Makers of cookers, fridges and other appliances, Stoves is on the of UK’s leading manufacturers of all things kitchen-related. Recently, they’ve launched a competition for University students to develop a British seal of approval to help consumers to buy British. The full brief can be read here.
The problem with this competition is that it’s “spec work” or work without guarantee of pay. It promotes free labour and exploits students who may not have the business experience to know that these sort of competitions only benefit the company and not the entrant. Spec work is looked down upon by the majority of the design industry including AIGA, the professional association for design along with popular designers such as David Airey.
Many companies don’t realise what they’re doing when launching competitions such as this and use the excuse of it being called a competition to justify the exploitation of those entering. Regardless of what it is marketed as, it is still spec work if you are asking people to submit work without recompense.
Spec work is not only bad for the designer, but for the client as well. Design is about communication. Client/Designer communication is imperative to meeting the needs of the brief. Without a good rapport between the two parties, good design is difficult.
In addition to Stoves promoting spec work, another example cropped up from sustainable paper company Domtar. They asked designers to come up with an advertising campaign to promote their paper. A competition, where the only winner is Domtar and the designers who chose to enter are not fairly paid for their work. After a backlash from the design community regarding this example of spec work, Domtar have now retracted the competition and issued an apology for which they’ve gained a lot of respect from designers. Stoves would do well to do the same thing.
So, if you come across competitions that invite you and potentially hundreds of other designers to develop work for free, say no. Such competitions are unethical and unprofessional and the sooner those outside of the design industry realise that, the better.
With the Viral Man project completely finished, it was time to launch it, but not without a few changes.
Unfortunately, the symptom videos which we filmed were eventually not used as the committee thought that a lot of them weren’t as funny as intended. It’s a shame, as we thought that they really added to the project, rather than just the one interview video.
Additionally, Hannah had volunteered to dress up as Fresher’s Flu, a friend to Viral Man and together they’d infect students. We incorporated this into the script of the interview and Hannah volunteered to don some pink facepaint, pink clothes and even some pink hair extensions to become Fresher’s Flu for the day. Unfortunately, this didn’t make the cut and the committee requested that the interview video be reedited to remove references to this character.
Viral Man goes live
The Viral Man project was developed in the middle of July/August for a September launch and the committee had always intended us to be present at the student’s welcome meeting to introduce the video to them. Both Jerry and Will weren’t sure if they’d be around for the welcome meeting and Hannah didn’t want to do it by herself at one of the two campuses, but I was really keen on gauging the student’s reaction to the video, even if it meant standing in front of a few hundred people.
In preparation for the presentation, I made a very simple PDF with my name on it and some key points. Having sat through a similar welcome meeting when I was a new student, I knew that they wouldn’t want to listen to me go on and on and so my presentation would last no more than three minutes, though I had been told I had ten. I wanted to incorporate the video directly into my PDF, but unfortunately, I was told that there wouldn’t be time to give me a copy of it to do so. I was assured however that there would be AV technicians on the day to help make the presentation run smoothly.
On Sunday 20th September, I headed over to Chester and watched everyone start to gather in the large sports hall which was now home to around 700 seats. I spoke to one of the committee and she told me that the video was ready to play on disk. I just had to open it up. As I said, I was told that there would be AV guys there who would do that and so I wasn’t looking forward to having to close my presentation down, insert a disk and play it. In theory, that sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but when you’re on a stage in front of 700 students who just want to go for a drink, it’s much harder. I was also told that I would be presenting twice, as there would be two lots of 700 students to speak to. Something which no one had informed me about! This made things twice as nerve-wracking.
Once the hall was full, I realised just how daunting it was going to be to stand in front of everyone on my own. While other staff members had done this on a yearly basis, the most people I had presented to was 30 of my fellow classmates. 700 students was on another level!
It doesn't look like it, but there's 700 students here.
On stage first was the Vice-Chancellor, Tim Wheeler and then followed other important staff, some of which I’d already met. I was up last, right after Gay Rabie had spoken to students about Swine Flu.
