- Rationale -
The inspiration behind our topic choice comes from my own experiences feeling overwhelmed by assignment work and wanting to be able to still work on personal expression through drawing, writing and such throughout my day. I had heard of people doing creative challenges to commit to progressing their skill, ability, and learning more about their own creative capacity. It makes sense this is also a highly beneficial thing to us as designers, so should definitely be something that is encouraged. Often I was left feeling creatively 'drained' after inputting everything I had into assignments and the simple act of taking a little time for my self to express my own ideas however I wanted ended up having a more positive and uplifting feeling in my life than I had anticipated. Our call to action was a very straightforward one: 15 minutes, 15 days, endless ways to create. Join in on the creative challenge! :) And our target audience was people who are creatively inclined or aspire to be, and also might be motivated by social media as an outlet for their creativity.
Both Lani and myself had a very strong idea of a certain look we wanted for the identity of our topic - handwritten fonts, beautiful/colorful and artistic photos and imagery, a mix of gritty city environment with bursts of creativity like a hidden paradise in an urban jungle. We tried to portray this in a way that fitted the mix of "city meets art" aesthetic that the Wellington region is known for, and this can be seen throughout the visual elements of our website, video and whole project. The public seemed receptive to the logos and banners + dialogue we put upon the pages we created for out project, and some of the artwork shared on the facebook page for it has been amazing, the social platforms really did have alot of potential and opened up an entire avenue of interaction for this project. We worked some of these contributions into the background image by the 'Join In!' portion of our website.
The website was a big learning experience for me and I'm hoping it will load right on the mac with the fixed div sizes, as it was coded entirely on pc. :P There was a bit more I'd have liked to included such as a gallery of peoples work with links to it etc, and maybe links to other challenges people have created elsewhere on the web, but overfilling the website with text probably would have been just as distracting as it would be beneficial. We felt that having a parade of statistics/infograms filling up the site would detract from the message we are trying to promote -- we want people to create, it's as simple as that. And given creativity is such a broad and subjective topic it doesn't feel right to narrow it down to certain figures or stats generated by surveys done on specific groups.
We are not trying to convince peoples intellect, we are trying to stimulate their imaginations.
