Visiting Lecture - Craig Oldham

A few weeks ago we had a visiting lecture by Craig Oldham who is a designer and art director at the award winning design agency Music in Manchester.

The title of the lecture was “But Isn’t That Your Job?” and was an informative and funny talk about Craig’s personal experiences with illustrators through 6 different projects. The first project was a marketing campaign for Manchester City Football Club called the “Big Four”. The job of the campaign was to promote four new players the club had bought and whip up some excitement amongst the fans and I guess in doing so taunt the other big football clubs.  At some point in their career each of these new players had played for one of the top-opposing clubs. A poster was created for each player and was themed according to the player’s attributes on the pitch. The below posters left to right are Emmanuel Adebayor illustrated by Michael Gillette, Craig Bellamy illustrated by Todd Slater, Shaun Wright Phillips illustrated by Chris White and Carlos Teves illustrated by Shephard Fairey. Although I know absolutely nothing about football Craig made the presentation of the project really enjoyable and I must say I found his raw style of presenting very refreshing. Craig described the process from roughs to finished pieces and spoke about the many problems the project presented in terms of budget and artwork. Another interesting project that was highlighted was the re-branding of Chester Zoo. Craig approached illustrator Adam Hayes who is a master of typography and asked him to create several sets of lettering for the project, which were later turned into a font. Adams approach to the project was one of complete enthusiasm, and you could definitely tell he really enjoyed what he was doing.

Through each project Craig explained how important it was to find the right illustrator for the job and told us how difficult it can be to find illustrators out there. This just goes to show how important self-marketing is and having a good web presence is the start of making sure you get seen.