To day was 'Stamping Day'. Claire and I had around 1500 notepads to stamps. These are going to be handed out as freebies on Opening Night.
Currently we are waiting for some replies from merchandise suppliers. The freebies are proving to be a problem. However, apart from the tags, there was not very much to do at present.
Having said that, the Projection group really needed some help as they were on a tight deadline. Shirley and I took the initiate of completing a scene from the narrative part of the projection. The scene was to have an Art Deco style. The scene consists of the clock tower being built and I was to make the mechanism of the sides. The initial ideas was to hand out freebies to the guests on the Opening Night. These freebies were to be printed at a professional product printer, however, for some reason this was not approved from the administration. In addition, no one was notified that in order to proceed with any payment, quotations from three different suppliers had to be collected beforehand. The latter ended up delaying the payment by a lot of time, and it could not be afforded.
Upon acquiring everything, we were told that the freebies are not going to be ordered readily printed, and the idea of spray-painting the logo on the tote bag was suggested. Little was known that a lot of spray paint was needed. And no one considered the health risks either. I sprayed around 300 bags. I was fun at first, but the pungent smell of the paint was making me nauseous after a while. Along the spray painting, we were to stamp the logo on over a thousand notebooks. As part of the promotional give-away concept, we came up with a sticker collection, that is to be included in the Opening Night Booklet. Each of us took one design, and I worked on the 'Fine Arts' sticker. The design is to be applied on the tote bags as well. I was thinking of making the the tote bag design an extension of the sticker artwork. I wanted to create a link between the two the idea is in fact to give out the tote bag upon completing the sticker collection.
We were also thinking of making multiple give-aways, and making multiple redeemable criteria. for instance, if one manages to collect 3 stickers the price would be different from that of someone who completed the collection. Being the Design & Print Team, one of the tasks was to make exhibition posters for the foundation courses. As they are not familiar with the software, they needed a lot of assistance, and most of the time, each of us had to sit down and make the poster for them for the sake of good design. I was a good thing that members of other groups came to give us a hand.
What we did not know was that there were a lot of students, and very few new how to use the software. In addition, the posters' measurements were not ISO standard sizes, hence we needed to prepare a different template. If we knew about this before-hand, the task would have been managed a lot better. Right now, the group is not over-the-top busy, which is kind of a good thing for we need to hand in the thesis. The main aim right now is to get the templates finalised prior uploading them on the Public Drive. We also need to figure out how the give-away system is going to work, and see what exactly are we going to give out.
Apparently, it's going to be tote bags, but we do not know yet if there will be more. There was not that much to fix, it was more like correcting what was initially overlooked.
Together with Shirley, we also tweaked the colour palette a little, and saved them in various formats as necessary. The group also started preparing the brand book, that is going to be presented in due course. The concept chosen is 'Paper to Screen'. The concept behind this brand is to capture the process an artist or designer uses to create their masterpiece.
Following the presentations, the class is once more divided into department, and I am in the Design and Print department. The main role of this group is to present the brand to rest of the school, and responsible for any material that needs to be branded, which includes the finalisation of logos, brand book, poster templates and merchandise design and quotations. We are halfway with the preparations and everything, but there's still a lot to do. The logos are not finalised yet, and the exhibition space is still in discussion. I am responsible for the exhibition space along with two others, and the main problem we are facing is how are we going to distribute everyone's work evenly without making it look overdone and crammed....
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