Fred Marber BA Illustration and Visual Media 54321 for me is a project about collaboration. Illustration is often viewed as a solitary profession, drawing alone in a small studio, but I wanted to do a project that pushes me to collaborate with my friends, with peers and people who I find inspiring. Then to take all that shared creativity and publish it inside of a magazine filled with all the things that people love and are inspired by. Throughout this year I have switched up the way I normally work. When I used to start a project I would work on it by myself, brainstorm it myself and complete it entirely by myself. However, over this year I have started to collaborate and reach out to multiple different practitioners. This has taught me the value of opening up your creative space and sharing it with other people. I have been creating my SIP with a friend called James Milroy, we have both found value in bouncing ideas off of each other instead of the usual way of talking to yourself. I knew I wanted to collaborate on a project since last year when I read an article where It’s Nice That interviewed creatives who collaborate together and I read this quote: “We’ve realised that at times we can be our own hindrance. It’s been important for us to allow one another to fail.” (Goh et al., It takes two: the secrets of enduring creative collaborations 2023) This past year I have had trouble with collaboration. I had scheduled a shoot with a few photographer friends of mine and on the day of the shoot, about an hour before shooting, all my photographer friends cancelled. I spent an hour calling up people I knew who could take their place but most people were busy. In my state of panic I texted James and he agreed to help. For me this was a spark of inspiration into collaboration, as when one collaborative opportunity fell through another one opened up. During the creation of ‘54321’, James and I decided to interview one another so we could understand for future interviews the style and tone of our interviewing as well as to create a layout for future magazines based upon our own interviews. Once we had completed the interviews and had made some form of layout from our respective interviews, we then decided to critique each other's choices. Initially we both found this hard because it feels as if you are making fun or bullying one another’s work but then I remembered a quote I had heard before: “We LOVE bad ideas. We learn from them and they help us identify good ones.” (Keller, A. and It’s Nice That (2017) Creative collaboration: do many hands always make light work? Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/creative-collaboration-advice-facebook-yawn-glimpse-bread-miscellaneous-010817). After remembering this I felt more open to giving critiques on one another, for example, I thought the text on the cover James did was too small and squished together, so I told him and we discussed typography and we talked about possibly talking to people whose SIP ideas were typefaces. This idea of networking and collaborating with people on my course from multiple fields was exciting as I had never really done anything like it before, this being said, its been found psychologically that teams built up of multiple different disciplines from multiple different people are more likely to succeed creatively (Fay et al., Getting the most out of multidisciplinary teams: A multi‐sample study of Team Innovation in health care 2006). Recently we conducted our first interview with Harry Simms, he runs a vintage shop on the South Bank. Getting the chance to do this interview was rough. Harry is an extremely busy person, so during the time it took to get an interview James and I pushed one another to try and adequately use our time. We decided to concoct his ‘nightmare scenario’ and book a second interview with a different person as a way to utilise our time and stay agile and adaptable when working. This showed us how capable we are when plans are slow or fall through. This situation showed me what we would most likely have to deal with as collaborators, after we graduate as people are busy and we would have to think about how to approach them and deal with plans falling through. Overall, I believe ‘54321’ has shown me the power of collaboration, and what it means to work with another creative and how valuable it is to have another voice in the room. This SIP has shown me the direction I wish to take after my degree and how collaboration in any regard will be important to me. References: 1. Goh, K., Durimel, Jalan and Durimel, Jibril (2023) ‘It takes two: the secrets of enduring creative collaborations ’, It’s Nice That. Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/longest-running-creative-collaborations-thematic-creative-industry-260923 (Accessed: 2024).
2. Keller, A. and It’s Nice That (2017) Creative collaboration: do many hands always make light work? Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/creative-collaboration-advice-facebook-yawn-glimpse-bread-miscellaneous-010817 (Accessed: 2024). 3.Fay, D. et al. (2006) ‘Getting the most out of multidisciplinary teams: A multi‐sample study of Team Innovation in health care’, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 79(4), pp. 553–567. doi:10.1348/096317905x72128. 4. Marber F. (2024) Spiderpeople Sketches for Harry Hartex
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