Finally, let's explore #3 in the chain -- sharing your ideas with your CD/account team.
After you've concepted out a series of ideas and roughed them into a form that's palatable to share with your larger team at work (or the client), the fun truly begins. That is, the fun of actually making your ideas into tangible artifacts. But first, you have to sell your ideas in. If you just start designing stuff willy-nilly without conceptual buy-in, you're going to be burning a lot of time on the computer that would be better spent making sure your ideas are salable.
And when ideas get shared with others, a funny thing happens... as the idea broadens to envelop others, they grow in ways that you can't anticipate and control. Shaping that change is a critical tactic of group ideation, not enforcing things exactly as you see them in your mind, but as they can be shared en masse to create a more powerful meaning. You've all got to drink the same kind of Flavor-Aid. After group review, you may need to tweak, retrofit, or otherwise reconcept material if it isn't fit for execution.
Here's some governing principles for presenting your concepts to the overall team:
Show a wide range of ideas. Don't show variations of an idea in multiple executions. Show wildly divergent ideas that are expressed in very different ways.
When you're presenting ideas internally, always start larger than the goal set in the client's contract. If you have to show two ideas to the client for review, have three or four in the internal review meeting to shoot at.
When you present the work, treat it just like a client meeting. For each concept, give a high-level overview of the main idea of the piece, supported by three key attributes that map back to the brief. (In a few more weeks in class, you're going to have this constraint on a number of presentations in critique.)
Be confident, but not overconfident. Speak loud and somewhat proud, but be open to debate and criticism. Some of the best ideas inherently cause a bit of friction.
Be open to change, as long as it's strategically on point. My peers are my best educators at work, and I've learned everything I know from them, basically. If they think my ideas are totally off the reservation, chances are they're right.
And if all your work gets killed and you shut down, apply the 3% rule. A good way to mitigate getting raw, negative feedback on your work is to apply the 3% rule. By that, I mean that I will accept that 3% of what you are saying is true and valid criticism, and try to discern what that 3% is (instead of killing you). That way, I'm not just beating myself up over and over again for missing the mark and/or reacting in a hostile manner. Chances are, after you consider that 3%, it's going to end up more like 25%, but that's okay. From small seeds grow large insights that help shape our ideas more properly.
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In my next long essay/post thingy, I'll chat about what happens in the next link in the chain: the making of the design. If you have any questions regarding this stuff, please feel free to comment, email, or bring it up in the next class session.
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