When Gay took to the stage and delivered her presentation, the first thing I noticed was that she had used an image of Viral Man in her presentation and while this in itself wasn’t a bad thing, it made my introduction of Viral Man a little less pronounced, especially since there was no explanation as to why the image of this green man was in the presentation.
And then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I managed to see someone enter the sports hall. As I turned to look at them, I realised who they were. Viral Man. As someone who had been playing Viral Man for roughly two weeks of my life, it was absolutely surreal to see someone else dressed as him. Green face, the same wig I had worn, along with a stripey jumper, black pants and green gloves. And holding a green umbrella.
It was at this moment that I felt just as confused as the students sitting in the hall. I hadn’t expected him to make an appearance like this, especially before he had been properly introduced by me but because it was so unexpected, perhaps it worked.
Viral Man began walking towards the front of the hall. You could even say he was strutting, twirling his umbrella as he did so and making his way onto the stage where Gay Rabie was still speaking and coughing as loud as he could. I was bemused and so were the students. And full credit goes to the person who was playing Viral Man as he did a fantastic job.
Gay finished her presentation and suddenly I was introduced onto the stage. I could not believe how nervous I was. My hands were literally shaking. I was very thankful that I had a small script prepared for what I wanted to say and a presentation.
I said hello to everyone and explained who I was and why I was there. “And this is Viral Man”, I said to the crowd, but then had to fiddle about with a laptop to get it to play. As I said, this is usually the easier of actions, but when you’re literally shaking with nerves, it was like a lifetime waiting for the CD to load.
Finally, it played and I was able to take a 90 second breather as they watched the video. To my surprise they laughed. At the right parts. It’s a great feeling to know that something you’ve created has been enjoyed by so many people.
I would call the presentation a success for both the project and for me personally. For the project because it was a culmination of five weeks worth of work and for me personally because to speak in front of so many people was incredibly nerve-wracking. I knew I would be nervous beforehand but I still wanted to do it because what better way to overcome your fear of something than to confront it?
After the launch
Since introducing Viral Man to students, the project has been featured in numerous press articles including The Chester Chronicle, The National Student and Nursing Times. I also spent a fair amount of time regularly talking to students as Viral Man on Facebook and it was great to see him being mentioned in people’s status updates. Additionally, Viral Man was also tagged in a number of photos after students had taken some of the posters from various places just because they wanted them. I think this proves that Viral Man was indeed popular and successful.
In conclusion, my time spent on the Viral Man project was a hell of a lot of fun and resulted in a project that I’m very happy with. Given more time, I would have loved to have built a website around Viral Man to better focus all of the campaign assets such as the videos and perhaps some downloadable content. On the plus side, the Facebook profile for Viral Man proves continually popular, with more people adding him as a friend every day. My only hope is that the people responsible for updating the profile and interacting with students maintains the level of fun and quirkiness that Jerry Clark, Will Bollen, Hannah Bradshaw and myself managed to create over the course of five weeks. A fantastic project to work on.
This is the final entry in Viral Man: The Making Of. After five posts and now this, the sixth, I hope that you’ve had an insight as to what I did to get to the final stages of the Viral Man project. In this entry, I’ll be talking about the filming for Viral Man and the impact that it’s made on the University as an institution, the students and the external press. Unfortunately, as I’ve said in previous posts, I did have photos to go with this post but lost them in my hard drive crash so again, I apologise!
Viral Man goes filming
On the last Monday of work, we set about making plans for filming Viral Man’s main interview video. This two minute video would introduce people to Viral Man, while the smaller 15 second videos would show how he could be found infecting people in any manner of ways from making them cough and sneeze, to giving them aches and pains.
I was becoming quite accustomed to being dressed as Viral Man now. You could even say I was enjoying it. Although it was nothing more than facepaint and a wig, it does make you feel very different knowing that people around you are looking at you in an entirely different way.
