Near-overload of questions

I’ve been posting less often lately. Oh, noes! I’ve got little to write about, really. Lately, it’s all about being lazy the work, and the work is almost over. It’ll be over this Friday, in fact. Today I got done with marketing class. We had done our team presentation last week, and all I’ve had to do is sit through the remaining presentations, the last two of which took place today.

The first presentation was good. A couple got through their parts by reading from the slides. Understandable. The rest of them were good, and the slideshow was very complete. Since they were re-launching a brand of chocolate, they were nice enough to pass out samples of the redesigned product, new wrapping and everything.

Now, the second presentation … they were re-launching a hotel from a well-known chain of hotels. If this had been a contest, they’d have won, just by the arrangements. Posters here and there, a podium, a small stage, music, screens on each side of the stage, and all the presenters in formal attire. The presentation was very different from all the others. It seemed as if we were attending an actual re-launch event for the hotel.

But, the good stuff stops there. Turns out that the Dean of Business Administration was present, having been invited by the presenters. I didn’t know who she was when I first walked into the room, but we all realized that she was not only knowledgeable about marketing and administration, but also a figure of authority. After the presentation was done, she began throwing questions at the presenters while a waiter started serving fruit cocktail (yum). They answered as many as they could, but ultimately ended up overwhelmed as she finished by making a speech on how to sell an idea, and saying that we’re “the best product of this university”. Then, she congratulated the team for a good presentation and made her exit. A short round of applause at her prescence.

It was very interesting to hear what she had to say, but I’m really glad she was absent from previous presentations, especially the one I was part of. I wouldn’t be able to provide answers and would eventually lose my ability to stand in such a situation. I would really hate that, especially when being right at the finish line for this class.

I’ve only got tomorrow night and Friday morning, and then I’ll be home-free until January. I’ll try and be smarter about the page that will just not load, since the risk of being left out of a class has been brought down to a minimum. After all, I’ve only got nine subjects left!

For tomorrow, I have to fix the website project thingy for graphic design class. I’ve not touched it since Thursday, and I better fix the whole thing tonight, so I’ll have the rest of the time to do the final work for pre-press class on Friday. This time, I won’t be required to spend lots of money for a print that may or may not come out right. Thank goodness.

I’ll have to revisit that old list of mine, to see what I can get done during December. There’s a lot of things I’d like to do to improve myself, and a lot of things I have to think about and figure out. I don’t want 2009 to suck as much as this year has, you know! I’ll be having quite a lot of free time during that year (especially in the last four months), and I wouldn’t want to find myself in the exact same place I’m in now.

So, to sum up: this day wasn’t bad, I listened to a bunch of people talking and was given some fruit cocktail and a bar of chocolate. Now if more days at college were like this, I’d complain less.

Oh, well. At least I saved the chocolate for dessert. Bye.

The encounter, part three

This Saturday, the last day of the days-long conference/encounter thingy, felt a bit like a Sunday. It felt longer than the previous day at times, partly because some of those friends who were with me that time couldn’t be there for various reasons. This time around, though, the presentations started on time, and the whole thing ended earlier than before. I’ll start from the beginning. I’ll try to write less, so you all don’t die while attempting to read all of this.

I got there before 9:00, same as before, but they were letting us in and out of the conference hall at our own will. There were fewer people this time. I sat in one of the middle rows, one row in front of where I had sat on Friday. When most attendees were seated, there were still many empty seats. Seems they either couldn’t make it, or didn’t want to repeat Friday’s experience.

The first presentation of the day was one that couldn’t take place on Friday. Alberto Olivera, from Cuba, gave a presentation on packaging as a semiotic instrument for commercial communication. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? He started off with a story on a product that needed proper packaging and branding, and it ended with “and they lived happily ever after”. The ending got a collective Awwww! from the audience. He provided a few examples of what was supposed to be good product packaging, some of which I wasn’t too fond of. Oh, well.

