so naive when I go into industry.

YCN Student awards.

I am happy to say, I have submitted mine and Amys completed YCN student award brief, for Tuborg. Fingers crossed it wins!!!

Below are some of the previous winners, take a look.

The Brief: Doritos
Break the rules of packaging and point-of-sale and bring the Doritos brand to life in the stores and shops it is sold in.


The Brief: Ctrl+Alt+Shift.
Redefine what it means to ‘give’ to charity.

Website complete.

So this week after much research and learning, I have finally set up the website for Maslewski&Bowden. To design the site, I used iweb, which was quite straight forward, and I based the design around the logo we had selected to use. The hard bit came when I had to figure out how on earth I publish a website from iweb or buy a domain. Fortunately I am writing this having figured out how to do this, so I present to you my partners and mine new website which I am very proud of, it took some sleepless nights, but I now know how to set up a website! Check it out:

www.maslewskibowden.co.uk

Personal Branding.

So as myself and partner Amy have now created our personal brand. This is our stamp that will be applied to our website, twitter account, and other avenues which are a representation of ourselves. It is something which must get our personalities, strengths, professionalism and creativity across to anyone who may look.
We came up with several ideas for our brand at first which we felt didn't work, they weren't bold enough, and looked too much like a company brand rather than a creative teams brand. MB creative wasn't working as you will see below.



So after this we looked at just using our surnames, using a punchy typeface and vibrant colours we felt we would get our personalities across.


After some deliberation we decided to use the purple and green colouring, it was most vibrant and could be easily applied through many medias. As seen below:


So having decided on this I am now working on our website and other accounts to apply the same graphics throughout. Hopefully it will impress!

Leith Visit.

Last week our class had the fortune to be visited by one of the creative teams from Leith in Edinburgh, Michael Maxwell (copywriter) and Ian Fletcher (Art Director). It was really fun getting the guys down, they set us a task initially to answer a creative task or question. The whole class were given a task per team, and ours was the controversial 'Do a t-shirt that promotes Colonel Gaddafi'. Now this was some task, as he is such a hated man at present with the troubles in Libya, so after some research we found a picture which formed the basis of our t-shirt. Quite frankly I think for completing this in half an hour, it wasn't too bad! Take a look:


After this task they ran through some of their work and just answered any questions we had. The general theme of the discussions were unfortunately, how difficult it is to get into advertising, but if you put enough effort in, how satisfying the job truly is. Their talk really gave some inspiration, as the workload recently on my course is stepping up a gear, and becoming rather difficult, but their talk gave hope to press on, because the best bit is yet to come!

They then set us two briefs one for Irn Bru Sugar Free and one for the new '380' model train which is being released for Scotrail. They are both very different briefs, and I am very eager to begin working on them.

To end with take a look at one of my favourite TV adverts Leith has produced. Named 'Knife for Life', it is an awful subject, which in an ideal world we shouldn't have to advertise to prevent, but I think Leith did a fantastic job with it. It is one of my favourite adverts, and just creates so much emotion no matter what your background. See what you think:

My ad of the week. Cravendale - Cats with Thumbs

This is a new advert which is part of a campaign named 'The Milk Matters' to break away from Cravendales old image. A genius execution by Wieden + Kennedy. It puts a new, upbeat, fun image to the Cravendale brand and quite frankly cats with thumbs amuse me greatly! See what you think.

Influential thinking.

Creative influence can be sourced from all different genres, fashion, music, art and literature. I have found it is just about applying this influence to your own personal subject.

After watching an interesting program called 'McQueen and I', I got thinking about the array of historic creatives who excelled to amazing heights in their careers. 'McQueen and I' was a documentary about Lee Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow. Until watching this, I had not realised how Alexander McQueen had grown up or gained his own influences. He grew up in a very basic council house with his Mother, Father and siblings. On a daily basis birds would flutter around his home, if you look on the images below you can see how he applied this influence into his collection, the bird silhouette is heavily used and works. Although this is fashion I think his creative thought process is inspiring, it shows how you can use what may seem like common objects, and turn them into your success.




Another example from the same genre is Isabella Blow who McQueen was close friends with, looking at her fashion style, it is clear that the pop artist Lady Gaga has been influenced by her look and has turned this into her musical persona. Thus transcending fashion into music.

Isabella Blow



Lady Gaga




In advertising influences are very beneficial in creating a great advert. It can be understanding a certain target market, and using influences which appeal to that audience. So looking at past examples can only aid my learning in this.