As D&AD and Hyper Island announce our partnership bringing the Hyper Island Master Class to the UK, we investigate the skills gaps that the digital revolution has precipitated.
Most people feel a bit behind when it comes to that thing termed ‘digital’. Even hardened professionals admit that keeping up with the pace of change can be impossible. So how can agencies ensure they leverage the opportunities that digital media offer them?
There is a widely acknowledged dearth of graduates with the right skill sets and competition to recruit is fierce. A fact demonstrated by the high placement success rate of educational institutions like Hyper Island, who specialise in this area. So training existing staff is key as well.
Harry Fowler at
Cogs Agency recruits talent with a strong digital bias to creative agencies. He
thinks that training is essential if the industry is to avoid the same small
number of skilled people being headhunted around the industry. The talent
pipeline needs to be kept active and one way to do that is to retrain existing
staff. ‘A crossover of skills is needed between traditional and digital
agencies’, says Harry, ‘Digital agencies need the strong brand understanding
and conceptual approach of traditional creatives. Traditional agencies need
people who understand the process-led production of digital work.’
One agency that has taken the bull by the horns is Wieden & Kennedy London. The whole agency participated in the Hyper Island Master Class. ‘Whether we like it or not, we are all ‘digital’ now’, says Sam Brookes, Managing Director of Platform, W&K’s innovation unit. ‘We all live in that world, and we all need to be able to navigate it to a certain degree’. A sentiment echoed by Harry who points out that ‘The rules have changed and so have consumers, those that fail to skill themselves up will be redundant.’
Sounds scary, but many see it as an opportunity. Sam Brookes says, ‘One of the important things about the Master Class was that it didn’t make us feel inadequate. In fact the training affirmed that we were already fantastic storytellers and it simply gave us opportunities to do more of that, more of what we do best.’ The pay-off has been visible across the whole organisation. ‘We now have a much better idea how to act as an agency in this new landscape’ says Sam.
Here at D&AD
we were keen to work with Hyper Island given their track record; they have
placed graduates in almost every large agency in London and delivered their Master
Classes to professionals around the world. Their learning philosophy has great
resonance with our own approach to training, using experience-based learning as
a foundation. ‘It is fantastic that D&AD are working with Hyper Island to
bring this training to the UK’ says Harry, ‘Everyone should want and need
this’. If you are interested in the Hyper Island Master Classes read further or email workout@dandad.co.uk.
We are pleased to
announce the release of the Product Design briefs. We have two briefs in the
product categories, one sponsored by DIY Kyoto and the other courtesy of
Seymourpowell. They can both be downloaded now from the site.
We
are planning to run some more workshops. Currently we have two planned for
January 27, one from LIDA around Direct Response and the other with Seymourpowell
for Product Design. Spaces on each are limited to 12 persons. For full details
click here.
With workshops in
mind, we have embedded the videos from the Autumn season below.
The noughties are no more, but it was a decade of huge change in
advertising and design.
Since the turn of the century, D&AD Black Pencils have been awarded to everything from coins
and stamps to posters and TV commercials. The digital world was awarded its
first Black Pencil for ground-breaking creativity in 2006 and since then, the
industry ‘rules’ have been entirely rewritten. We've loaded up each year's winners onto reels for you to reminisce about the good old days.
2000
The decade got off to a roaring start with a double Black Pencil win going to AMV.BBDO with Surfers for Guinness. Apple's Cinema Display won in Product Design, and RSA/ Black Dog Films won a Black Pencil for 'All is Full of Love' for Björk.
2001
Four Black Pencils were taken home, two in environmental design. Casson Mann won for ...Comment, their huge visitor feedback installation in London's Science Museum. Marks Barfield Architects were awarded for the design of the London Eye. Apple won it's second Black Pencil of the decade with the Pro Mouse. Ground-breaking work by Mother won them a Black Pencil in Ambient for the controversial Britart.com campaign.
2002
Three Black Pencils were awarded. Two entries won in direction, Frank Budgen for Levi's Twist with BBH and Michel Gondry for Star Guitar for the Chemical Brothers. Apple also won for the very first iPod.
2003
No Black Pencils. None. Nada.
2004
It was design's year. Atelier Markgraph won for the Ship of Ideas, which floated down the Main in Frankfurt. johnson banks meanwhile injected ground-breaking innovation to a project much smaller in size (physically, of course). Their fruit and veg stamps changed the 'face' of mail.
2005
Another year of double wins. Wieden+Kennedy London was awarded not once, but twice for 'Grr'. 4Creative walked off with a Black Pencil for their revolutionary Channel 4 idents and Foster & Partners were recognised for the breathtaking Millau Viaduct.
2006
The first digital Black Pencil was awarded to Leo Burnett Canada for the redesign of the global network's corporate website. Another redesign was recognised for breaking the mould, with a Black Pencil going to the UK's Guardian newspaper.
2007
Illustration crafts and cutting edge technology were recognised this year. Kolle Rebbe won in Illustration for 'War Orphans'. R/GA were awarded for Nike+ - the site that made running a social activity.
2008
An unprecedented 6 Black Pencils were awarded this year. Apple won for the iPhone and fourth generation iMac. Fallon's Phil Collins loving, drumming gorilla snatched up another. Japan's first Black Pencil went to Projector Inc for Uniqlock. The first Black Pencil for digital crafts was awarded to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for Get the Glass. Last, but definitely not least, The Partners were awarded a Black Pencil for the National Gallery Grand Tour.