Next up was Carmen Ortiz Arteaga, from the University of Puerto Rico in Carolina (Carolina, Puerto Rico, just in case). I thought her presentation on the online courses in the universities of Puerto Rico in the 21st century was going to be boring, but it turned out to be fun, with some audience participation (questions, hand raising).

Next up was Adolfo Lucero, from Altos de Chavón, whose presentation on digital design as a novel marketing tool was renamed to education by the pixel. He said a few things about the requirements for creating a digital design project, and went on to quote designer April Greiman, who said this about digital design:

The paint never dries. – April Greiman

Can’t disagree with you, Ms. Greiman. Anyway, his presentation ended shortly thereafter, and they started handing out tabloid-sized papers about the courses given at Altos. I’d be interested in the 3D animation course if I didn’t like Blender so much (of course, they don’t use that), and if I didn’t know more than just the basics (I like to think that I do!). I saved one of those for myself.

Right then, they started serving appetizers. My stomach wasn’t up for it, and the long line was just not worth it in the end. Just after, Alicia Álvarez, Santo Domingo-based Cuban designer and former teacher of mine (two subjects!) gave her presentation on new tendencies in brand design (it’s a longer title, actually). I found it somewhat interesting, so I wrote down some things from there in my note pad. The audience cheered a lot, before and after, because she had been (or was still) a teacher to most students in the room.

Rebeca Galán of the Cuban Association of Social Communicators talked us through the creation process for an environmental preservation campaign conceived after this year’s disastrous hurricane season (hurricanes Gustav and Ike weren’t too kind to Cuba).

Then came a very good presentation by Pablo Jiménez of Cumbre Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, about Lovemarks: the future beyond brands. Great use of the slideshow (sleek design, not plain at all), great examples and great humor. At the end, he got a very long cheer from the audience.

Following the above, came a presentation that, well … killed our buzz a bit. A presentation on academic application of art therapy in design. Too much text on those slides. Then came the lunch break, which would take place in another hall. I got in the line, but quickly got out of it after waiting for a few minutes. I didn’t want to stay in the sun (that’s how long the line was), and I just didn’t fell like eating. So, I went back to the conference hall and took advantage of the situation: the hall was empty, and I could walk around and take pictures! So, I did that, until people started coming back.

After the hall was full again (there were more people this time), began a presentation that I’d been wanting to see, after its presenter being the only one I heard commens about from 2006’s encounter: Matilde Capitán, from Barcelona, Spain, but who’s been living here for over three decades and teaches at both our college and Altos de Chavón. She got the longest before cheer I’ve ever seen. Second longest only to Obama’s acceptance speech. Some people started shouting “I love you, Matilde!”, and there even were some signs that read “I love Matilde”. Hilarious. It became more fun when she began making faces and little dances as the cheering went on, because she wasn’t allowed to start her presentation. Extremely amusing, and more because I won’t be taking a class with her (she teaches an advertising class, and I’m in graphic design). She must be really fun to be around with. Her presentation was called If Freud raised his head, and she showed a bunch of suggestive ads. Sexually suggestive, that is. A lot of whoo-ing from the audience, as expected.

Ms. Capitán ended her presentation early, and showed us some more of those suggestive ads from her 2006 presentation, which some had already seen but wanted to see again. After there were no more ads left, she proceeded to introduce Dr. David Roca, from Spain, who gave his presentation called can women be creative?. Instant reaction from the female part of the audience, which was the majority. He presented the result of a survey on artistic directors in Spain, who provided answers about whether women are suited to be artistic directors, and what (they think) they’re better at when it comes to design and marketing.

A student from college, Lía Vanessa Pérez, introduced us to her project on redesigning the signaling in our Colonial Zone. Her friends cheered her with signs (L-I-A, heh). After that, there was a presentation by someone from Ideas, Papel y Tinta (ideas, paper and ink), who supplied printed material for this year’s encounter. It was an odd mix of shameless plug, typos and eco-friendliness. I’ll say no more of it.

