bioStyle Process Recap.

ah, bioStyle, how I loved ya....



Overall... {insert time to reflect here} I think things went really well.
I'm happy with the brand we produced and the fact that we got a reasonable presentation together in the time allowed. When Luke described the customer that our product made him envision, it was exactly the target I wanted to hit, so.. bulls-eye.

It seemed to make sense that since the timeframe was so tight, the best route to take was to narrow the brand to an image and a color palette and a font, stay simple. I think it takes a lot of courage to slim down your design to a few key points and retain the confidence that you're presenting something with impact and voice. On the flip side, once you make the choice for brevity, everything you present absolutely has to be tight and in line with the other elements. This is where we had some last minute complications.

I felt that with such a large group, someone had to take ownership over the cohesion of the final product, so i branded myself as that person from the get go, with no apparent push-back . Since the idea was to have a cohesive brand that we could all feel good about, I was aggressive about asking my teammates for input and feedback on my designs throughout.

That being said, I'm sorry that once push came to shove, the boys in the group ended up with hurt feelings. Reading their blogs, I got an impression of their feelings that didn't come through during the process. It didn't feel like a "girls vs. boys" vibe while we were working, there were definitely some issues with listening skills, but it wasn't gender-universal at all... I would have liked more constructive push-back at the time, if it could have improved our final project, but I'm not surprised that there was a bit of fallout from asking just one member to leave the group. (sigh....)

I will admit, I felt from the beginning that the ladies in the group were able to listen to each other really effectively and that we got onto the same page quickly, maybe this can be chalked up to the fact that the target audience for the event is women. Regardless - but, sadly- this is an issue that became a non-issue when Luke decided to break everything in to two person teams for project #2.

In addition to naming the team and the event, picking the font, and finalizing the color palette, I produced over 15 versions of poster/program cover possibilities.
Randi had 8-10 handbills (the one we ended up using exemplified the simplicity angle - it was bold and bright, but basic.) and Elizabeth, in addition to drawing the tree, had a ton of sketches for the stage embellishments. Logan's banners were great, and his work on the technical tweaking of the logo was a lifesaver. Tim took the web page mock up that Logan designed and turned it into a fully functional page, he used my suggestion as a launching pad for a cute comic-style logo for team antfarm, and he showed me how to use layers in Illustrator, which made layering the yellow into the dress and the color-dots onto the tree so much easier to accomplish. (luke's suggestion, the color dots were..and what a great difference they made... I guess that's why they pay him the big bucks ;-)

For my part though, I do wish I hadn't gotten so frustrated with the last minute complications.

I could have let myself use that energy for filling in the program, which definitely got shorted for the attention it deserved, paying more attention to the typesetting on my pieces ( this is where I consistently get lazy - I block in text as a placeholder, and fiddle with everything else right up till deadline, leaving the words orphaned and unloved. I have to change this habit) and actually writing a design proposal to attach to our board.

As it was, I wasted a lot of energy fretting over whether or not the crucial elements that we needed to use across all the components were going to materialize; if everyone was going to actually use the color palette, the same font, the logo, etc. In my dream world, we would have made the time to get together with all our elements and do a final check for consistency and each others final input, rather than scrambling at the neuberger printshop on the morning of hand in, but this is the price you pay when you work with real grown-ups.. we all have jobs and lives and getting the time together proved a stretch.

(note - somewhere in the process of drafting this blog, a few sentences were lost. 2 were devoted to my list of the things i contributed (psh, whatev' ;-) , the one that I'm sad to lose contained my feelings about Liz's tree. It used words like skillful, tender, perfect to message, and an anecdote, overheard at the Marketing Dept. Cannes Lions ad award event where the judging was done... which I'll try to reconstruct now....

" I don't know... they're all great, and have a lot going for them.. but there's just something about that one... that tree just makes me feel so good.. i just want to touch it, and be there, ya' know? The whole package is just so lovely"

no matter the fallout, or bitching in the heat, someone looked at what we did and wanted to be there.

bulls eye.