School: Winner

So, my group won the competition. It was extremely nerve wrecking as they went down the list of all the entries, which were e-mailed to the director to be judged by a group of professors and herself. First half were the entries for the concert, second was ours with the Communication and Design entries. They showed ours second to last, so the whole time I was worrying whether I had e-mailed it wrong or something. Anyway, let's go back to the beginning.

We started on Tuesday with 2 speakers, Guillermo Valverde and Germán Barreneche. In the evening we began brainstorming the ideas for the poster we had to make. My group was really enthusiastic, and they were throwing ideas around everywhere. I sat back and doodle the following in my book:


So I showed my idea to the 1 or 2 people sitting by me, but I never presented it to the group. They had their own idea going, and weren't really paying attention to my sketchbook, so I didn't really care about anything at that point. They had asked the 2 guests for help and advice. On one of these discussions, the guest through out an example for us (as it seemed he wasn't really into any of the previous ideas). The idea he drew, was pretty much my second doodle, a speech bubble with a scribble (in my case, a blob of paint) in the middle. When he drew that, I pulled out my sketchbook. He looked at it and seemed impressed, asking if I had presented this. Admitting I hadn't, he told me not to stay quiet about anything, present everything. Anyway, we continued the brainstorming.

By then, seeing as how my idea didn't seem unanimously received, I got bored and was walking around checking out the other groups' designs. Near the end, I was outside talking with friends, almost ready to leave when they called me inside. They were talking to the second guest (Germán, I believe) who had a speech bubble with the appearance of a paint palette. The group told me to show him my book, so I did. He was really impressed as well (something to note, is that both of them pointed out my first doodle, the one with the pencil. They seemed to have liked that one a lot as well.) He congratulated me for the idea, and told me that I just needed a little bit more effort to have reached the palette idea. My group cheered and that day ended awesome.

Unfortunately I wasted that night Photoshopping some images of the idea I last heard we were gonna use (as the group never told me, ok, let's use yours). Oh well, Wednesday came, 2 other dudes spoke (mainly on urban art), and once again we started working in the evening. This time I busted out Inkscape and started working on the actual design of the palette bubble. By the end of the evening I had a cool vector style drawing. However, Germán suggested we try a more realistic approach, by Photoshopping a palette into a bubble. At night, I finished up a set of the final designs to choose from:


So, Thursday came, final day to finish our work. We decided to use my photoshopped palette, but the various teachers we asked recommended different backgrounds. The group decided on black eventually, and I had to edit the darn JPEG manually to fix it seeing as how I left the editable PSD at home! :P The end result is below, once again. So, it was definitely an interesting experience. I apparently won a tablet (getting it Monday) but it's probably the lesser-known Genius brand, one that doesn't really compare to my current Wacom. ;) So I'll be selling that. Lastly, the Germán dude told me to stand up, and I was actually complimented as a "serene intellectual" in front of all the graphic designers at the University! (At least, the ones who were still left in the auditorium, some had left since they lost ;P) Congratulated by all my class, we then watched the University's salsa dancers show off their moves, and here I am, feeling great. Back to work on all the finals I have left!! X-P