Carlos Forero and Eric Rivier from Forero & Rivier gave a presentation on BTL: below the line, advertising in our time.  Their slideshow was, for some reason, in English. Rivier did most of the talking. He proceeded to show us a local campaign they had worked on for Sony Ericsson where people would freeze up until others with a branded t-shirt waved a hand in their face to unfreeze them (imitating their latest cell phones). Very creative. Then, they gave away tickets to an upcoming Fonseca concert, for which they also did an advertising campaign (of which we got some examples), to the first person with a Sony Ericsson mobile to send them a text message of a song that they played. One girl texted them, but she turned out to have a cell phone of a different brand (got it on video!). The first song didn’t work, so they played one by Juanes. Someone texted them, and that person won. The end of that.

Rubén Tascón from Colombia gave a brief presentation called the dot com university. The slideshow was heavy on text, and there weren’t any actual examples. But, I’m glad it was brief. The day was getting old. Alicia Zarza Martínez gave a presentation on an interactive (Flash) presentation they did for Hotel Nacional de Cuba. The Flash thing was very nice, and the presentation was short. Lastly, there was a presentation on the three Es of graphic design. The guy didn’t go past the first slide (which contained the title) for the longest time. A lady sitting in a row of seats across from me noticed that one of the cameras was aiming in her direction, so she stood up and adjusted her clothes while saying “it’s so they’ll I was here!”. The presentation was too long for my taste, and the examples provided were somewhat bizarre. Suddenly, the power went out, so the guy cut it short, even though the screen came back on shortly after.

They proceeded to give some graphic design awards for courses that were given before the seminar. One of the winners wasn’t there. After that, the Dean of Arts at our college (also a graphic designer and teacher) gave a final speech with several rounds of applause here and there. The whole thing ended much earlier than the day before, and I didn’t suffer under a thunderstorm.

I ate plenty of dinners (yes, plural) when I got home, to make up for all the eating I’d missed, and I sat here to write this post so I wouldn’t have to at a later time (and because I’d already written the previous two parts consecutively).

I failed at writing a post shorter than the last one, it seems. Whoops! Sorry! But, you won’t have to suffer through these anymore, as I’ll be back to my usual rambling, and I won’t be able to attend 2010’s international encounter of something-or-other, because I’ll hopefully have graduated by then, so …

Anyway, it’s Sunday already, and I can finally get some sleep. Good night!

The encounter, part two

I wish I could say that today (Saturday) was a great day, but it wasn’t. I attended the international encounter of something-or-other, of course. I got up to an early start, like I said, arriving shortly before 9:00. It was supposed to begin right there and then (there was a 9:00 presentation), but it didn’t.  So, the whole schedule was immediately thrown off.

It took a while for everyone to arrive and be seated (larger hall, many more seats than last time), adding a bit more to the schedule throw-off. It started out with a slow presentation on the challenges of advertising  in regards to climate change by a Cuban teacher. It didn’t really cause much excitement, as it was supposed to be co-presented by one other person who wasn’t there. Right after, followed a very interesting presentation by Ecuadorian designer Connie Hunter. I had seen one of her designs a couple of years back, and I must have liked it a lot because I instantly recognized the name on the presenter list. Anyway, she began her presentation (on in-development graphic design) with a set of auto-run slides depicting many phrases and misconceptions commonly seen on the career of graphic design. That sure got our attention, as even I recognized some of them from personal experience.

Ms. Hunter provided a couple of interesting cases of designs that she’d handled. In the first one, Metrovía, we were shown that certain liberties were taken that broke some design norms, and that caused some cringing from the part of the audience. The second one was a redesign on both the interior and homepage (redesign yet to be applied) of a well-known Ecuadorian restaurant called Pique y Pase. Drastic improvement on both accounts. During the presentation, someone fiddled a bit with the lights, to which she reacted by saying “oh, a light show, that’s part of this whole thing”, getting a good laugh from the audience.

After this presentation, followed another one by a teacher from our college. It was a presentation on where dreams are born. With such a name, you’d expect something much better, but the slides needed a lot of work, design-wise, and it just failed to entertain. Right after, there was a presentation by Spanish music teacher Jordi Lalanza, on music in advertising. There were some technical problems (video not showing), so the presentation was halted before it could get anywhere, so we were given a short break (and some appetizers) before the next presentation by New York-based Pablo Medina of Cubanica, who showed us his short film El Play (see trailer), which took him five years to film and one year to edit. Very interesting.

