Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an illustrator based in France. She loves drawing and painting. When she’s not illustrating, she likes eating Pain aux Chocolat ( french bread), reading, going about the city in search for new stationary or taking long walks on the beach.

Why are you an illustrator?
I have gone down many avenues of design. Illustration is the only one that helped me truly express myself.

Did you attend school for fine art or design?
I did Maeer’s MIT Institute for Design Foundation and DSK Supinfocom Rubika International School for 3D animation. For going into the career path of being an illustrator, I would say I am self taught. The previous schools and education helped me to be a better designer but at the end of my 3D education I felt that drawing was always calling me back.

The 100 Days Project is originally a workshop held by Michael Bierut at the Yale School of Art that entails performing a creative operation that you’re capable of repeating every day. Taking inspiration from this, Debbie Millman, conducts this exercise each year with her class at School of Visual Arts. As an Indian student pursuing my Masters in Branding in USA, I always felt that the western world has always undermined the abilities of the eastern world. In fact whatever information they have about India is through Bollywood movies like slumdog millionaire. We are still the poor land of elephants and snakes.

The purpose of my project was to bring about the stories of the east – the discoveries and inventions in the field of science, art, culture, food, stories, language to the forefront. So many things that are now “American” are actually not from America. This led to ‘East Influences West’ on instagram where I illustrated and animated things that are from the Eastern countries like India, China, Japan, Persia etc.

Why are you in Advertising?
I can get paid to think up cool ideas, draw, shoot and make stuff. I like all things creative and advertising gives me a way to dabble in many things.

Did you attend school for fine art or design or Communications?
Yes, I did. I went to Miami Ad School (the Miami location) for an art direction program. And before that I went to MOP Vaishnav in Chennai where I majored in advertising photography and learned a bit of everything from fine arts to tv production.

Network Advertising, one of India’s leading independent ad agencies, has launched a campaign from home-grown lifestyle brand Ellementry.  The campaign highlights how Ellementry products blend form and functionality – making them the most thoughtful and beautiful gifts this festive season – No more thoughtless gifts this festive season.

Shayondeep Pal – Chief Creative Officer, Network Advertising, said, “Ellementry gives you the opportunity to build a brand through good old days of print. With a core proposition of form marrying function, it creates a design genre that’s new to us. Never before we had mundane products that take aesthetics seriously. And that’s how we arrived at the idea of ‘everyday beautiful.’ To find beauty in everyday things. Like a rolling pin or a tea rest. From a creative point of view, there’s immense satisfaction in reviving the dying art of soft persuasion through headlines in the mad days of cluttered television.”

TBWA\Helsinki designed the campaign for the Agency of the Year survey blindfolded to illustrate the challenges of operating without knowing what you’re doing. Agency of the Year survey measures client satisfaction between marketing, advertising, and communications agencies in Finland. The exceptional execution of the campaign aims to demonstrate the importance of feedback and data in the cooperation between agencies and clients.

TBWA\Helsinki won the Agency of the Year title in Finland last year and thus got to design this year’s campaign for the survey. The aim of the campaign is to show how important client feedback is for agencies – without feedback work is like operating blind, and designers of TBWA\Helsinki demonstrated this by creating ads blindfolded, without being able to see what they were doing.

– The results are bizarre, which really isn’t a surprise. This was an extreme way of dramatizing how challenging designing advertising would be if you didn’t know what you are doing. You can’t emphasize enough the importance of feedback and transparency between clients and agencies, underlines TBWA’s designer Timo Klemola who was one of the blindfolded designers.

The print ads that are now being published in Finnish newspapers were designed for some of the biggest brands in Finland, such as Fortum, Nokian Tyres, Vepsäläinen, Atria Wilhelm, Arla, and S-market.

Feedback on strengths and areas of improvement

Agency of the Year survey gives agencies information about their strengths and areas of improvement compared to their competitors. In addition, the study charts the attributes and criteria that effect when choosing an agency and maps out the general trends in marketing.

– We were honored to design the campaign for the Agency of the Year study. Being nominated as the agency of the year between marketing communications agencies was an honorable mention, but even more important was the data we got from the study. We naturally listen to our clients and follow the customer-satisfaction in many ways and that’s why we value the Agency of the Year survey’s data highly, explains Sami Tikkanen, the CEO of TBWA\Helsinki.

From knowledge to action

Agency of the Year survey is based on a concept created by a Swedish marketing research agency Regi and offers information about the clients’ stance towards the quality of the participating agency’s work. The clients respond to a survey evaluating the results, fluency and agency’s understanding of the clients’ business and needs.

– If marketing is designed without data and feedback, the final results are rarely optimal. Remedial feedback is communication at its best, and giving feedback is at the core of the Agency of the Year study. By sharing their views about the strengths and areas of improvement of their agency, companies do a favor to themselves, for their agency and for the entire field of marketing, states Pia Grahn, the CEO of Regi.

Vamika Sardana is a Visual Designer and soon to be graduate of the Strategic Design & Management program from Parsons School of Design in New York. She specializes in print design for apparel and illustration. Her design style lively, bold, full of spirit and extremely happy. About 9 out of 10 times in a day she is thinking about food. She loves creating stories through her designs and takes a lot of inspiration from her culture. She is a very curious person who uses a lot of color in her artwork but is quite the opposite in real life. She is constantly exploring the why’s of things’ and most importantly she does not think Ross and Rachel were on a break 😛

Why are you a Graphic Designer?
It happened by mistake actually. I never wanted to be a graphic designer, I always wanted to be a fashion designer but when I got accepted to MIT institute of design I kind of changed my mind because I thought that graphic design is a more versatile field and also because my other college options were not as good as MIT really 😛

Did you attend school for fine art or design?
For Design, I went to the MAEERS MIT Institute of Design in Pune.