Curator

Last week, Jerome spent the week at the design university ALBA in Beirut with the 1st year Master in Interaction Design and Art Direction, working on narratives, mood board, story telling and photography. It was a direct hands-on exchange based on Curator and Jerome’s past experience in helping creatives and brands tell their story online…

The week long workshop was based on short intense sessions lasting 10 to 45 minutes. The aim was to introduce the students to techniques and methodologies, exploring their limits with an extreme emphasis on audience empathy.
Topics included:

– Brain-storming and brain-writing: How to kickstart the creative process, finding a topic and analyse it.Working on concise definitions of ideas—expressing visual concepts verbally

– Mood boarding: collecting images, classifying and organising according to various criteria (aesthetic, meaning)

– Picture research: how & where. Exploring the internet and the not so obvious places to find images that will help the creative process. Selecting sources and the right images to help convey the message. Exploring the offline: library, second hand bookshops, found pictures, etc.

– Brief-writing: including a series of sessions where the students had to write a brief for their picture researchers when directing a project (film, photography, branding/identity, etc.)

– Editing: building up a narrative, assembling a story from diverse images, selecting and refining choices

– Presenting: voice intonation, body language, context of the presentation

While Curator is enabling a modern, mobile way to collect, organise and present visual stories, the idea behind the workshop was a back-to-basics approach. We decided to have the students use the Mac’s Finder to organise and present their work. It was interesting to strictly limit the tools available to produce the presentations and gave us all a lot of insights on how to work better with simple tools. It also highlighted possible new directions for Curator to integrate the traditional workflow on desktop and laptop computers.

Big thanks to the Alba University for their invitation and their kind welcome—we had a great week working with interesting students with bright ideas a great dedication.