Urban sketching is even inspiring my work.
This year I was asked to present at two conferences: one was a Pechakucha presentation on urban sketching at the BC Society of Landscape Architects AGM and Conference back in April, and over the weekend of October 5/6 I was asked to be on a panel about graphic design alongside two other Vancouver design studio principals at the Canadian Association of Communicators in Education (CACE) conference in Whistler.
The topic I chose for my presentation was “Client-designer communication”. I’ve been communicating with design clients for eons, and I am pretty sure I’ve seen it all. I can deal with anything from production schedule delays and out-of-scope requests all the way to excrement colliding with the air ventilation unit.
While I have a lot to say on the subject, I wanted to make it fun for my audience. So I had to inspire myself first. As an artist, I can trust my ability to look at things that I have seen many times before, as if I was seeing them for the first time. If I could incorporate some kind of drawing into my presentation, I knew that would get me excited and inspired about whatever I was going to discuss. So I made extensive use of a diagram that I drew of a wiener dog race this past summer. The wiener dog race became a metaphor for my topic. Because hey, aren’t we designers and our clients just like dogs and their owners? And even if we aren’t, I will make it so.
I think I amused my audience as well as gave them some good advice — a few of my slides are shown here. And since the accommodation was provided by the conference, I brought Jeff along for a weekend at Whistler. He claims he was born to be a trophy spouse, so I was glad to provide him with this rare opportunity to live out his destiny.
