Heather Marie Metcalfe

NMP Evaluation

When I was setting out on my NMP I had no idea what I wanted to do and actually felt a little lost with 14weeks worth of work to aim for. Luckily Laura had the idea to work together on some competition briefs, we thought that YCN was a good option to try out some ideas considering our success last year so the initial part of my NMP was to work on 2 YCN briefs, we had about 3 weeks per project on our timetable and a week for tweaks.

Boost was a really enjoyable project but we did get off to a slow start, I think because the brief consisted of so much we were a little overwhelmed with where to start and what ideas would stand out. Eventually we came up with #uptheanti. The concept was to boost your antioxidants (in the drink) but also challenge yourself to do good things on a daily basis. We thought this was a really strong idea, better than our others, as it involved a lot of customer interaction and really brought people into the campaign. The designs took a while to get right, once we had the flavours picked we worked on creating the brand around this. In the end we did end up spending a little too much time refining the designs and the idea and we did go slightly over our time limit that we set. I think we worked well yet again together on this brief, Laura focused on the copy and posters for the campaign while I created the brand, this played to both of our strengths so we could work efficiently. Working in a team allowed us to share the workload and iron out the issues pretty quickly.

Our next project was YCN Standard Life, we wanted to try a more serious brief and savings and investments was definitely that. Getting younger people to start saving is hard already so creating this campaign took a lot more thought. We struggled on ideas for a while and when we finally settled on our Superhero squirrel we were quite disappointed to find something similar had already been done so that put us off that idea. Considering we had less time on this idea due to over-running with Boost we started to panic with ideas and considered abandoning the brief altogether a few times but we got through it and after a good few brainstorms and stewing over ideas we came up with our concept of #FollowYourInstinct. This was all about animals who hoard food and it being a natural thing to save. Once we had this we literally had  a few days to get this all finished and uploaded to YCN but I think this pressure made the campaign. There are a few tweaks that could have been made, such as the cover of the savings guide but I am really proud of the project and what we achieved in the space of time, especially considering we nearly gave up! We got both of our YCN briefs uploaded on time for the deadline so fingers crossed for this!

             When the Future Lions brief came up me and Laura were really eager to have a go at this and try some alternative ideas and designs. We initially brainstormed quite a few ideas and selected the Pampers to work on. The app was for younger mums teaching youngsters potty training. I think we really did well with this brief as it is a little different than our usual designs and it gave us chance to be inventive too. We then found out that the deadline had been extended so having already finished Pampers we moved onto another idea which was the McDonalds selfie checkout. We did this within four days so it was a pretty tight deadline but I am happy with the results! Both of these briefs have been submitted to Future Lions.

            I have also been working on a personal side project since the start of my NMP and this was based around type. It was purely to have a bit of fun and to create something every day. I initially started with hand drawn type but then decided that I couldn’t really draw so moved onto the computer. I found this project really fun and I didn’t set myself any rules of deliverables, I just let it roll and I’m glad I did because I am really pleased with the results. I have created a typeface, letters and numbers and I feel this shows another side to my designs, a fun side!

            Lastly I was working on some monoprints and I intended to create patterns and develop them further but unfortunately with all of the briefs I took on I seem to have left this project behind.

            Overall I am really pleased with all of the work I have produced and feel that I have kept up the standard throughout. I feel like my time management has improved and I have been able to handle each project well. I am glad I broke down the 14weeks into different briefs because I have tried out lots of different approaches and developed my skills. All of my development is on my blog:

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