NESTA workshop 3 & 4

Apologies for the lack of blogging in the last 2 weeks. Things have been rather hectic in the Illustration department however I like to think I am now back on track!

So two weeks ago we completed our third NESTA worksheets. The workshop was about the marketing mix and the 7P’s of marketing which can help ensure your product or service is in alignment with your company’s business and marketing plans.

The 7P’s are:

01 Product
02 Place
03 Price
04 Promotion
05 People
06 Process
07 Physical Environment

Here is my completed worksheet.

The second worksheet was about critical marketing tasks and aimed to help us plan and guide the activities we may carry out in our business. I found this one quite challenging as I found it hard to think of the tasks I may need to carry out and how much they would cost but I did my best.

Last was our final week of NESTA workshops which focused on finance, not a very exciting subject but one we will be faced with none the less! We were given a worksheet with a number of questions to answer. Here are my answers up to halfway through.

All these questions were quite difficult to answer because obviously at this stage it’s hard to know exact numbers and costs. However it did give me wake up call as this is all information that we will absolutely need to know or else my businesses will not be successful.

The final worksheet was a Kickstarter Pitch sheet. Kickstarter is an online American company and is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is an incredible service which allows new businesses to pitch their ideas on the website and get funding from the public. Sadly it is not yet available in the UK but they are apparently looking into starting a UK site which would be great!

And that’s it for NESTA! It’s helped me immensely to realised all the different aspects to starting up my own business but also to realise that it IS possible and that it’s something I’d really like to do. Expect more to come on how I’m getting on with my proposal and Frydays development over the next month!

NESTA workshop 2

In our last NESTA workshop we looked at our future customers, blueprint modelling and relationship modelling for our business ideas. These were quite difficult tasks as we had to think about where we’d like our business to be in the future and all of us obviously can’t predict where that would be.

The first worksheet was about ‘Your Customers’. It was aimed to help us picture our potential customers, realise their needs and what we are offering them. The harder part was making a guess at how much they will pay for products and at our potential total income. For my ‘Frydays’ clothing brand I wasn’t sure about pricing, I am aiming at young, fashion-conscious people but I need to decide whether I make it an affordable product for students or a more exclusive item at a higher price.

The second worksheet was about blueprint modelling. I found this one particularly difficult, we had to think about the businesses activities that we could charge the client for and the ones that we would have to pay for ourselves. The table was split into 3 sections: engagement, development and delivery and these were then split into backstage and onstage, backstage being what the customer doesn’t see and onstage what they do.

The final worksheet was about ‘Relationship Modelling’. It was split into the generator, realiser, customer and distributor. So you can see in the photo below what I put for each section.

 

NESTA workshop 1

Last Wednesday we had our first NESTA workshop with Lindsey Gardiner. As we hadn’t had our first tutorial with our illustration mentor Ailsa McWilliam, not all of us were certain what we wanted to do for our business idea but Lindsey was very helpful. The NESTA workshops are a step-by-step interactive resource to help plan, build, communicate and launch new creative businesses. Before this module I’d already thought I would want to become a freelance illustrator where my brand would be myself but for the sake of this module I felt creating a business idea would be more viable. I’ve decided to team up my current personal project in my elective course (illustration) with this assignment.

So my idea is to create a clothing line (possibly) called ‘Frydays’. Here is my mission statement!

‘Frydays’ is a unique clothing range that is inspired unhealthy foods. It’s a fun brand targeted at young, fashionable people aged 16-30 and aims to make the wearer feel delicious in it’s colourful, bright designs.

The first activity was a worksheet about ‘evidence modelling’. These were my answers to the 4 headings.

Enhance: What does it bring new value to?

• food inspired clothing
• wearing what you enjoy
• handmade/printed clothing

Revive: What does it bring back that was redundant?

• fun, 80’s and 90’s inspired clothing
• handmade clothing

Replace: What does it make less desirable?

• unaffordable designer labels
• average high-street clothing brands
• underweight role models
• mass produced clothing – more unique items!

Backlash: What could be the negative effect when pushed to extremes?

• could be seen to promote unhealthy eating
• time – handmaking clothing and printed could take a while
• cost – buying at the materials and digital printing can be pricey

The next activity was looking at ‘fake evidence’, where we would like to see our business/product in the future. We were told to dream big so I thought of ASOS, the online fashion store who are hugely popular and famous for their wide range of brands available. Urban Outfitters is also good for this.

