OUIL503 Responsive - Workshop Task 1 - 10 Things to get out of Responsive

10 things I want to get out of Responsive

1. Better skills working with and communicating with clients
2. The chance to get do real-life, professional briefs
3. Improve my technical skills through applying them to professional briefs
4. Get my name out into the illustration world
5. Possibly win some nice things?
6. Narrow down areas of the industry I would like to work/enjoy working in
7. Add some brief-based work experience under my belt for my creative CV/Portfolio
8. An improved ability to balance a number of briefs at once
9. Gain further knowledge on preparing work for use in commercial purposes
10. Better pitch and presentation skills for showing work to new clients

Revised list from group discussion:

1. Better understanding of what exactly clients are asking for
2. Learning how our work can fit in with what the brief requires
3. Getting people to know who we are
4. Constructive feedback from clients on how we can do better
5. The ability to source and find brief work independently 
6. Learn where my work sits with the context of the industry
7. Learn to work to our own deadlines
8. Rub elbows with existing professionals and potential employers
9. Improve on our presentation and pitching skills
10. Step out of our working comfort zone and do things we might not usually tackle

Re-revised list from class discussion:

1. Broaden your way of working
2. Win!!
3. Feedback from Professionals in the industry
4. The chance to network and pick up contacts
5. Gain confidence working as a practitioner and not a student
6. Manage workload better
7. Meeting deadlines a lot better
8. Experience working with real-life clients
9. More experience creating commercial work
10. Locating where your practice sits in the industry

How would I achieve each of these?

1. Understand that different briefs have different tones of voice and require different skillsets
2. Benchmark your work against your peers and the industry
3. Actively seek feedback and work it into your practice
4. Actually chat with clients outside of the brief work, engaging them for future projects.
5. Actually doing as opposed to talking about it makes being a practitioner more of a realistic goal, which builds your confidence more!
6. By planning your time and resources, you have enough time for everythings (which is a sign of a good professional)
7. Sticking to your own deadlines
8. Improve how you communicate with people on a professional level
9. Do more - Fret Less
10. Pushing yourself out from where you'd normally choose work and investigating whats out there

This session was good, because it was nice to have an open discussion about competition briefs and the pros and cons of entering them. It also opened my eyes to how exactly you need to tackle working on industry briefs to make sure your client is kept happy, and to make sure that we don't get shortchanged either.

To help us identify these potential pitfalls, these are the questions that need to be asked before any brief is picked up :

• What is the problem the brief is identifying?
• What is the brief asking you to do about it?
• What is the brief trying to achieve?
• What is the message?
• Who are the audience?
• How will the message be delivered?
• Who will benefit?
• Can you foresee any problems?