I thought I’d share this video I put together duing the middle part of the course in 2015 – I made this video for the subject called “Art Direction”, one of the harder ones. Basically, as part of a rebranding project, I had to design a new logo for Aeroflot. There were a whole bunch of other documents I had to produce along with the logo: Client contract, production schedule, budget estimate, branding guideline manual, advertising campaign, storyboard advert and finally a presentation.
The week before I started this subject, I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). It was really, really hard for me to get up in front of a room full of people to talk about Aeroflot. I’ve always hated public speaking but I managed to get through it with a lot of support from the college’s counsellor. Let me tell you, I started worrying from the moment I knew there would be a talk. So rather than worry for five solid weeks in advance, I decided to do a kick-ass presentation. I mainly wanted people to look at the video and not at me. I had already spent around 25-30 hours editing the video before the talk. I was so distracted by the video editing process, I actually worried a lot less. I still worried, but not quite as much.
I get so nervous during a presentation I can never remember what to say, so rehearsing things never works for me. My mind starts racing. What I tend to do now if I have to talk in front of other people is lots of brain training and visualisation. I imagine myself talking about the subject. I’ll do this over and over and over again when I’m walking my dog. So I have a lot of pre-prepared things to say during the talk. If I forget to say something, no big deal because I’ve already covered most of it (and you can always go back to a point). I basically then adlib the whole talk and try and treat it like a one-person conversation not a presentation. It’s also great to tell stories, so I told the whole story about Aeroflot’s dubious safety record².
The logo is inspired by the Siberian Crane. So I decided to feature migratory birds in my presentation, to give people a wonderful feeling about how amazing flight is. I think we’ve all started to take flight for granted. And we’ve only been flying 110 years or so. The flying fish are a metaphor for Aeroflot needing to change their branding strategy or they will be eaten by the competition. So anyway, the plan was, at the end of this cool video, my logo would appear. I edited it in Windows Movie Maker in high-definition 1080 pixels sso it is probably best watched over on youtube. It’s not so high definition anymore I suppose with 4k, 5k and even 8k monitors on the horizon. Even so, my computer kept crashing time and time again.
The day finally came and I was the only one with a video! But here was no turning back! A lot of the other students did some truly amazing presentations. I ended up getting a 5/5 for my presentation, so I was very pleased with that. I think this is the moment I kind of new I wanted to focus on illustration and not graphic design. I’m really not cut out for loads and loads of team work… I just prefer to work from my home alone (well, my rescue-greyhound is always here to keep me company, she always sleeps on my bed).
As time went by, the logo morphed and became simpler and simpler and I just couldn’t make it any simpler than a triangle and two squares. During the concept phase, the teacher remarked “it looks like a fork”. Which just happened to be true. So because of that, it doesn’t look like a crane anymore but that’s what it started out as. I had to lose the legs because it just looked too much like the Lufthansa logo. A funny thing is that I became so obsessed with the video, I couldn’t think of another tagline for Aeroflot except “only some want to fly”. That didn’t go down too well in front of a design crowd. Oh well. So the teacher suggested “the new way to fly” and I’ve adopted that now instead. The font is my own one. I am slowly but surely developing a font based on Haettenschweiler.
I’ve since spent another 10 hours or so and re-edited the video and included an animated logo from some tricks I learned in Adobe Flash Pro. Why so long editing a video you ask? Well, if there’s one thing I learned from “Art Direction”, it’s that art directors have to have unquestionable style and taste to influence other people (normally you’re trying to convince them to buy things, but not always). The real aim is to generate a further £6618.41 for the BirdLife migratory birds & flyways programme and that’s the reason I’m sharing this video here, to give it a bit of extra exposure.
I hope you like the video, I hope you like the logo and I hope you donate lots and lots of money to BirdLife or one of the other charities listed in the youtube video description.
² Actually they have one of the youngest fleets in Europe now and there have been a lot less crashes in the last decade.