I also looked at Vogue, the leading fashion magazine, a cover or spread featuring my clothes obviously would be incredible.

The final worksheet we did was a SWOT analysis, looking at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats for our business. Here’s mine:

Looking forward to our next workshop!

Presentation time!

Last month on Friday the 24th we finally presented our research on The Church of London. We were all fairly nervous and many squirts of Rescue Remedy were sprayed on our tongues before we went up! However hours and hours of rehearsing and annoying other people to let us practise infront of them paid off and I’d say it went pretty well!

As creative individuals we didn’t want our presentation to be ‘just another power point’ so we each illustrated a few slides for the sections we were speaking. We put these altogether along with a few examples of the agencies own work, our video and TCOLondon’s ‘The Making of…’ video which helped us to catch our breath a little bit! We also ended our talk with Danny, Paul and Rob’s own advice to us, “don’t be shit” which caused a few giggles and hopefully didn’t loose us any professional points!

Here are our slides for you all to see!

Mine:

Liz’s:

Alice’s:

Tori’s:

Gina’s:

Greg’s:

And a collection:

So overall I’ve really enjoyed this project, it’s really shown me that’s it’s not impossible to contact the people high up in the business’s you’re interested in. I feel we’ve worked well as a group (W.E. Illustrate) too and every decision was discussed fully before we took any action. I don’t think this will be the end of us either! We’re looking into having an exhibition as a collective so there may be great things to come!

#weillustrate over and out.

Success!

So less than 12 hours after we sent the email we had a response! TCOLondon loved our video and were happy for us to interview them, however they were on a deadline so asked for it to be over Skype rather than face to face.

As well as this they had written about us on their blog! A huge success which we were all very excited about.

We were also mentioned by our University on their Facebook page and also by our module leader on the course webpage!

http://designandthemarket.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/illustration-students-creative-research-pitch/

So overall we were really happy with the result, have an interview scheduled and now to start the presentation!

Let’s Make a Video!

Realising that most successful design agencies must get a lot of students trying to contact them we thought about how we would make our attempt to contact TCOLondon stand out from the crowd.

So why not make a video? We’d seen the Making of Little White Lies time lapse video on youtube:

and took our inspiration from there! We all got together one afternoon and began our ‘Dear Church of London’ illustrated letter. We attached the video which shows us writing and posting our letter to an email stating our interest in the agency and hoped that this would get us noticed! So here it is!

And some photos of the making 🙂

Choosing an Agency

After our first group meeting we went away in two’s and researched an illustrator or design agency that we were interested in. My partner and I looked into the creative lifestyle magazine ‘Oh Comely’ which specialises in fashion, music, craft, film and the part we were particularly interested in; illustration.

The magazine is only 16 months old and is already a huge success in the arts community and a new issue comes out every 2 months. Although we love the free, inspirational, creative feel the magazine has to it we couldn’t find much information about them and felt as a group that looking into a bigger company we be more beneficial to us. Contacting Oh Comely in the future independently is something Gina and myself could look into.

Some of the others our team looked into included illustrators Jonny Hannah and Nick White and design agencies Heart Agency, Handsome Frank, 4wall, C. I. A. – Central Illustration Agency and The Church of London.

After some discussion we decided on the creative agency The Church of London who started up in 2005 and produce the magazines ‘Little White Lies’ and ‘Huck’. Again we then went away and did research on different areas of the agency. I looked at exhibitions and the ‘The Good Times’, a newspaper project released on January the 16th (the most depressing day of the year), which researched into what makes people feel happy and inspired. The newspaper had 7 sections: Peoples!, Lovely Money, Trees and Animals, Art & Stuff, Ink on Paper, Robots, etc. and Running and Jumping. Copies were distributed by a ‘happy van’ and in The Stack magazine shop.

Liz in our group found out the following information: Danny Miller, the Managing Director and one of the Founders of TCOLondon graduated from Newcastle Northumbria in 2001.  For his final year project, he produced Issue #0 of Little White Lies (LWLies), and then went on to intern and work as Art Director at ‘Adrenaline’ (surf, skate and snowboarding) magazine.  He worked there with fellow TCOLonders Matthew Bochenski (now Editorial Director at TCOLondon) and Rob Longworth (now one of two Creative Directors at TCOLondon) and it was through this friendship (and the disbandment of Adrenaline) that they began making inroads into putting out issue #1 of LWLies, and in 2005 to founding its publisher: The Church of London.