The previous week, Jerry, Will and Hannah had spent time developing a script for me to read through while I was concentrating on designing the poster campaign. I hadn’t had much chance to rehearse it until I got to see it on Monday morning. It wasn’t actually that much script for a two minute piece of video, but because there were to be pauses and cut-aways, it easily added up.
Hannah did my makeup and I got dressed as Viral Man once more and Will set the camera up in one of the unused ‘quiet rooms’ in the library. The room, while not soundproof, is indeed quiet and made an excellent fake office.
As mentioned in my previous entry, the committee had had some reservations over the type of voice that Viral Man would have and I hadn’t really come up with a new one as of yet. It meant that I had to try and come up with a voice as we were filming. I knew that I wanted him to sound ‘husky’ and as if Viral Man himself had the flu. But at the same time, he needed attitude and even a bit of anger. Anger at the world for not loving him!
I wrote the script out on A3 pieces of paper and Hannah held them as far back as possible while I read them. The trouble was that because I wear glasses and Viral Man most certainly doesn’t, I was blind for most of the time I was reading! It meant that the script couldn’t be too far away from my eyes. Ideally of course, it would have been better to memorise the script altogether, but we just didn’t have the time.
Having gone through a few test runs, it was clear that it looked as if I was reading from a script instead of looking at an interviewer off camera. Because of this, we ended up refilming the interview the next day.
This time, I had tried to refine the voice a little more and I had the advantage of knowing the script a little better. This time, I read the script in sections, pausing to memorise the next part. I was allowed to do this because as I said earlier, we’d be cutting away from the interview to various mini videos so it didn’t matter too much if the script wasn’t read in one go.
I had a lot of fun being filmed as Viral Man. It was the first time that Viral Man had had a chance to speak. In the mini videos, Viral Man only acted, never spoke. It was fun to give him a bit more depth and allow him a point of view.
On Tuesday we also met up with some of the members of the committee and showed them a rough cut of the interview to make sure they were happy with the voice and script. It was a bit of a backwards way to do things, filming everything and then getting approval, but it was the only way we could do things quickly, as we didn’t have much time left. Thankfully, they were happy with what we were doing.
Once all of the interview filming was complete, it was then up to Jerry to put everything together in Final Cut. And so here for your viewing, is the video for Viral Man:
The next day, we did some final filming for some of the short videos outside. It was funny watching people’s reactions as they wondered why they were watching a green man doing strange things.
Later that day, to help with the transition of handing over all of the campaign assets, I wrote a campaign manual for those who would be responsible for keeping it going and a character profile for anyone who would be playing Viral Man. I think it’s really important to make sure that people understand that the character has a very specific way of acting and to go against that would go against the project.
Saying goodbye to Viral Man
Wednesday ended up being my very last day as Viral Man and in a way, I was quite disappointed! I had become accustomed to going home half green so much so that I felt comfortable enough to even take a trip to Asda in full Viral Man costume (including green face and wig) just to see what sort of expressions we’d get. It was hilarious. People looked at me as if they hadn’t quite believed what they had just seen, while others burst out laughing. There were also a few children who were either incredibly curious or incredibly scared. It was a fun experience and once which I’ll miss being a part of.
On Thursday, my penultimate day of work, I took a trip over to Chester to get some test posters printed and handed them over to the committee, along with a few copies of the campaign manual and character profile.
The Last Day
Finally, on Friday, we took delivery of 2,500 spikey balls for the project, along with 2,500 stickers. This ended up being one of the most fun days of the project, mainly because all of the more challenging stuff was now out of the way. Instead, the morning was spent removing all of the packaging from the spikey balls so that it was easier to distribute them. We also cut A4 sheets of stickers down to A6 for easier handling. While Hannah, Will did that, Jerry focused on editing the rest of the videos for a 4pm deadline. As for myself, I had very little to do now that my job as Viral Man was complete! I had designed two poster campaigns, beer mats, stickers, set up a Facebook profile and YouTube account and of course been the character of Viral Man in person. It was weird to now be struggling to find something to do.
