The Friday Creative Playtime
Hello everyone! Today, we need to talk about one of the best ideas we had since the creation of the Yousign Design Studio: the Friday Creative Playtime✨
It all started with a problem: for a while, every Yousign blog post was illustrated by one of us, or by a freelance illustrator of our choice, at a rate of approximately one article every month. It worked well: we could select alternatively who would make the illustration of the month depending on everyone’s availability and we liked the diversity brought by each graphic style. But one day, the Marketing Team approached us with the idea of publishing one blog article every week… and therefore needed a new illustration every week! We felt it was much more complicated to organize.
Then we had a bright idea: gather our forces during a short creativity workshop 💪. This is how we set up this meeting, every other Friday morning to work together and produce numerous illustrations.
The First Workshop 🎨
Our first session took place in early February. The Marketing Team wants to cover one topic and, more precisely, one business line every month in its articles. The development of the eSignature is particularly significant in these business lines, hence the importance of creating content specially for them. We started with two topics, to move ahead: Real Estate and Human Resources.
At first, we brainstormed for 15 minutes around the keywords of the business line, to highlight reflection areas that could be interesting to illustrate. To do this, we used the collaborative tool Miro to create mind maps. Then, we looked for ideas on our own and started to sketch or to produce directly, according to everyone’s habits. It was a new exercise for me and I was a little nervous. I was afraid of not being able to find ideas, to create interesting visuals. Luckily, I had already done graphic research on these themes for another project, so i could re-explore some of them.
About an hour later, we shared our ideas and our drafts and gave advice to each other, then we finished our illustrations by the end of the morning. We tried to set deadlines for each step, to pace the session. The goal was to be able to produce illustrations within the allotted time, and not to have to finish them later. Regarding this first attempt, it was a bit difficult to keep on time because we were not familiar with this type of exercise, but we still created some varied illustrations. There was a great atmosphere, which made me optimistic for the next sessions.
A new idea: guests 🙌
After this first good experience, we wanted to repeat it, but not only with our team this time! During one of our weekly team meetings, we had the great idea of inviting an illustrator to share this moment with us. And the following Friday, we were back with an additional member: Bertrand Bastide 🚀. The theme was Insurance, another theme I had already worked on. We then followed the same schedule as the first time. At the end of the session, our guest shared his feelings about this experience: he told us it was a very interesting exercise and it would be a pleasure to come back (maybe with more mental preparation). He suggested that we allowed more time to the creative sequence because it was a bit hard to finish an illustration properly. So the next time, we adjusted our schedule like this:
- 9.30-9.40 (10'): Brainstorming
- 9.40-10.10 (30'): Sketch
- 10.10-10.20 (10'): Sketch sharing point, choice of a graphic axis
- 10.20-11.20 (60'): Graphic Production
- 11.20-11.30 (10'): Graphic Production sharing point
- 11.30-12.50 (80'): Graphic Production - finalization
- 12.50-1 pm (10'): Sharing
In this way, we had enough time to create a finalized illustration.
For this new workshop, on the topic of Sales Team, we invited once again an illustrator: Julien Cather ✨. It was the first theme I had no experience with, so I took advantage of the train ride to start thinking about it, to feel more prepared. I came up with a few ideas, and I found others afterwards. The schedule seemed much more balanced this time and I had enough time to finalize my illustrations. The illustrator’s feedback was once again very positive, which makes us want to continue these workshops in the future.
In conclusion
We are very proud and enthusiastic about these new regular meetings ❤️. They are very stimulating and are very good sharing moments between creative people. It is so inspiring to see everyone’s ideas and work together on a same project. It is a perfect break during the week, when we can put aside the current projects for a while and do pure creation. Inviting people from the outside is really cool, and seeing how they work is super rewarding. I look forward to pursuing these workshops (#covid19) and I hope we will be able to organize them for a long time 🤞
PS: If you are an illustrator and want to join us for an illustration session, contact us at studio@yousign.com 🙂
