Gauge/AIGA Presentation - John Coy

Although I give him props for trying to keep my attention and for creating such amazing designs, John Coy’s presentation didn’t really interest me. After attending last quarter’s presentation by Rebecca Mendez, I was expecting something a little more lively and entertaining, but this presentation was a little disappointing. Yes, I did gain a few things out of the presentation, but for the most part, Coy’s calm and monotone presentation was more of a bore than a learning experience.

I appreciated him asking for our input and what we wanted to learn from this experience, but even though he cared about what we wanted to learn, I still didn’t gain much from the experience. The one thing that I did benefit from him was the fact that he said the job market out there is not clearly based on competition alone. He states that we need to find something that identifies us as designers and build upon it more. He also mentions that we should believe in ourselves and continue to work hard to try and become amazing artists since we do not have the same advantage as students from an art college.

Coy’s presentation was a little dull in my opinion. Just having to go through every single slide that he provided us was monotonous and seemed to take forever.  Majority of his slides, if not all of them, were picture based and it felt like a really long art history lecture. Coy is an amazing designer and most of the designs that he presented were spectacular, but without him trying to engage his audience and hoping that all of us will benefit from his presentation didn’t thrill me at all. He just talked about how much fun it was to design things and where his work has been publicized, but I wanted to gain more knowledge from this experience.

I wanted to learn more about his creative thought process and how he develops ideas, transposing them into designs. Coy’s designs are great, but like Jimmy has mentioned in class, if one cannot defend or explain his work well, then the designer has failed to communicate his idea effectively. Perhaps I’m used to watching the TED talk presentations in class and learn more from those films rather than this presentation, but I felt that Coy’s way of presenting his experience to us was just up to par; nothing spectacular. I now understand that effective communication is everything and preparation is necessary in order to entice an audience.