At 4pm, we managed to get everything burnt to disks and handed everything over to the committee. It felt great to have completed a project that we were all quite proud of. To go directly from being a student of the university to staff of the university and be repsonsible for creating a campaign that would affect 15,000 students sounded like a daunting task at first and yet for the five weeks that we worked on it, it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun and a project which I’m proud to have been a part of.
And with all of that said, I’d like you to head over to the Viral Man project page and see everything that was designed as part of the project. I’d love your thoughts on it. You can also become a friend of Viral Man on Facebook at www.facebook.com/viralman.
Thank you for reading these posts and I hope that you’ve enjoyed them. It’s been useful for me to write them as well, as it’s great to look back over what I’ve done. There will be one more entry about Viral Man and this will be to do with presenting it to a total of 1,500 students – on my own!
As mentioned in one of my Tweets, me and my University of Chester graphic design class had an exhibition on June 18th to show off our finest work to design agencies and the public. As part of the promotion of the exhibition, I was tasked to produce it. This included invitations, posters and a website. You can view the work here.
Producing an entire exhibition is certainly a different experience than simply creating a one-off piece of design. Producing an exhibition means taking everything into account and being responsible for it all fitting together and I have to admit that there were times when it didn’t seem like it was going to be done on time.
It all started at the beginning of March, when the class were told about the exhibition and the need to form a design committee to help organise and produce the show. A group of seven students originally volunteered to help steer the production in the right direction. Over the course of the next few months, we’d slowly begin to develop the show. To help with this, I set up a Facebook group and liaised with the tutors to send out an email to everyone asking everyone to join it so I could keep the class up to date with developments.
Facebook group for the exhibition
We invited the whole class to begin coming up with themes for the show. Something that the design committee could work with to develop invitations, posters and anything else that was needed. We gave people two weeks to develop their ideas into A3 boards and then discuss them with the rest of the class. This proved to be incredibly successful and from this, the idea of using exaggerated facts and figures was chosen.
The committee begin coming up with a range of facts that could relate to design students and their three years at University. This included ideas, hangovers, swearing, paper pads and computer crashes. These facts were then given large figures, based on one person’s experiences, multiplied by 60 (the number of people on the course). So where the average person may have 20 coffees a week, 60 people will have nearly 200,000 over the course of three years. What was clear after coming up with these facts and figures was that there was one fact that would always remain at 1 – the design show itself. This realisation helped to steer the project into the interesting direction of thinking about the exhibition as a culmination of three years. A filtering of ideas, good times, bad times and arriving at one design show, hence why the show was given the name “One Design Show”.
The idea of the past three years being filtered into one show made me think of how it had been tapered to a point – the point being the show – and this gave me the idea of making the invitation a triangle. Something that had a (literal) point to it. Using a triangle for an invitation would give added impact when sending out to design agencies and colleges because how often does someone recieve a triangle-shaped piece of mail?
One of my tutors had mentioned in passing that the previous year’s students had managed to make the invitation its own envelope and this was something that I also wanted to do to so I began to experiment with triangles and how they could fold up into an envelope to keep it secure.
An initial idea for the invitation for One Design Show
The first idea consisted of a hexagon, with a cut from the centre to the edge. The invitation would then fold up into a concertina, leaving a triangle shape. The problem was that in order for this to work, there needed to be enough copy/image to fill 12 pages (six triangles on one side, six on the other) and this proved to be too much and not necessary. This design also meant that a separate envelope was needed. Additionally, because there was a lack of bleed area between the triangles, it meant that some of the artwork was bleeding into another triangle. In short, the idea failed, but the concept was there.
Sticking with the triangle idea but simplifying it, I decided to try it with three panels next to each other instead. This was much easier to handle and it meant that by adding a tab at the end of the triangles, I could fold the whole thing up and the tab would secure it in place, thereby forming its own envelope. I went with this shape and started on the design work.
The numbers for each of the facts were quite big. I wanted some way of trying to relate these big numbers back to a digital medium and the obvious choice was pixels because that’s what any piece of artwork is made up from at some point or another before being printed. I have always enjoyed the work of people like eBoy and their method of using pixelation as an art form. I wanted to take this and try and make it work on a larger, invitation and poster-sized scale. For this reason, I decided that iconography would be great to use.
