During the last few months, I have had the opportunity to participate as a Director for the Elevate Competition. For nearly 4 months I was able to be head of Digital Content Creation and to help the other members of my team prepare for the Competition. So what is this Elevate Competition? Every other semester Brigham Young University-Idaho hosts an Interdisciplinary Competition for Social Change. Teams made of students from all the different Colleges on campus come together to answer a question that deals with social change. This question has ranged from Mental health, Forming relationships, and for the next competition; Finding Balance.
As a member of this team, we had one purpose that we worked towards for the last few months. That purpose was to get everything ready to go to be able to host the event. This ranged from creating posters for advertisements, writing up the guidelines and styling them for the contestants to read and understand what their goal will be for the event. We even created Social Media Posts, although social media and the writing aspects were not what I spent my time on. As part of the Visual team subgroup, we were tasked with creating anything visual This meant finding pictures for the guidelines, creating the posters as previously mentioned as well as any other graphic that was needed for the guidelines, or anything else in general. We had 4 months to finish all these things so that the next semester where the contest is being held, all that would need to be figured out and organized is the event itself, as all the advertising elements are already made and finished. We worked hard with our team, as well as the others on the board to make sure everything was good to go for the competition event.
Visual Team and Guidelines Team meeting together. I am on the far right.
The project :
Some of the visual team’s tasks were simple, others were harder. For the most part, I spent a lot of time doing photography research on free to use a website such as Unsplash or Pixels to find a picture to fit our theme so that we would not have to go out and make our own. Besides that, the rest of the work I did was on posters. We had a few different styles and versions for different parts of the event. Here are a few examples of the work I did.
Challenges:
Throughout the entire project, we only experienced one major challenge, and that was the emersion of the Worldwide pandemic of COVID-19. In late March when it hit the US, the government instructed us to not gather in groups, and so our teams were not able to meet in person. luckily we had been able to get a vast majority of everything done, so not being able to meet together was not the end, but what we did not foresee was the end of Elevate was nearer than we thought. It was decided to postpone the event to a later semester, as BYUI had decided not to hold on-campus classes for the Spring semester. Since spring was when the event would be held, all our plans and work came to a staggering halt. We were able to put some final touches on the specific assignments we were working on, but then that was it. We were done. We won’t be able to see the fruits of our labors, but not everything can go according to plan. It was a huge challenge that is still on our minds because now we have to try to figure out how to hold an event in the future when those apart of the original planning process aren’t able to be there. We shall see how it goes, and hopefully, elevate will continue in the fall.
Project processes:
Our group of individuals was a well-oiled machine. Our head Director Caryn Esplin who is the associate dean of Interdisciplinary Studies, once told us that we were much more effective in the planning process than previous directors. Each week on Tuesday we would meet as a whole group to discuss progress and talk about what needs to be done. Then we would break off into our separate teams, Visual and guidelines, and get to work on those tasks. During the week on our own time, we would continue to work on our separate projects and then meet back up the following week. This process was very effective as it kept us accountable to each other and motivated to get the work done. We maintained this for months until we were told not to meet anymore. By that point, we simply worked from home to finish up our projects and are where we are today.
Overall Experiences:
Overall I loved working with Elevate. I was able to work on my design skills and put to practice things I have learned in a real-world setting. Instead of working for a grade, I was working to accomplish something, which has allowed me to become a much better designer and to work well with a group or team. As a whole team we had so much fun, we became close friends being able to joke around and have fun, while still staying focused and on task. It was a fantastic experience and I hope I can participate in the execution part of the event whenever that is, but only time will tell.
Insights/Takeaways
As previously mentioned, I gained some great things from this project. I now consider myself a much better graphic designer and can work with a team more efficiently. I learned how to research different styles of posters and work done for past Elevate competitions and use that in my own way. I learned that there is a fine line between being independent and working things out on my own and the opposite, reaching out for help. I had to swallow my pride from time to time and reach out to my teammates to help me finish my work. Most importantly, however, I like to think I gained a greater appreciation for critiques. Many times my rough drafts were not accepted and I have to redo them. The critiques were not harsh per se, but still, it is hard to be told no on something that you made. I learned to accept the critique and move on. That was my greatest take away from Elevate.
