A few weeks ago I decided that we needed a break from what we were doing in our current project as we were having a bit of a mental block. To do this I had the idea of a '1 Minute Brief'. We stopped everything we were doing and opened up an a4 blank canvas in illustrator and I asked someone else in the group to come up with a brief for us quickly and time us for 1 minute.
Once we were told the brief we had to start designing. As you can imagine, to come up with a concept through to final design all within one minute is extremely challenging and the results are often really funny and look silly. Sometimes the ideas you have are clever and prove that the first ideas you come up with can be good and pushed further. If you give yourself a one minute brief at the start of a real brief you may find that you come up with a really funny idea that could work. To develop your idea you could potentially use 1 minute briefs throughout and see how the design and idea changes.
When doing these one minute briefs we have also ran it as a competition between 2 designers to see who can come up with the best idea/design. This competitiveness gives the game an added edge and it is funny to see other people's '1 minute' work. We found that all of the other students gathered round to see what we were upto and everyone thought it was a good idea. Vicky even started to play the Countdown music after 30 seconds to add more pressure onto us. Overall I would recommend taking part as it is a real laugh and could potentially help you become a better designer. There is one example of a '1 minute brief' I did, above of a poster for The Printworks in Manchester. The concept is of the CMYK colours involved in print which are the stripes which can also represent the glow paint colours and black which represents the nightlife.
