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Today marked the “end” an almost 17 week project. The mission was to re-brand Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. The project was under the umbrella of Portfolio Center Lab.

The project was exteremly taxing both emotionally and physically (late nights). However, I feel it opened my eyes widely as to what the hell I’m doing with my life.

Wade kept telling us that it’s not just about making pretty pictures. I don’t know if we ever believed him. We kept coming in with ideas that didn’t hit on the point. They were pretty pictures, but they weren’t meant to last. The problem was that we were just trying to do what we thought might work without thinking what was best for Brian, proprietor of Saltworks. He didn’t need pretty pictures. There’s plenty of that lining the walls of his gallery.

What Brian needed was a better way to organize information on his art so he would be free to focus his attention elsewhere. He needed a solution, not a design.

My guess is that most people at Portfolio Center see design as, well, design, as art. Through the growing pains of PC-Lab, I’ve started to think more in terms of communication of information. Aestetics are subjective. Just the other week, I saw two people come in a two different times and give completely opposite feedback on the same exact things. Both are well respected designers/teachers around PC. I’m not saying that aestetics don’t matter, but aestetics don’t matter.

It’s not about aestetics. It’s not about ideas. It’s not about concepts. When we presented today, we focused more on our strategy. When we were done stating our objectives, to slightly less than favorable articulation, only then did we ever mention anything about design. We still have to refine the presentation for a re-do.

We did all the right things over the course of the project, we just didn’t have the know-how to do everything when we needed to. It seemed like we were running around crazy with no control, but when I looked at all the comps we had produced over the weeks, I realized that we had been slowly progressing towards our final reccomendation.

My advice to young design students, the quicker you can learn to look at things wholistically, the smoother things will go for you. I think someone said that too me a while ago, but I didn’t realize it until I had to do it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 26 April 2007 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.