2009
Four Black Pencils were awarded across multiple categories. Droga5 set a new standard by winning 2 Black Pencils for separate entries; Million - the mobile technology driven solution the the problem of student apathy in New York; and The Great Schlep - mobilising young Jewish voters to engage with their grandparents in Florida. Graphic Designer Matt Dent became our youngest Black Pencil winner with his redesign of the reverse side of UK coins. Art+Com were awarded for the Kinetic Sculpture, installed in the BMW Museum.
Find out more about what we do.
Have a look at the best advertising and design in the world.
See what the best up and coming student work looks like.
This week, we are pleased to introduce Franki from Franki&Jonny
http://www.frankiandjonny.com. Franki is going to be a regular contributor to the D&AD University Network blog, commenting on things that are happening in the industry, giving an insider view to the discussions with clients, the things that are troubling her and trends that she observes. Her first piece is looking at 'what is expected of a modern creative'. We hope you and your students find this useful and look forward to hearing your thoughts!
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When I was 22 I quit my corporate print job at a reputable London agency in search of something beyond 8 Page Brochures and Quark Express. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew it had to be something different.
My friend, a Technical Consultant for the aforementioned agency learned of my desire to move on and invited me to work on location on a film set in Venice creating a website for the film maker Mike Figgis. ‘But I don’t know anything about websites, I’ve never designed one’ I said, in a bizarre attempt to talk him out of offering me a job in Italy for 6 weeks in the company of Salma Hayek and John Malkovich, to which he replied: ‘I don’t want you to know anything about websites, I want you to come up with ideas.”
8 years, one BAFTA and a load of FWA awards later that visionary programmer is my business partner and we run a niche digital agency specialising in Film and Entertainment clients. And we’ve never hired a web designer.
What?
We are a design-led agency. We cannot be true to that principle if our designers are asking themselves ‘how?’ before they think about ‘why?’. It’s a case of being technically agnostic - we will design something first and then decide how to build it. If a designer isn’t concerned with the build it keeps the design fresh, appropriate and unaffected. An old creative Director once told me not to have ‘scissors in your head’ - cutting off ideas before they can even form, we feel that a little technical knowledge is just the kind of scissors he was talking about.
We therefore hire designers on the basis of their ideas and visual skills across any medium and pure coders with absolutely no ambition to design. Put simply we're wary of the jack of all trades and master of none - the kids that do both tend to do neither well.
But how does that thinking sit with students? If they have a great digital idea should it stay as an idea until they can build it properly or should they have a go - cobble it together with Dreamweaver, Flash and a bit of help from a mate’s brother? Let’s face it aspiring creatives have to shoot their own photos and films, bind their own books, and find a million other ‘cheats’ to realise big ideas at education level so is digital any different these days?
Most probably not. I guess my fear is that a little knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing and whilst I would encourage emerging designers to engage with new media, to love it and to understand its power I would urge them to not to get bogged down in the technical details. Learn enough to get your idea working, if possibl e collaborate with a technical student the way you would with a photographer or an animator, get good advice and keep it simple. (And once you have done don’t put ‘proficient in Flash 10’ on your CV if you aren’t. )
I’d love to hear about innovative ways design students have realised digital ideas and how the industry can help guide the development of great cross-media designers without forcing them all down a half-coded fudge that leaves them confused and overwhelmed. Answers on a postcard. Or on the blog. It’s not about the medium, it's about the message!
Give a design grad a job and he'll be employed for two years. Give him the means to get one himself and he'll be moderately wealthy with a detached home in SE18 by the time he's forty - Ancient Proverb
Hi readers, we're ShellsuitZombie, a small graduate
organisation whose aim is to cut through the crap and help you get yourself
into the creative industry. Since we graduated just over a year ago we've
collectively been hired eight times, lost two jobs, worked in London and Paris,
freelanced for some great and awful people and for some and no money, lived in
A LOT of different houses, bought six bicycles and baked a cake. Using this experience
(mainly the baking) we set up SSZ to encourage both graduates and the creative
industry to fall in love again.
We try to do this in three ways.
1.
Forget 'Mother', think brothers.
Through our website we put graduates and their work on a level playing field with the work that inspires them. After all, what x Art-Director did with £12 million shoot is of limited relevance to a poor student whose budget is second hand baked beans tins. At our stage you can't just throw money at stuff, the idea has to be good, and a lot of yours beat the pros hands down.
2.
Let's get boozed
Don't take that title too literally, but booze (and socials in general) work wonders for smashing some of the employer-employee (or industry-graduate) barriers that might taint more formal events (dare I say, such as New Blood). When the whiff of desperation has passed, we can all have a larf. Our events try to make that happen. In addition graduates sharing advice and stories with each other is invaluable - A room full of them can only be a good thing.
3.
REVOLUTION
We proudly (and angrily at times) act as a voice against those who would have everyone believe there isn't a hope for graduates, the nay-sayers who sit on their thrones and spout condescending and patronising garble about the number of grads per job, the state of education and the inevitability of our collective fate in Broken Britain. We really hate those guys.
So there you have it. We are all working graduate creatives from backgrounds in design and advertising who have a passion for making this whole process easier, less stressful and most importantly more fun for you guys. No-one chooses a creative career as a fallback, it's a way of life. We've had tough times over the last 18 months but there isn't one of us who would swap them for a management recruitment salary and an easy time. Sod that, we make shit look good.
Please come and visit us at www.shellsuitzombie.co.uk where you can sign up to our mailing list to find out about future events/competitions, submit your work, subscribe to our RSS feed and have a closer look at what we do. We also like twitter (@shellsuitzombie) very much, so hit us up on that bad boy.
Peace, Love and Cakes Galore
Jonny Burch
ShellsuitZombie
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