So we’ve decided to focus on contacting Danny Miller and Paul Willoughby, creative director and illustrator. In order to find out more information we need to conduct an interview so next time we meet up we shall brainstorm the best strategy to achieve this!

Time To Become an Entrepreneur

Last Wednesday I had my first lecture for my new module, ‘Design and the Market’ with Christina Hirst and Mike Press. Already, the I feel the workload piling up but the lecturers were really motivating and I’m excited to get on with it!

The message from this first lecture was…

STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD

We had a look at previous DoJ and art college graduates and their success including:

• Johanna Basford http://www.johannabasford.com/
• Joanna Montgomery http://www.joannamontgomery.com/ http://www.littleriot.co.uk/
• http://www.wearesnook.com/snook/
• Kate Pickering http://vanillainkstudios.co.uk/

We were given our first assignment to get into groups within our specialism, chose an enterprise we admire to research and produce a 20 minute presentation on our findings. I got myself into a group of 6 and together we had a brainstorming session on who we would like to research. Some of the suggests were:

• Brewdog
• Oh Comely, Juxtapoz, Little White Lies – magazines
• Church of London – creative publishing agency
• V&A
• Galleries
• Creative stores

In our second lecture on Friday the 27th we looked into going about our research and were told to follow these steps.

SELECT SUBJECT: freelance designer/design company/design intermediary – Criteria: professionally relevant/inspiring/significant/accessible

DEFINE ISSUES: clarify your aims/understand the characteristics of design and businesses and their life cycles. Discover the skills and attributes required by entrepreneurs. Examine how they operate – start up/define their niche/finance/brand and market themselves/organise and recruit/grow

RESEARCH: Desk research and primary research – INTERVIEWS

ANALYSIS

PRESENT: 20 minute presentation

START WITH THE ‘WHY’ QUESTION

Think about your USP – Unique Selling Point

Stunning Advertising

I ‘Stumbled Upon’ this advert the other day by Solidarités International and its agency BDDP Unlimited who are trying to raise awareness of undrinkable water.

Today, it is estimated that 3.6 million people, including 1.5 million children under the age of 5, die every year of diseases borne by unhealthy water, making it the world’s leading cause of death.

To evoke the silent and invisible threat of unhealthy water, BDDP Unlimited opted for a minimalist approach that is both visually appealing and surprising, using water and ink exclusively. The spot shows the power of ink to reveal the invisible.

The advert attracted my attention and even inclined me to go on and sign the petition myself showing how it has been successful in what it aims to achieve.

Women’s Sexuality in Music Videos

One thing I’ve noticed over the Block 2 research period is that it’s not just adverts for products that use women’s sexuality to sell their products. Nudity in music videos has always been a controversial subject with some videos resulting in being banned or censored. I read the book, ‘Sex in Consumer Culture: The Erotic Content of Media and Marketing’ by Tom Reichert and Jacqueline Lambraise which really helped with my Block 2 research and had a specific section towards research and function of sex in music videos.

Music videos have to attract attention in order to sell and sexual attraction does this easily and quickly. It is very apparent that sexuality is the main focus and selling point. This however is not a recent phenomenon, nudity first appeared in a Queen video in the late 1970’s and since then popular music videos have seen more and more explicit dancing. In the 1980’s there were 25 videos containing sexuality activity and in the 2000’s there were over 80, over 3 times as many.

A survey showed at 72.2% of Black, 68% of White and 69.2% of Hispanic youths felt rap videos contain too many references to sex. The impacts of these videos are mostly bad. Black women have been perceived as overly sexually active and easy and the effects on young girls has also been terrible. Many girls have acquired low self esteem over their body image and weight after watching popular videos showing females dancing overly sexually in clubs. Rap videos are particularly at flaw for objectifying women, they show money getting thrown and alcohol being pouring over them. Overall it is clear that female pop stars are not good role models.

http://www.maxim.co.uk/video/comedy/12075/top_20_sexiest_music_videos.html