Our fundraiser raffle has good music and a fun crowd! B Building was livened up for a bit. Good work guys!
Interesting debate going down on the Facebook Page right now about the name of this project. It does affect this blog seeing as the name of our grad show will eventually replace our little placeholder title and URL here.
There are a couple of suggestions being tossed around right now; one being Mad Grads, another being The Agency. Opinions differ as they always do, but we have less variation this time around since we aren’t choosing from a myriad of themes; we have a guideline. There are benefits and drawbacks to each of the names as people have brought up in the debate.
Mad Grads has a wonderful rhyming ring to it, seems memorable, and is related to our theme—but is it too closely associated with Mad Men? As previously mentioned, the theme is inspired by Mad Men but is more importantly focused on the 1960s Ad Agency, and it could be problematic to associate too strongly with a copyrighted TV show. The additional challenge lies in that it could cause confusion with our MAD Awards show, which is related but not the same thing. Or is the connection beneficial?
The Agency sounds crisp and professional, as some of our grads have said, and fits well with our theme, allowing us to build our own agency around it. Concerns on this one seem to be rising around the idea that potential employers might be confused and think that we are an established agency, but opinions seem to differ on that matter as well. Won’t they know they’re at a grad show? Will they be confused if they see the title at a glance?
Giving the name a lot of thought is a good idea, since there really is a lot in a name—but not too long. We have a lot of work to do!
The theme for the show isn’t Mad Men specifically, but just graphically inspired by it. The important part is 1960s Ad Agency!
Thanks Tegan for the heads up! sorry if anyone was confused.
After a couple weeks of deliberation, through surveys and debate, our class of 2012 has finally decided on the theme of a Mad Men-Inspired 1960s Ad Agency.
This may have been the most difficult decision we had to come to as a group (even if it probably shouldn’t have been). The challenge of branding our show lies in the fact that we are the largest graduating class in a long time, at 67 students, and we all have very different ideas of visual styles and how far we want to push those styles. It’s a great asset to have a wide variety like this, but also a significant drawback when we’re trying to reach a unanimous decision.
Ultimately, settling on the theme we did allows us to integrate it subtly, allowing everyone to show their own colours, while still unifying us under the brand of the 2012 class. Naturally our head of department was able to settle a lot of dispute regarding the theme with a few quick words—“If you’ve come this far into the program and you think you don’t need a theme, a unified brand to promote your show, then you haven’t properly learned anything in this program.” (Pardon my paraphrasing!) Pretty blunt, but maybe what a lot of us needed to hear!
With our theme decided, we’re well on our way to a visual identity so we can start promoting our show.
As the style develops, expect to see the appearance of this blog mirror that!
