OFFSET - Steve Simpson

Steve Simpson is an Irish based illustrator and graphic designer specialising in packaging design.

Steve started off his talk at Offset on his origins - he was at first a cartoonist and started shadowing his uncle who was also a cartoonist at an early age. He continued to create cartoons for companies but soon branched out into a broader style of illustration.

His foray into packaging design became a passion of his and he created the packaging for Mic's Chilli, an Irish hot sauce brand. 

It was while creating this that he realised that he was in fact a graphic designer as well as an illustrator, something he never thought he would be. 

I even spotted it in a different country!

Steve's advice/methods
Steve always sketches to form the beginning of his ideas. He goes through multiple sketchbooks a year.
He sticks to limited colour palettes, as they help bring everything together. 
He loves hand lettering and uses it often. Similarly, patterns are a regular feature in his work. He looks back on patterns and the like from the 80's and gets inspired.

OFFSET - Shane Griffin

Personal work - the more you do the more you attract.

Shane tends to creates projects from key words. He works a lot with Nike and uses these projects as examples.

Legacy, Sculptural, Epic - Nike Sneakerball sculpture.

Speed (shown by racing car), Precision (shown by arrow), Ferocity (shown by shark jaws) - Nike x Kobe

Illuminati, Sound Reactive, Ferocity - Nike Yeezy

Rube goldberg, 6 steps, Forced perspective - 6 steps to 1 million lottery video
http://www.sundayafternoon.us/shane-griffin-national-lottery-6-steps-to-a-million

This project was my personal favourite as the video and project was so intricate, the amount of work that went into it was phenonmenal and the finished result was mind blowing. It was so creative and something I always remember and aspire to do something similar one day.

Shane's final advice was to collaborate and invest in yourself as much as you can. 

Stress management workshop (27/10/16)

anxiety

aŋˈzʌɪəti/

noun

1. 1.

   a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.

   "he felt a surge of anxiety"

Anxiety and stress are common, especially within the creative industry. The pressure from deadlines and the feeling of not being good enough can overcome you. Social media makes comparative living the norm, the ability to see other peoples lives and especially work makes you more likely to compare yourselves and your own work to theirs. This can lead to feelings of self doubt and inferiority.

Happiness is a competitive advantage. *
Happiness is a choice. the way we think about happiness is backwards.
Every time your brain has a success, we change the goalpost of what success is almost immediately. Happiness is a moving target you cant quite reach using this formula. Change stress from a threat to a challenge. Productivity rises to 31% when people move from a neutral state to a positive state. Social connection is the greatest predictor of happiness.

Negativity bias - the negative comments are the ones you remember, even if you have a majority of positive feedback, the few negative reviews/ opinions are the ones that will stick with you.

have you had a negative thought today?

I don't want to get out of bed

what scares you?

public speaking/ presenting work to others 

what stresses you out?

procrastination catching up with me

how do you destress?

sleep and netflix

What I found most interesting is that a lot of the negative thoughts section was full of people saying how bad they thought they looked today. It is not just creative work that stresses people, peoples moods can be affected by their appearance and others opinion of them.

Haiku 

A haiku is a Japanese poem, often following the structure of 5, 7, 5 syllables in the form of 3 lines. I based my haiku on an issue I really struggle with, and from the task an issue I think a lot of people struggle with, especially as young people. 

sleepy

don't want to get up

nine thirty is too early

just five more minutes

Everybody made a haiku and stuck them up on the wall. It was really interesting to see everybody's interpretation of the answers, and the way they turned them into creative writing.

My favourite haiku was this.

Working something out for others can help work it out for yourself.

I came up with a few ways I could put these haikus into use, that would help people. I wanted to help students as I think they get really stressed with the subjects mentioned in the haikus. For example university work, appearance anxiety and time management were talked about the most frequently by my class in the haiku exercise.

My ideas included an interactive book that people could use to scribble down their thoughts and complete exercises, a lot like the book 'wreck my journal'. Other thoughts were of making a calendar with a haiku for each day, perhaps with gaps for people to fill in the words they felt most relevant to their mood.

My favourite idea that I would like to develop is an app for students to create haikus and upload them to the app, so that other users can search for relevant haikus, "like" them, and also see suggestions people have responded to the haiku in order to relieve stress/ anxiety and solve the problem. Also included could be a preloaded exercise for the student to complete, e.g. a breathing exercise or small task that will help relieve stress. 

*recommended reading*

Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert

Deep Work - Cal Newport

The Stress Report - The DoLectures

OFFSET - Aaron Duffy

Aaron Duffy is a creative director and visual communicator. He has produced adverts for big companies such as Google and Audi - these adverts have been highly well received, earning awards and accolades.

