Creative Presence

• What should your identity convey about you?

I want my identity to show my capabilities as a practitioner and my tone of voice - which in turn should show what kind of work I might be ore suited for. 

• Is it actually important to have an identity as an illustrator?

I believe so because it is what separates you from everybody else who can draw a picture and it helps people understand your voice as a practitioner.

Follow Sophie's board Promo Pack Research on Pinterest.

• What could be included in your pack and why?

So far I am considering making business cards, badges, stickers, postcard sized prints of some of my artwork and I want it to be packaged in some form of box.

• What are you wanting to achieve by producing promotional items?

By making promotional items, it'll help me see myself in a more professional manner - as well as other people. I want to use this promotional pack to present myself as a kind of brand that people will recognise and assimilate as me. 

To start with my creative presence, I recently made a Facebook page for my work. This is just to separate my work from my personal profile and to look a bit more professional. My Instagram on the other hand is a bit of a mix of my work and personal posts - I don't mind this however because this particular platform is much more 'laid back' and isn't the place people go to for professional portfolios. So far the responses on my online profiles have been great but I want to create a more professional profile - perhaps on LinkedIn and start thinking about whether I want to make a Tumblr or a website as an online portfolio. 

Initial Business Card Ideas

For the exhibition at Colours May Vary (post about it here), I decided to make some business cards because I realised that people whom I don't already know would be seeing my work and that they might actually like it. 

I'm too fickle when it comes to choosing designs so I used three images that I personally liked (either because of the process I used, the colours or just the content). I really struggle with finding images that reflect my practice so I hope these were sufficient. 

I put all three piles on a table at the exhibition so that people could take one and to my surprise, they actually did! On the opening night, I could already see that the octopus design was the most popular because there were only a couple left by the end of the night. Whether or not anything comes from people having some of my contact details, I'll have to wait and see.

Colours May Vary Exhibition - Off The Page!

To organise this exhibition, we split off into different groups to take care of specific things. I signed up for the promotional team and our first task was to make posters for the event. My initial ideas were:

As a group we had decided on a format for the text so that we were all working to the same specifications. Most of us put forward a design because at some point it was decided we have multiple poster designs to show the diversity of the work in the show. However, not all of the information on the poster was correct and there were some things missing. Due to a bit of bad communication, the posters went to print before they were signed off so we wasted a lot of money on that and we all got pretty worried about the whole situation. After a quick meeting, we came up with a plan to fix it and decided on having just one design to make it less confusing. 

I was pretty flattered that my hand drawn type was used for the final design and was made into a sticker to go on the window at Colours May Vary. It could be improved upon, but having people wanting to use it is encouraging and I think this is a new area of my practice I want to explore. 

All in all, the opening night was a success! We had a fantastic turnout (the guys at Colours May Vary said it was the busiest they'd ever seen the place!) - hopefully everybody else enjoyed themselves as much as I did.

Studio Brief 2: Life's A Pitch

Currently feeling very positive about our pitch presentation. Our numerous rehearsals paid off and we were all confident about what we needed to say. I think keeping the presentation concise not only stopped the audience from tuning out after a while, but made it easier for us to remember the important parts. 

Visually, I think the presentation went well - props to Aggie for adding graphics and bit of colour. Although it was mentioned that we probably shouldn't have handed out our little cards/leaflets as it might distract the audience from what we're talking about, we wanted everyone to get a sense of how real this proposal could be. 

Verbally I think we covered most of the important information. We could have gone more in-depth about the financial side of things and market sectors etc, but we didn't want the presentation to be boring/too wordy. 

After the presentation, we decided as a group that we'd really like to make this proposal actually happen. Because of the low start-up fees, it's probably one of the more achievable proposals from the day. We got to work straight away by creating social networking accounts to save the URL we wanted and are going to work on a proposal for Kickstarter. If we can get £2000 from Kickstarter and other fundraising we won't have to think about loans, so we wouldn't be starting off in debt.