BUTTERMILK GOES TO BOSTON – PART 3
“Buttermilk Goes to Boston” is a four part blog post about our journey to speaking at this year’s The Dieline Conference. We’ll post an update every month leading up to May when we finally head north to present “Oops, I Became a Packaging Designer” at the conference.
Click here to read Buttermilk Goes to Boston – Part 2 and Part 1
May is right around the corner and we are half excited about our upcoming presentation and half scared to death! We’re slowly but surely putting together our presentation and are feeling pretty good about it.
So how’d we go about pulling together all the content for our presentation? Reaching back into 7 years of package design is a tall order to fill. We want to provide value to our audience and not just do a portfolio review so we really had to sit back and think about things: what were those meaningful projects that really put us through the ringer- those projects where we really learned some things.
As we looked at the landscape and we realized we needed some sort of organizational method for the projects we were presenting- so we settled on a type of “good, bad, and ugly” scenario. It took a couple trips to the patio of our favorite meeting place to come up with the list of projects to discuss but we narrowed it down and now we had our list. Now of course we couldn’t just leave it at “good, bad, and ugly” so we brainstormed ways to make that interesting and that led to The Boss – but you’ll have to see us in Boston to hear how that idea pans out!
We thought long and hard about these projects we picked out. What about them made them particularly challenging. What did we learn from them? What would we have done differently? What went right!? (if you can believe it) Some projects dealt with things like getting the right info up front, dealing with photographers, and how to spot a good idea when you’ve got one. We’ll be providing takeaways for each project because we really feel like providing takeaways is what is going to make our content resonate with the audience and hopefully give them some inspiration to take back to their day jobs.
As we continue to put together our talk and polish we’ve realized a couple of things:
- We’ve worked on a bunch of projects, both big and small.
- A packaging designer’s education is never complete- every project presents a new set of challenges and learnings.
- Sometimes when looking back at work we’ve done, it’s not quite as awesome as we once thought it was!
We’re having a blast putting together our presentation, rehearsing, and feeling anxious for Boston. The reality is setting in that we’re presenting at the packaging design conference in front of an audience of our peers. Its nerve wracking and thrilling all at the same time and we know we’ll miss it as soon as its over.
