By Mona Sharif

5 days, 5 learnings. 

Today, I decided to reflect on my 5 biggest learnings from these 5 days of post-half term break. 

On Monday, we came back to the studio and started working in our teams on D&AD briefs. You can feel in the studio an energy stronger than ever. You can feel that each of us is working hard with passion and to trying to produce their best work. 

Shekhar Deshpande gave us on Monday a great master class about insights, which can be described as a discovery of a human emotion, explaining why people behave a certain way, why they do what they do. Insights explains how people feel, not how they think.

1 – We learnt that how something ends affects how we remember it. 

As our experiencing self is constantly moving, our remembering self only remembers the peak (best or worst moment) and the end of the experience and isn’t affected by the duration. 

2 – Leaving something incomplete makes people want to complete it. 

Therefore, in advertising, we don’t need to give the answer, we gotta give credit to our audience’s intelligence. 

On Tuesday, Greg and Thomas gave us a masterclass about how to win D&AD pencils, in fact, they know what they’re talking about because they won a yellow, plus a black, plus a white pencil on one work they produced for the Nationwide brief, while they were on placement after SCA. 

3 – ‘You can’t fail if you never give up’ is the most important and inspiring learning I took from their talk. As we’ve been told more then once, hard work beats talent. 

Wednesday was the first step of the Sign-off process on D&AD. 

4- Having a deadline forces you to manage your time and helps/forces you to have ideas. I discovered trying to be ahead (or at least on time) of deadline by pretending the deadline is a few hours or days before the actual deadline helps me manage my time. 

Tom Bender from Tom and Tom gave us a masterclass I absolutely loved and as an art director, I started the No.5 right after he recommended it us. 

5- Start an organised library with references: photographers (fashion, lifestyle, still life,…), directors (documentary, comedy,…) and various artists, illustrators, designers. We have to own our craft, therefore we need to have references of people who can execute what we can’t do by ourselves. 

Finally, today is the birthday of a member of the SCA family: Naomi, so happy birthday again Gnome, love you!