Ian Anderson

This workshop was intended to make us think more creatively. We were given the brief:

In the future the world is ran by one organisation, this organisation wants to re-brand, and to do this they need a new colour. Each colour is owned by separate companies, therefore each company would need to pitch their colour to the world organisation persuading them that their colour would be the most beneficial in order to win the contract.

Our team colour was blue, we could do anything with this to create a compelling argument why our colour should be chosen above the likes of red, orange, green and yellow. We began by putting everything down on paper that has a connection with blue as a starting point, from here we tried to expand on possible routes we could take it to make our presentation the most compelling.

We decided to make our pitch factual stating what blue could do for the world organisation. Key points:

• Blue can be extracted from seaweed therefore it is a sustainable colour.
• Blue is tried and tested on signage, easily readable when travelling at high speeds.
• Blue is diverse, the palette offers many tones which are provocative a range of emotions.
• Conveying blue as the natural choice because it surrounds us from the sky to the sea (we really wanted someone to point out the sea isn’t blue, had our argument ready and everything…)

To say we were 2 people down in our group I think we did well, although I only started to think this after the presentation, before all I could think was FAIL. The other groups presentations were for a start longer, humorous & more imaginatively presented where we had opted for short, sharp and straight to major points we thought if there would be a world organisation in the future, what would they worry about, and tried to reassure them on subjects such as legibility and cost. We closed our presentation with ‘Blue speaks for itself’ because we didn’t have any blue cakes or blue carrots to sweeten the judges.

Presenting is something I’ve never been good at, nerves get the better of me and my face falls off. I understand the need to be able to confidently present an idea so hopefully practise will improve these lacking skills. I’m really glad I stuck the workshop out, it’s really hit me how important it is to be confident and voice our opinions.