16 Oct Worldskills Abu Dhabi 2017: C2

Competition Day 2

Editorial, collage and infographic. All under six hours. All aboard the fast train.

Nick Lamatalale (NL) kicked off an amazing drumming bongo with Thomas Palacin-Danthine which kicked Anne Cappelen Grandt and Heng-Hsiu Liu into a dance off to lighten the mood of a late start on Day 2. It was perfect. Unscripted. Delightfully primal.

Lengthy briefing session quickly brought back the stress of a complex brief. Starting points seem only to add to confusion and several updates extended question time, which threatened to reduce competitor open communication with their experts.

Nevertheless, competition started strongly, marking continued from the night before and the day flew.

A few tips and notes:

1. Learn the various ways to impose an Indesign document for a foreign printer. Use distiller, manually move pages to impose in a copied INDD document, drop in PDF’s or simply use Acrobat. Practice these methods. There should be no excuse to not be able to find a workaround when it comes to duplexing or printing a booklet.
2. Info-graphics are exactly that. Spend time to make the iconography and readable text work harmoniously with noticeable legibility. Hierarchy again plays a huge role here (*see a trend?). A table of numbers and data isn’t an info-graphic. It is a table.
3. A handsome and well composed montage of imagery is like oil paintings to visual artists. It is the slowest drying of all the medium’s and often whilst mix-media (ie: vector elements and patterning) can come into play, the classics always look are ‘just right’. They guide the eye through the work. Also, don’t put a rhino hovering in a waterfall. They can swim, but generally, the way images are built up, it is best to stay grounded.
4. Swift roll out into social media spaces is vital nowadays. Don’t re-invent the wheel, just take your key elements and re-configure for the difference canvas sizes of the social inter-webs. Make solid colours work a little harder. Don’t have tiny images or simply scale down the cover of your magazine.
5. Your presentation board skills can always be better. Practice mounting work. Float mount, stack, mosaic tile it… Do everything you can to get better at setting square bits of paper on immaculately cut foam core.

I’ve lost my phone on the bus, so imagery might be delayed for a few more days. Drats.

In the meantime, follow the #worldskillsaustralia instagram account.