Friday 18 November 2011

DandAD Talk at Preston

On Wednesday 16th November I went to Preston university with a bunch of people off the coarse for a DandAD day.

We got two talks in the morning, the first one was just really an overview of DandAD and what they do. It wasn't too interesting. Lucky it didn't last that long.

The main speaker was Jack Renwick who just recently left a company called 'The Partners' to start up her own company. In her talk she briefly gave us a bit of background to how she got into the industry then went on to shared her experience within the creative industry with us all.
Jack talked about how clients might come to you wanting to 'be different' then as time goes by and you pitch your ideas to them, they can become a bit nervous and start to think 'maybe different isn't what we want'. Jack explained that what people tend to do is do something which they'll then go away and say "i did this, its ok, but the client was always making me change stuff, so its not how I want it to look". Jack had the same issue with one client where they wanted to be different, so jack and her team re-branded them and gave them a makeover which consisted of changing there main colour to black, this would mean their business cards would be black too. They didn't like the idea of black business cards, they wanted to keep them white. In this circumstance what she did was instead of moaning about the client, she went away and thought how I can convince them that its a good idea. She went out and collected all their competitors’ business cards and put them in a frame and put in the middle what she wanted their new one to be. It was a sea of white business cards with one black one in the middle. She asked "which one stands out the most" to which they all pointed at the black on, thus convincing them it was a good idea.
So, its all about finding ways to persuade the client....not just moaning about them.


After her presentation, someone asked the question "why did you leave The Partners?" to which she answered in a round about way;
I've worked there for 13 years, what fun is it once you've achieved what you wanted to achieve. I wanted to start something new that would challenge me.

I thought that was quite nice.


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