Last year, I attended a design boot camp program that was arranged by a major ad agency. The goal was to come up with a design pitch for a Halloween ad campaign in a matter of 3 days. While this timeline sounds reasonable on paper, generating a design with a bunch of people who you have never worked with before is challenging in a short timespan. At one point, I was so exhausted that I immediately fell asleep on my desk, which was cluttered with design books and reference guides.
However, the timeframe did help in giving us an urgency to push our creativity to its limits. Here are some things I’ve learned from attending this boot camp:
· Resist the temptation to look at past work for inspiration
Naturally, if you want inspiration, you would want to look at what past participants did in the program right? But my advice is: don’t. At one point, my team was stuck at coming up with a solid idea, so we turned to look at past submissions for inspiration. However, it led to us getting discouraged that we couldn’t come up with anything truly innovative, and it took a few motivational speeches for us to get out of it.
Ideas are better born in a vacuum. Looking at past work can either introduce unnecessary concepts to your idea or make you come up with an idea very similar to what has been done before. If ideas can be born that way, designers wouldn’t need to be called in to present pitches. I wouldn’t call looking at past work completely useless: it did give us ideas for how we wanted our deliverables to look like. But don’t go looking at past work for design ideas.
· Be prepared to defend the heck out of your idea
To borrow the words of one of the mentors at the program: “If you can’t defend your idea from the naysayers, then maybe it isn’t a great idea.”. Several people would come in and provide feedback to each of the teams during the process. My team had one person come in and look at our idea, which was a VR horror challenge and complained there needed to be a better incentive for people to go to the challenge and drive sales. During this discussion, we somehow introduced the possibility of an AR horror story game and lost track of our VR horror challenge idea. This lost us about half an hour that could’ve spent on working on deliverables. My team managed to get back on track, but if I were to go through that again, I would’ve stayed my ground and defended our VR idea more fiercely.
· AR was a popular idea being thrown around
At the time of design pitches, there were two teams whose design pitch revolved around AR. This was something our team considered too, before deciding on VR instead. I was glad we didn’t, or else we would’ve been the third team using the tech. I guess this isn’t surprising, considering there are several successful AR games on the market and the latest push from tech companies has been towards development in this area.
· Working as part of a design team was nice
Most of my work experience has been working with clients, copywriters, social media managers, and art directors. Very rarely did I get the chance to collaborate directly with other designers. My team was also all-women, which I felt made some noticeable differences. While I have high respect for my male design colleagues, I’ve noticed I naturally defer conversations and discussions to them. Whenever I worked in a team with male designers in the room, it was obvious who was the “de-facto leader” and was taking charge. With my team, we didn’t have a definitive “leader”. We all sought contribution from each other and checked-in constantly to make sure everyone was on-board with the creative vision. Or maybe it was the blend of personalities that contributed to our team dynamic. I can’t confidently say I’ll ever get this kind of experience again, so I was glad I got to be part of such a great team.
I’m very grateful for the mentors and fellow designers I met during boot camp. Although boot camp can be extremely stressful, it’s a good chance to not just speak to experts in your field, but also what beginner designers are doing. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn from both!
