Miju has a chat with Annabelle, Hafizah and Tricia from the SMUN Design team to chat about this year’s design elements and comment on some interesting design fails.
Part 1: Introducing the Desginers
Designers Annabelle (left) and Hafizah (right) (Not photographed: Tricia)
Miju: Good morning. Today I have with me, SMUN’s very special design team. They are here with us today to give us an insight into the processes behind the beauty of the designs you see on the SMUN website, instagram, prospectus, everything really! Introduce yourselves and why you chose to join the design team this year.
Tricia: Hi I’m Tricia, I’m the DSG for design this year. I got on board SMUN as Valen asked me to come on board as a DSG before the designers were invited and I myself am interested in design. I have done this last year as a designer so I’m back again to contribute to SMUN and further its potential.
Annabelle: Hi everyone, I’m Annabelle, I’m actually from Taiwan, I’m not Singaporean. I’m a freshman at Yale-NUS college and I joined SMUN design because it kinda challenges my own abilities a bit, but also because I wanted to try out the creative side, so I wanted to give myself some challenges.
Hafizah: I’m Hafizah from NAFA (Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts), I got to know about SMUN from Tricia. She is the one who asked me to join and I didn't really have any design experience externally, this is my very first SMUN and my first external design experience. I, myself, am interested in designing but more towards the artistic side, not really a formal event like SMUN, so this is definitely a challenging event for me.
Challenges Faced as Designers
M: Annabelle you mentioned that you wanted to challenge yourself right, so about challenges, what were some of the struggles that you all faced as a team when designing for SMUN this year?
A: As a team, I think one difficulty was that our main communication was online, like because we couldn’t meet in person due to covid restrictions and everyone was busy with school, so sometimes when one of us are doing something and we realise that there is something wrong with the design someone else made, we have to quickly text in the group like “can you fix this please?”
A: We also don’t know if the other person will reply, so I think deadlines would be an issue because some of us will be too busy, too tired, or too hectic, but we did overcome it so I think it was fine. Should I talk about personal challenges?
M: Yea sure!
A: Personally, I mentioned how I wanted to discover my “creative side”, but my huge struggle was that I was not familiar with Adobe applications at all. Even though Tricia really really generously gave me a two hour lecture on it, I still wasn’t able to do it at all. It got to a point where I was so dejected that I almost left the team, but I’m glad that I stayed. So I ended up using Canva to make my designs. Because of that I couldn’t really design really continuous backgrounds for instagram, so that’s why you can see posts in blocks of three, six and nine. It was still a struggle, but I’m glad I overcame it.
It got to a point where I was so dejected that I almost left the team, but I’m glad that I stayed.
M: What about Hafizah? What were the challenges you faced? Were they similar or different?
H: Personal challenges were a bit different, because like I said, I am more into abstract designs and most of the time along the way I found myself trying to stop myself by saying “Less is More”, you know? That it is better to design that way, and that it will meet the tone of the event itself. At first it was challenging for me, but it helped me break out of my comfort zone and along the way I learned new skills. And that’s only thanks to Tricia for guiding me through the process.
Along the way I found myself trying to stop myself by saying “Less is More”, you know? That it is better to design that way, and that it will meet the tone of the event itself.
M: Tricia, how about you? And how did you decide to get Hafizah on the team as well?
T: I actually admire Hafizah’s work because both of us were actually classmates (we have since graduated). We both did graphic design as a module, I liked her designs and she did pretty well in that module so I thought, why not, because she has a lot to offer.
T: For me, my personal challenge was balancing my own personal schedules because on the DSG’s end, there is a lot more back-end work we have to do (which I shall not delve into). The challenge was really just that, balancing schedules and refreshing my knowledge on designs.
Head over to Editor's Posts to hear them talk about their designs, and see them rate Miju's most confusing design fails.