Internship - week 4
This was my last week here and I found it quite enjoyable.
The last project I was given was the most interesting one, because it was closer to my personal interests. It was a Dreamworks project, through which they wanted to promote their characters but in a new and fun way.Â
They came up with a ‘Dumplings’ project and asked us to develop the idea. Essentially, they want to create some sort of toys/apps or ways to promote Dreamworks characters but especially in Eastern Asian countries such as South Korea or Japan. Given the fact that I am personally interested in the Japanese language and culture, I found it easy to try to come up with names for their ideas, so I made a list with different words or phrases that might go with it, and I was happy to see that people quite liked some of them.Â
I found out that quite often clients would come to the designers with an idea (sometimes only half developed or not developed at all) and ask them to develop it further. It made me realise that the actual briefs I will get as a designer won’t be similar to the ones I am currently getting at university. The clients will 99% of the time have no experience in design so they won’t be too sure about what they want. It won’t simply be a matter of them asking us to do one thing and us doing it by the agreed deadline. Although I didn’t realise that before, I think it’s quite an interesting thing because I enjoy trying to develop an idea and I think it’s even more pleasant when you are working with people with a similar mindset, as it makes things work faster.
Another interesting thing about this project is that it made me realise we often have to understand exactly what our target audience might want (in this case, children). Sometimes it might be rather difficult to understand what that is, especially if we talk about a big difference in age, culture or race. It made me think of how much can we really understand about our audience, especially if the difference is so big in some cases. Is there a limit or is it possible for us to understand these differences and provide people with what they need?
