Roses Student Awards Brief
Designival is now the most established design festival in the North. Design a campaign that promotes Designival and engages the target audience (design professionals) through a campaign message: “Design is_….”. The campaign can be provocative, challenging, humorous and can work online, offline, virally, guerrilla – as you like.
Design Rationale
The Designival brief asked to create a campaign for the festival. The target audience was design professionals and the tag line was “Design is…”
With our campaign, the idea that we came up with revolves around puns, which came about because the name itself is a play on words. The reason we did not make “design is…” our main focus is because we felt it was to cliché, deciding we wanted to do something a little different from the others. So what we really focused on was that target audience: designing for designers gives lot of freedom to be very experimental including terms and references that would only be understood by the desired demographic.
To support the campaign, we also created name-badge style stickers for #designis. The intention is that people will see these stickers, writing on them what they think design is, adding interactivity to the project helping to generate more interest around Designival. Every design professional considers design to be something different. So by engaging them, involving their own opinions it allows the campaign to revolve around what other think of design.
Another alternative we considered was to use words that simply describe design and use metaphorical images to match the type. However, after review, we realised that once again this would was in danger of becoming a clichéd, over done response to the brief.
The idea is simple, effective and works well, following the brief to the best of our ability, targeting the correct audience efficiently. By including “in jokes” we grant them intelligence and an invitation to an elite set of like-minded people.
On purchase a customer would receive a ‘design kit’ including a t-shirt displaying one of the campaign slogans and their wristband required for entry into the festival. Pre-event consumables will create excitement, anticipation as well as increasing the potential for advertising if the designers then wear products.
Using word play we focused are posters around our target audience which was design professionals.
We shaped this box like a tent to keep with the festival theme.
We created a sticker campaign, the idea being that people at the festival will see the stickers and will then write on them what they think design is.
