Productive Procrastination

Hello!

I apologise for lack of updates of late. This is because about 2 months ago, I applied for this crazy thing called Award School. And I got in! See those two bright yellow stickers on the cover of my application folio up there? They both say YES, YOUR IDEAS ARE OKAY. Two different people in the advertising industry looked at my shiz and deemed me worthy of the most highly regarded ad school in Australia. Amazing.

For those who still don’t quite get what it is: It’s a 16-ish week course run by fancy ad people and it teaches you how to have ideas. It’s apparently quite hard to get into, like 1000 people apply in Sydney and 100 get it? Or something like that. And I guess it’s pretty impressive to have on your CV. You just kind of casually go “Oh and when I did Award School…” and people go “Ooooerrrrr”.

It’s also pretty competitive. There’s big emphasis on getting into ‘the top ten’ and getting a piece of your work on ‘the wall’. Agencies keep tabs on who’s doing well and will often recruit the top few students. Some people who don’t place anywhere will apply and do the course again. Some people spend years trying to get in.

For people who want to get into advertising, this is the course to do. I have no idea whether I will want to go into this industry. Sometimes I think I do. Other times… well I guess I just want to do everything. I guess I’m worried about how I’ll go. I’ll be up against people dead set on winning a spot in the top 10 and getting a glamourous (read: not glamourous) job somewhere like DDB or Clems or Saatchi or wherever else. They’ll be the ones staying home every single night until July pumping out idea after idea after idea, turning up to tutorials and getting their ideas shot down and going home and redoing them again and again and again until they have a Book. And then they’ll redo their Book once the course is done. And then they’ll send out quirky self promos to every creative director in Sydney, probably containing a joke about how they’re poor and you should hire them, and they’ll beg for interviews, and they’ll get them, and then they’ll end up working somewhere writing ads for fabric softener. (Whereas I… well, it’s the first week of the course and I’m supposed to be coming up with ads for washing powder right now.)

And I guess because I applied just to see if I could get in, and don’t quite know what I’m going to do with it afterwards, and am pretty happy being a designer, maybe I won’t do as well as I could. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to work hard. But perhaps I feel that I should have tried for this course when I was more sure of what I wanted.

At the very least though, I’m excited that I’m going to learn how to have amazing ideas. I’m concerned at the moment that my lettering work doesn’t have any conceptual basis behind it and is all about form and composition. Which is great but I think that if I could combine powerful ideas with powerful typography I could create some fun things. It’ll also be cool to hang out in some awesome ad agencies. I’m doing my first six weeks at The Works (the view from their office is amazing!) and then Monkeys!! Which is exciting. Before I took the job I had in Sydney, I sort of turned down the opportunity to work for one of the big name agencies back in Brisbane. Their office was all sorts of amazeballs — huge glass walled meeting rooms, grungy interior decoration, a whole wall of gold lions and other fancy little statues, ping pong table, crazy creative people running around doing important crazy things… Being in a smallish digital agency now, I still sometimes wonder what it would have been like and whether I could have handled it.

Anyway, my point is, I’m going to become an insane ad person for the next couple of months and there will be no fancy letters for a while. And since there hasn’t been anything interesting on here of late, nor will there be for a while, here’s my successful Award School application folio for Sydney 2013. I’m pretty proud I got in as I know lots of people don’t get in on their first attempt, and I was too scared to apply last year. Also I almost didn’t get to finish my application as the week before it was due, I was working late almost every night! Question 1 was a 2am fluke — I had left it until very late, and had to just put something on paper and hope for the best. Questions 2 and 3 I wrote at work an hour or so before I handed it in. Which is obvious, because there is a typo in one of them.

These are just shitty photos at the moment but will scan properly at a later date. It will be good to compare these to my final book and see how far I’ve come!

Q1. Why are you applying for this course?

Q2. Write a short paragraph about a piece of advertising you like.

Q3. Write a short paragraph about a piece of advertising you don’t like.

Q4. Create an ad for Nestle Extra Strong blend with the proposition, “The strongest coffee around”

Q5. Create an ad for Purina dog food with the proposition, “For a stronger dog”.

*Side note: Does anyone else get Price Waterhouse Cooper and Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce confused? I do all the time. I totally am not cool enough to do this course.

This is totally not finished, and is still pre-refinement/smoothing/makingthemcurvesallsexy stage, but I just need to push that god damned sausage off the top of my page.

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Food Porn.

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If your surface is too smooth, you may have trouble in controlling your pen. It is like walking on ice.

Zapf. U so cool!

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fuckyeahtypefacedesign:

Designs monospace font

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