Design Instantly?!

I was both nervous and excited to be at Mahindra & Mahindra Pvt. Ltd., a leading automotive company for a project briefing.
The brief was simply to design a poster for an annual campus recruitment event. I suggested we would need more articles for visibility on the ground like the stall backdrop, the stall itself, give-aways, the works. The client gave two clear phrases to comprise for the basic message,
1.Freedom at Work
2.Opportunity to grow
The target audience was young graduates and students from various engineering colleges. Besides M&M, there would be other companies with their promotional stalls as well.
Little did I know that I had been given precisely 24 hours to come up with a concept so that it could be presented to the head honchos for final approval.

I thought the deadline was crazy and wanted to turn it down.

Can I really do this?

I was already getting ideas on my way back from our briefing. Obviously there wasn't a chance of a mistake to make as there was no back and forth possible here.

Here is what was presented at the end of 24 hrs.

I said-
"Grunge often referred to as the Seattle sound is a sub genre of alternative rock that was created in mid 80s by American bands. Inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal and indi-rock, grunge is characterised by heavily distorted electric guitars, contrasting song dynamics & apethetic lyrics. Many grunge musicians were known for their unkempt appearances. It continues to impact modern music.
Indian college youth today listens to such music as this, together with Indi pop and raga at the same time. This is often reflected in their lifestyle in the form of clothes, accessories and hairstyles they sport."

And this is what I had on my slide,

The two posters that lay emphasis on the phrases given in the brief, to which we added some copy of our own. We also suggested two lines from our side,
1. Clutch the opportunity and accelerate your career
2. If you have the drive in you, we'll give you the wheels
They bounced it with their internal team and reverted saying that they'd prefer these over the phrases.

The posters went ahead with only slight changes in copy. We made bookmarks for give-aways and had the illustrations for the stall backdrop up in the next three days.



We are flattered to see these very illustrations on the M&M official t-shirts as well. They still read "If you have the drive in you, we'll give you the wheels" !

Project closure: Dec '07