The original set of icons and one blown up.
I love working with iconography. It forces you to be economical with your design because you only have a 16x16px area to work with. Communicating a computer crash or a hangover in such a small space is quite an interesting project on its own but I had to make the icons work at print resolution. When a 16x16px image is printed at 300dpi, it is less than 3mm in width. This meant that the icon would need to be blown up if it was to be seen. However, by blowing something up so small to such big sizes, it was inevitable that they would look blurry and messy. Photoshop’s default method of resizing images is “Bicubic”, which is useful for things like photos. However, Photoshop also has another resize method called “Nearest Neighbour”, which allows pixels to stay sharp at larger sizes even when resized to ten times its original size.
The icons that I designed, although nice lacked colour and so a few of them were eventually redesigned including a red coffee mug instead of a white coffee cup and a few of these icons were using on the invitation that can you see on the project page.
Once the invitations were designed, it was then a case of finding a quote from the printers. The design department didn’t have a large budget to spend on promoting the show and tasked me with finding a suitable printers to print 400 copies of the invitation. Luckily, the invitation was small enough that two would fit on one A3 page, which meant that it immediately cut the costs in half. Unfortunately, due to the unusual shape of the invitation, they could not offer diecutting for price inside the department’s budget and this meant that I, along with a few other people were tasked with cutting them manually.
400 invitiations manually cut and ready to be sent.
After the invitations were taken care of, the next thing was Moo Minicards. At an early stage of producing the show, I had remembered a great website called Moo. They offer business card-like cards, slightly smaller called Moo MiniCards. I thought these would be a great addition to the show, allowing someone to take something away from it and keep a piece of student’s work with them. My idea was to put a piece of student’s artwork on a total of 100 cards and order 5 packs of them. Each pack costs just £10 so it was well worth it. I requested that all students send me three pieces of their work with their full name and website address. These cards were then scattered all over the tables between each student’s portfolio, making the tables come alive with colour and inviting people to pick them up and look more closely at the work.
Moo MiniCards scattered all over the tables.
The next thing to design were the posters which would help direct people to place in which the exhibition was being held. Originally, the idea was to produce 5 x A1 posters that would be easily visible around the campus. However, after walking around the campus and figuring out where the posters would go, it was clear that more than 5 would be needed. The budget didn’t allow for this. Instead, the posters were designed at A3, which meant that more could be produced and a fraction of the cost of 5 x A1 poster. A series of 8 posters were designed and printed twice, giving me 16 posters to place around the campus in preparation for the opening night.
So as to identify each piece of work on display, nametags for each exhibition stand were designed in the same style as the invitation and placed above each stand. Although a very simple part of the whole production process, these triangles, like the invitations had to be manually cut out of card.
The exhibition, ready for opening night.
Finally, a simple website was designed by myself and built by Liam Gallagher, another student on the course, that housed a few student’s work, descriptions of it and information on the show itself including when it was open and how to get there.
A few of the students who exhibited and/or helped with the show.
Overall, producing the University of Chester’s graphic design show was a really good experience. Liaising with so many people about so many different aspects of the show proved to be very difficult at times due to other coursework-related committments, but I believe that the end result was executed well. In particular, I was really happy with the quality and popularity of the Moo MiniCards that I had designed. As mentioned, I had a total of 500 cards printed and by the end of the seven day opening period of the exhibition, there were less than 100 left. Also, I was pleased to overhear some of the public who attended the opening night of the exhibition express their approval of the posters I had designed. It’s always nice to hear that something you’ve designed has been met with praise.
I’ve really enjoyed working on such a large scale project and I hope that I can do so again in the future.
Makers of cookers, fridges and other appliances, Stoves is on the of UK’s leading manufacturers of all things kitchen-related. Recently, they’ve launched a competition for University students to develop a British seal of approval to help consumers to buy British. The full brief can be read here.
