Design and the pitching process

A small note to commemorate my first official branding/design work pitch. The sweet day of irony that began with a lecture on… you guessed it, pitching.

It went quite well, with some great discussion around my ideas, there was a small moment where someone thought that the brand vaguely resembled a penguin, but it passed. All around, it was an excellent learning experience, that has basically put legs on a heap of stuff that we’ve been talking about at uni. Nothing is official yet, but I am optimistic that it will progress to the next level.

For those who are less familiar with the world of design, there is this little thing (actually freaking huge, but they don’t tell you until it’s too late) when you do design that involves your momentary transformation into a sales guru, otherwise, you don’t get work or, at least don’t get good work. The realm of pitching is not exclusive to freelancing, it is rampant in the design industry… basically standard practice. Why I’d never thought about it until relatively recently, beats me… but work certainly can’t keep falling in your lap forever, eventually your friends run out of things for you to do.

I’ll take this moment to mention the slightly ginormous proposal I am working on for my Managing Design class. The subject is entirely composed of developing a concept based on Future Melbourne, managing a project, writing a proposal and pitching it at various stages through the semester. As a team effort, it’s surprisingly been (quite honestly) great fun, I am in a diverse but generally hard working group of 4 (myself included) and am enjoying being Team Leader. As person with the keenest writing skills I have also taken on the task of writing the increasingly lenghty document while the others do hard yards in further research and 3D modelling (We’re working with both Multimedia and Industrial Design students). My tutor has come excruciatingly close to convincing me to get excited about public speaking. It’s good to be able to step up and feel comfortable and natural leading while maintaining a level of ‘stretch’. Because there are Tuesdays where I sit in class not fully feeling the 100% get up and go.

Pitching requires confidence. It’s not the easiest of things having your ideas and work bandied around as you sit there, and I’ve barely even begun to experience it, but surely it brings a kind of integrity to the work and helps designers not to dance to their own irrelevant little tune and chase down the thousands of loose ends that do exist. I think design in teams is an incredibly useful thing to employ. 8 eyes see much more than 4 and have exponentially greater the number of ideas.

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