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The One Club of Creativity Special Section

#OneShow2017: Enhancing SA's young creative yield

Today we find out from the One Show's SA Young Ones' student judges' about SA's significant creative talent and why we need to simplify to amplify and better promote design as a career possibility.

One Show Creative Week is well underway, with SA bringing home 7 bronze pencils and 17 merit awards from the first awards night held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday. SA also brought home our first ever portfolio winners at The One Show's Young Ones Awards held on Tuesday night, in the categories of graphic design, photography and illustration.

To boost your excitement until the final results from the One Show's culmination in the awards night tonight, I chatted to our SA judging contingent for the One Show’s Young Ones about the state of local creativity. They raised interesting points on the importance of a well-written rationale, not expecting your work to speak for itself and the all-important need for a truly inclusive, transformed industry…

Simplify to amplify

Reddy: My personal view on global creativity is that brands need to stand out. Culture is way ahead of what we do, our target should be trying to be ahead of what is happening in culture. When something breaks in culture, it's amazing how it spreads. Creativity or the ones that are creating should take inspiration of what's happening in culture and try push our work so we also shape what's happening. There's so much material out there. It's just a matter of editing: simplify to amplify.

Schaefer: I'm happy that South Africans were named winners in the Young Ones’ photography, graphic design and illustration portfolio categories. I was impressed with the graphic design and illustration portfolios I assessed, and clearly, the other judges were as well!

Many of the projects that I judged in the advertising portfolios were using brands to create social improvement and/or to support causes. Often a product innovation was the focus of the campaign. Students seemed to be less concerned with the benefits of the product but rather focussed on how the product or brand can be used to benefit society.

The international students all created professional-looking and -sounding presentation videos for their campaigns. I wondered where they got such slick voice-over artists from, or if they all have professional actors at their colleges! On the downside, the students had to write brief explanations or rationales of the projects submitted. I was shocked to see how badly written some of these rationales were. Did these students assume that the work would speak for itself and therefore rushed through writing the descriptions? Excellent representation of one's creative work and the context thereof, both in the spoken and written word, is important, especially for an international audience who would not always be familiar with that which one takes for granted.

Promote design as a career possibility

Van der Westhuizen: May I be so bold to be allowed this opportunity to express the importance of an inclusive, transformed marketing and advertising industry? Never in the history of our country has it been more important than now to celebrate our rich, boundless, enigmatic and beautiful cultural heritage and experience ground-breaking new work that truly speaks to our country's people. The youth offers us a glimpse into this, however, we need to promote, encourage, motivate and nurture our future creative talents in helping us build this creative industry with relevant, moving and culturally sensitive advertising and communication, which speaks not only to our fellow countrymen's eyes but to their hearts, too. Moreover, we need the input and support of our creative industries and educational providers to encourage and promote design as a career possibility which in turn will develop and promote our local talent and affirm its importance and relevance that does not need to adhere to international standards, but rather South African standards.

Alexander Podrezov © –
Alexander Podrezov © – 123RF.com

Sudheim: Marcuse once said ‘creativity requires conflict’. In developing countries such as South Africa, there is a lot more conflict – especially between ideologies – than in highly developed countries, where many of the big questions have been settled and norms are pervasive and universal.

Thus, often work from the ‘first world’ is concerned primarily with style whereas we are still grappling with issues of substance. It’s important for local creativity to take up this challenge and tackle the big, ugly socio-economic and political issues in a way that fuses substance with style. But this isn’t prescriptive in any way – many of the global trends are about a postmodern sense of ‘play’ and there’s no reason our creatives can’t beat the best of them in that realm as well.

The SA creative context

Pretorius: We often think that we should compare with global standards and trends, but we have significant talent in South Africa. Our South African context encourages a greater social awareness, possibly more so than in developed or ’first world’ countries. With this awareness comes greater diversity in ideas and solutions.

In a recent forum, institutions from Europe and the United States were impressed by our ‘ways of working’ and the kinds of work produced. Students especially aim to produce meaningful work and they have a hunger to make a difference, have an influence and to become change agents.

We can all learn from this way of approaching creativity. You can follow The One Club on Twitter and click through to our One Show special section for the latest updates!

About Leigh Andrews

Leigh Andrews AKA the #MilkshakeQueen, is former Editor-in-Chief: Marketing & Media at Bizcommunity.com, with a passion for issues of diversity, inclusion and equality, and of course, gourmet food and drinks! She can be reached on Twitter at @Leigh_Andrews.
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