The next presentation was also interesting. Isabel C. Fiallo Cross from UNIBE put designer-client relationship(s) into clear perspective in a presentation on understanding oneself as a designer to better understand the client. She gave clear definitions on designing, graphic design, graphich designer and then went on to talk about the types of leadership (liberal, autocrat, participative) and the various combinations of these from both the designer and the client in a nicely laid-out table of all possible combinations. I wrote down most of everything here, as did many people.

As the presentation ended we were told to form a line for lunch (late lunch, it was after 2:00 by then). I was one of the first in line, but it quickly became a convoluted mess as we exited the large hall into an outdoor area where tables were set. I wasn’t feeling too well, so I opted out of lunch. I waited inside rather than sit with my friends and did some reading until everyone started to walk back in.

After everyone was seated, we were given a presentation by the guys from Phixarmedia, Juan Carlos Pérez (web design teacher at our college, was in his class during last term) and Emilio Hernández. The first one did most of the talking, showing some phrases and terms (designers as visual leeches, heh), followed by some guidelines for good web design, including something to do with the divine proportion as applied to page layouts. I particularly agreed with his (their?) position on the use of Flash, part of which was this: if you’re thinking of doing an entire page using Flash, don’t do it! Now that’s some darn good advice, right there. We were shown some fine examples of the many great things that can be done with CSS. I got some ideas from them that I hope I can apply to my homepage, which is outdated (with high chances of becoming a barren wasteland if I don’t do something).

Next came a continuation of Jordi Lalanza’s presentation, which had been cut short earlier. Some definitions here and there, followed by some commercial examples. Not bad, but could’ve been much better. Then came a presentation of a Puerto Rican university, which was just some sort of plug for it. Afterwards came a presentation by Agustín Medina, from Spain, about the nine revelations of modern marketing. It was a bit bland at first, but as soon as the countdown count-up started, it began to get interesting, as he provided various examples, including stuff from the Internet (like the Diesel Heidies). Would’ve been nice if they had actually let him finish, as he only gave us eight out of the nine revelations (my annotations are incomplete, grr!).

Eduardo Valcárcel from the Vicini Group gave us a long, interesting talk on what makes a good brand and provided some good examples succesful, original campaigns for various purposes (see here and here). The last three presentations, I won’t comment much about. One was about the designer as a researcher, the other about design and the environment and the last one about how to avoid an economical crisis. That last one didn’t quite fit in an event about graphic design and advertising, and the hall was almost empty by the time he started.

After the event ended, I just wanted to get home, but the weather was against me. I got out of the hotel, and was pouring a bit outside. I paid little mind to it, as I’d walked under some light rain before. The problem is, this wasn’t light rain. It was a thunderstorm! It started raining heavily and I was still just outside the hotel, so I ran to a nearby bus stop. A friend of mine from high school was there, as well as some others who were also not too fortunate. We waited there, hoping the rain would stop soon, but it just got worse. Not just that, but some of that lovely sky-splitting lightning followed by the heavy noise of thunder, which scared us a bit. We even started joking around about how it couldn’t get much worse for us, and what could happen if it did. I suggested that pack of wolves might come from out of nowhere and kill us right there, and someone else thought of a Resident Evil-like outbreak that might have happened while we were in the hotel for the whole day. That was fun.

We decided to make a run for it back to the hotel, and right after we found ourselves under its roof, in an open area (well, more open than the bus stop), the raining started to lighten up a bit. Great! Good thing I had charged some minutes on my cell phone just the day before, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to call home so they’d pick me up earlier than 9:00 p.m.

By the way, sorry if the photos suck. I wanted to get pictures of some of the (more interesting) presenters, but I didn’t get a chance. Most of them left right after presenting. I’ll try to get some better ones if I decide to go on the last day (which is today … it’s past midnight). Good night, or time of day.