Presenting the Concepts, Picking a Winner

Photos, top to bottom:

1. The Winning Team:

Concept: Burn the Wall

Mentor

David Schiedt : Creative Director, Buster York Creative

Students

Loni Huston : Metro State College of Denver, Senior

Mia Huang : Colorado State University, Senior

Kyle Olsen : Colorado State University, Senior

2. Part of the Burn the Wall concept included tagging pizza boxes so the art travels

3. The three presenting teams were very organized with their rationale.

Honorable Mention

Concept: Rail Car

Mentor:

Jay Roth : Senior Writer, Integer Group AND ADCD President!

Students:

Brooke Schott : Metro State College of Denver, Senior

Adrian Newman : Metro State College of Denver, Senior

Kate Dzintars : University of Denver, Senior

Lynette Losasso : Arapahoe Community College, Sophmore

4. They were also excited about their concepts.

Honorable Mention

Concept: The Scrawl

Mentor:

Steve Koloskus: Principal, Extra Strength Marketing

Students:

Lauren Shviraga : Metro State College of Denver, Senior

Katie Matteo : Colorado State University, Senior AND ADCD Student Advocate!

Daniel Ahrens : Metro State College of Denver, Junior

Kendall and Peter discuss the problem and the many solutions proposed

5. Kendall and Jamie talk to the teams about their concepts and pick three of the ten to present.

At about 9pm, Kendall Peterson from UAF and Jamie Webb, the brief writer, circulated room, talking to the teams about their concepts. It was impressive to watch their involvement, their sincerity at treating this like a real opportunity for these students. That's part of what makes The Brief so great: it is a real opportunity. The work will get used by the client.

They chose 3 teams to present their ideas, and in the end, one team, one concept to follow through with. Remember the basic problem at hand:

How can we create and launch a newsworthy art program that enables true self-expression?

The idea centered around getting street artists to express themselves in ways that are both satisfying and profitable for them and whose format or venue is acceptable and appealing to the city and community (read: legal and non-vandalising). The concepts tonight ranged from movable train car installations to pizza boxes in actual use, and included ways for the artists to exhibit and auction or otherwise sell their work.

In the end, the team with the pizza box concept won the project. That's just the kernel of the idea, really. The concept, titled Burn the Wall after the colloquial language of showing up another artist, included auctions, subversive formats, and a "rebellious" aesthetic, and is easily executable on a variety of budgets and scalable to fit the needs and growth of the client's program. (I'd personally love to see some of the Cherry Creek style boutiques and chains sign-up to have their bags tagged beautifully; Ann Taylor, Betsey Johnson, etc, with traveling art that reaches across age, style and economic gaps would be interesting.)

Congratulations to the winning team and the client. And thanks to all who participated in this year's Student Brief. Another great ADCD event.

Briefies Underway

Kendall Peterson from UAF represents the client tonight.

It's 6:30pm and this year's Student Brief is well underway. There are 10 teams of 3 or 4 students each, representing 7 schools: Metro State, Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, Colorado State University, CCA Film School, U. of Northern Colorado, and Arapahoe Community College. Their elbows rest on table size sheets of butcher paper, sharing and recording ideas. Laptops are open and ready, but so far most of the work is in the conversations.

At the head of each table is the guru assigned to the team, a local senior copywriter, creative director, art director, etc. They look as involved in the process thus far as each of the students. Collaboration is the word of the evening.

But let me back up just a bit. The brief this year is presented by the Urban Arts Fund. They ar epart of DOCA, the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs. UAF was created, in part, to be advocates for developing and funding positive outlets for artistic expression of todays youth. Basically, the brief comes down to this:

How can we create and launch a newsworthy art program that enables true self-expression?

Stay tuned for more action on the Brief.

The Brief is SNOWED OUT!

The ADCD-sponsored Student Brief has been rescheduled for next Thursday, November 5th, due to horrendous weather.

Same time: 5:30 - 10pm

Same place: Auraria Campus, Tivoli room #640.