For his offset talk, Aaron talked about the statement "Do it for the meal or do it for the reel" - meaning you can create work to be paid and earn a living, or you can create personal work, out of passion and love for your subject. Aaron came up with 12 steps in order to close the gap between these 2 options.

1. Why are you creative?

2. Remember where you started

3. Rethink art history

4. Give credit

5. Ease up on personal style

For Aaron this was very important. His personal style was beginning to shape his career very definitively, so much so he almost turned down an opportunity to create an advert for Google. This advert was not his usual style and he only took the job on the advice of friends. Taking the job lead to one of Aaron's biggest pieces of work, reputation wise. Before this advert, Google had never advertised on a television basis, and when the advert premiered during the Superbowl, it quickly earned the title of being one of the best Superbowl adverts of all time. This case shows exactly that by stepping out of a comfort zone, you may be able to make the best piece of work you ever have.

6. Turn creative problem solving into creative problem making

7. Help develop new technology

8. Consider illusions

This is a personal passion of Aaron's and perfectly exemplified by his work on OK Go's music video for The Writing's on the Wall. The clever illusions mirror the lyrics of the song - where the people in the relationship spoken about think that they understand eachother, but are always surprised - hence the illusions.

9. Forget the meal and the reel 

Sometimes work is done under neither of these premises. Aaron helped to create the movement #asktransfolks for anybody to be able to ask any trans people questions they have, and for these people to directly reply to the questions in the form of a short video. This movement was created not as a career move or for a personal reason, but it was a project Aaron felt he needed to create.

10. Create new business models

11. Keep making stuff
By keeping on making things, anything, you can keep your creativity flowing and your mind fresh.

12. Know that it will be hard

This advice really resonated with me. I think when I first came to uni I really underestimated how hard the the work would be and how massive the workload is. I have now realised and really upped my game, I had to learn how to be more motivated.

Morgana Bailey - The Danger of hiding who you are

As part of the self branding lesson we watched Morgana Bailey's TED talk - "the danger of hiding who you are".

This talk was really interesting and brought up some relevant and eye opening points on identity and being who you are. Morgana herself is from Kansas and whilst in her youth was outgoing and didn't agree with conforming, when she spent a semester abroad in London she realised something that changed her outlook on life, and began conforming. She spent 16 years hiding her true self in fear of being rejected and only revealed that she was gay during this TED talk she gave. She decided to open up after the father of a friend of hers voted in favour of a homophobic bill put to vote in Kansas, Texas and she realised she could've done more to prevent this from happening if she'd been more honest.  

I was really moved and inspired by this talk as I felt I really took something away from it. The part about being able to make a change if only she was honest and herself is something I think we could all learn from. So many people hide their true selves away in fear of being ridiculed and it is sad that this still happens - especially in Morgana's case who spent so long pretending to be someone she wasn't so she could not be truly happy. I also admire her bravery for coming out publicly during this talk as it can't have been easy.

OUGD402 - Studio Brief 2: Self Branding + Identity - Part 1 (20/10/16)

Studio Brief 2

TASK - Prepare a brand/ identity for yourself that will suit your current approach to your work. A pack/suite of materials you feel are useful and exciting. This can be anything you feel appropriate.
Consider all forms of "range and distribution"

• product = me
• range = services I can provide as a designer
• distribution = the methods and platforms I feel are correct to communicate my work. (eg. web/ printed etc)

Small task - Who am I, who do you see?

In groups of 5/6, we were given the task to list words to describe each other. This was to discover how others perceive us, and give us a broader look into our personal identities and how we present ourselves.

These were the final lists

Although some words were written as a joke between friends, it was interesting to see what others think of me. The words that rang truest with me were; emotional, chatty, outgoing and creative. I felt this exercise was enlightening as it is rare you get the opportunity in everyday life to ask your peers what they think about you. On the whole I was pleased with the words used to describe me as they were positive, and the odd words that weren't were meant as a joke. I would say these words are generally true and do reflect my identity however the group I was situated in were all very nice and not exactly critical so the lists are very one sided.


My overall aim is to create an identity for myself, to reflect the person I am. Following this task I thought it would be a good idea to create a mind map or something similar using the same concept, but this time describe myself. People are usually more critical towards themselves so this will give me a more in-depth, rounded picture, including my negative characteristics.

As well as this list I thought it would be prudent to take a personality test. After answering some questions using a scale of how far I agreed or disagreed with given statements, my personality type was revealed as a Campaigner.

I found this test to be really eye opening and it rang extremely true. The keywords match some of the words from the list I made earlier.

Toni Morrison's book, Paradise - "There are more scary things inside than outside."


Oscar Wilde - "Be yourself everybody else is taken."