BRAND STRATEGIES: 1st Portfolio Reflection

Gabriella Godeliva Adytanthio
0324170
Graphic Communication Design
Year 2, Semester 3
Brand Strategies

Reflection Piece
Post-1^st Portfolio

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The first portfolio presentation in this module showcases our progress thus far, covering the client and business overview, ideation process, and proposed moodboards for the creatives. The purpose of the presentation, in addition to inform the lecturers and other students about their strategy of rebranding the business, is to train our communication skills in order to be able to properly convey their ideas. The presentation was on Thursday, 13 October at Taylor’s University classroom BG15. Apart from students who are taking this module and Ms. Natasha, other guests of the presentation include two other lecturers and students taking Brand Corporate Identity this semester.

Brand Strategies requires me to do things that I have never done before in previous classes, and new experiences bring about challenges. Looking for a client is one of these things. It wasn’t overwhelmingly hard, but for me personally it started off quite awkward at first as we go door to door offering our services. This gradually gets better the more we repeat the process. However, it doesn’t end there. When myself and Hasya, my partner for this project, finally managed to secure a client, it turns out that the client is not responsive, as they never reply to our messages despite having read it or call us back as they promised. This leads to us getting nowhere, while other groups have already started sketching potential logo ideas, which is why we decided to stop pursuing the client altogether and look for a new one.

Another challenge that I faced was in the ideation—to be honest, I’m still struggling at the moment with the same problem. Ms. Natasha told us that we have to show the sketches that we come up with to random people around the campus. That somehow unintentionally created some sort of barrier in my mind because I was sketching logos in a way so that people would immediately identify what the business is instead of putting into thought the values that the business hold on to, as we were taught to do in Brand Corporate Identity. I realized that most businesses we find as we walked through the commercial area of SS15 do not apply the ideal discipline that can be found in Brand Corporate Identity. People passing by SS15 don’t look at logos and ask about the values of the business, they want to know what the business is selling. The challenge (or one could call it a dilemma instead) is how to create a logo that reflects the business’s values yet at the same time make the type of business recognizable in a glance.

As hard as the challenges are to me, there are also parts of the project that I enjoy. First of all, working together with Hasya is a new experience that gives me the opportunity to get to know her better as a classmate. I feel that I learn from the way she does things. The litmus test was fun because I get to know people’s feedback for the design, as their answers can sometimes be unexpected, yet plausible.

I feel that I have improved my communication skills to a certain extent (if not a lot) after going through only the first portfolio, owing to the fact that we had to find our own client, liaise with the client, and present our ideas. Proficiency in language and confidence are some of the things that I feel I’ve become slightly better in. I’ve also gained an understanding on how the appearance of the slides affects the presentation of the idea after looking at other people’s work and comparing it to my own. As a designer, I’ve also learned that I don’t always have to conform to my superiors’ suggestion, and that I can always defend my idea.

The things I can improve in the future are mostly details concerning the presentation, such as fluency and persuasiveness in speech. I think this can all be improved with repeated practice accompanied by constructive criticism like what Ms. Natasha did with our mock-presentation.