If you are a student currently registered and you can't make it next Thursday the 5th please contact Peter Regenold Bergman <pregenol@mscd.edu> for a refund.

In the mean time, registration has been extended to the end of day next Tuesday. We still have room for more students so please sign up.

The Brief :: Design Winners

I want to personally thank all the students, teachers, volunteers and CDs and ADs that showed up to make this one of the more exciting events I've attended in a long time.

Congratulations are in order to Team 19 for the design aspect of the competition.

The team consisted of:

Creative Director: Nicky Alden, Idaho Stu

Rebecca Wood: Metro State College of Denver

Jenn Workman: Colorado State University

Matt Starr: Metro State College of Denver

Each student wins $140 in scholarship funds and an award.

Nice.

Briefies: The Debrief

Wow. 

In my previous posts about last night's events, maybe it seemed like I was being a little silly, a little flippant even, about how exciting it was. I mean, it was exciting. Truly. But one may interpret my previous posts as hype. That's fair perhaps, to an extent. I might've been trying to be cute or clever (and yeah, I wasn't much of either). Fine.

But I'm serious when I say WOW. The ADCD sponsored Student Briefies event was a great success. But that's not the WOW part. The fact that 72 students showed up — and 12 of those from Wyoming — was really cool. The creative energy in the packed room was tangible. The collaboration between students, and in one case, between teams, was inspiring. I could say "wow," but that's not the WOW part.

Steve Whittier was absolutely fantastic in helping to make this event much more than the sum of its parts. The plan, as stated in my last post, was for the students to put their ideas into a visual presentation. They did, but Whittier flipped the script a bit first. He wanted the idea to be the main thing. The students were already in a crunch and they had to nearly skip the research phase entirely. It would be tempting, as Whittier understood, to dive into the execution of it all and make the solution all about some neato design. But he challenged the teams to make it about the solution for the client. That made all the the difference between half-baked ideas wrapped in tidy clichés (I saw not one flourish, though!) and truly inspiring possibilities, roughly but clearly presented.

"The execution should be a given. If you can't execute the design, you shouldn't be here. Execution is easy. The great idea is hard." Whittier shared these thoughts just before the announcement of the three finalists. This was not a fancy awards show banquet, but as I stood in the back, straddling a mess of power cords on the concrete floor of the basement work room at MCA, it had the feeling of something really special. There were a few camera flashes and a palpable anticipation, as Stella Yu from Arts Street and Whittier began to introduce the finalist teams. 

Three great ideas. One rose to the top, easily, in my opinion. The whole event was awesome, really, but this was the big moment. A solution for the client that none of us expected. In three quick hours the teams had come up with ideas that surprised all of us. Even Whittier seemed a little non-plussed when he said that he hadn't thought of what he would have done.

Stella Yu then had a difficult task. Clearly she liked all of the ideas and was gushing gratitude in her final statements before announcing the chosen solution. She went with the one that answered the Brief holistically. She needed to get $750,000 in donations, to raise visibility for Arts Street, specifically, and foster community involvement and continued appreciation for the arts, generally. The winning team came up with something packed with gestalt. I'm very excited to share it with you now... But I can't. You'll have to wait. But it's good. New York City good. National press good. 

So, what's the WOW part? I guess, for me, it's the pleasure of having observed something so organically powerful as the creative process in such a test-tube kind of environment. Students getting deep into the problem and pushing through the obstacles; CDs coaching the teams to solve the problem at hand; the client, set aglow (she actually mentioned afterwards that she was glowing, not that you couldn't see it) by effort put forward by the students and by THE RESULT... All of it combining to demonstrate what can be done when we work and think together, that's the WOW part for me.

I made some new friends last night, another benefit of working together. One friend, Becky is, like me, a fan of Bruce Mau. I've often wondered what it might be like to work with such a visionary  who elevates process above product. He seems determined to stay close to the ground, where the process of working together happens, yet he seems to "change the universe," as my new friend put it. I think I got a glimpse of what that might be like last night. That's the WOW part for me.

On behalf of everybody involved last night, I would like to thank... well, everybody involved last night. Wow.