Unit 4 - Produce Outcome

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Introduction
Once you've responded to a brief and developed your ideas, how do you know that they will work in practice? Artists, designers and craftspeople often produce 2D and or 3D prototypes, models, mock-ups, samples or test pieces. This helps them to evaluate their use of styles and materials, to check that their idea will work in practice and be suitable for the people who will pay for it, use it or see it.

To complete Unit 4 of your BTEC First Diploma, you need to develop and extend your realisation skills, and produce a final outcome that matches the brief for your chosen project. You'll also need to evaluate your work and explain its strengths and weaknesses.

Producing something tangible
Imagine that a large company comes to you and asks you to develop a new brand for its products. You discuss ideas, you develop initial responses to the brief, you meet your client and they seem enthusiastic. You finish the designs and the new packaging/advertising/uniforms/ are ready to go into production. Your client sees the first few samples and says: ‘Oh, that's not what I expected. I'm not sure I really like it…' Imagine how much that would cost you in time, effort and materials.

Established artists and designers often work through many stages of development and produce prototypes to prevent this sort of situation arising. From experience they know that clients need to be consulted frequently and to give their final approval before any creative ideas are put into action.

At Elmwood, they present work to their clients at various stages of its development.

We don't produce story boards like an ad agency but we map out a presentation plan that includes the key messages and how we're going to get these across. We'll write skeleton copy and headlines, and present these to the client to show the structure of the document/packaging/website etc, how it's going to work, and why it will appeal to their stakeholders. When the client is happy with these preliminaries, we develop ideas further and at the next session we present two or three visual approaches, colour ways and photographic styles.

Try this

• Read the Elmwood, Ian Loseby, Thompson Design and Monty Rakusen case studies on this website to learn how established creatives produce an outcome to meet a brief.

Make a presentation
Communicating ideas so that your audience really understands what you are saying takes both skill and practice. Artists and designers present their concepts in different ways but if they are working with large corporate clients, they may have to give formal presentations to a number of executives.

At Elmwood: We have to decide whether presentation is going to be formal or informal. We sometimes make a paper presentation where we ask clients to come to our meeting rooms, which have magnetic boards on which we can display the creative work, and take them through the process.

For more formal presentations we create a digital presentation and project it, but if it's a one-to-one meeting we'd use laptops on the desk. Recently we've been using Muji folders for presentations. With these we can write a story showing why we've developed certain ideas and annotate the pages. The client can take the presentation back to their colleagues and they don't have to remember anything because it's all been written down for them.

Try this

• Make a preliminary presentation of your design ideas to a group of your classmates or friends. You should visualise your ideas and present them using whichever of the following methods is most appropriate to the project you're working on:
  • a PowerPoint presentation (for example, to explain how you've developed your ideas and to incorporate photographs and visuals)
  • paper-based samples such as drawings, paintings, examples of typography, etc.
  • models or prototypes
  • fabric samples or swatches
  • mood boards.

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