Ranch-Style Creative Inspiration

Recently, I attended Design Ranch, a three-day, hands-on design retreat sponsored by the Austin AIGA. I’ve been to numerous design conferences in the past, but I wasn’t quite sure how much this “back-to-basics” workshop would influence my career in healthcare advertising.

Although hosted by the Austin chapter of AIGA, fellow designers from across the US attended Design Ranch at Camp Waldemar in Hunt, Texas. Different from your typical design conferences, there were no computers and no iPads, and you had to hike to the top of a hill in order to make a phone call. Design Ranch was meant to get us away from the day-to-day grind, and rekindle our creative spirit. So, I put down my laptop and picked up a few of the long-forgotten tools of my past.

Despite immersing myself in the various workshops led by design gurus across the country, I couldn’t completely unplug. I was too busy thinking about how I could use some of these simple techniques in my healthcare-based designs.

Shots of HCB staffers using the Hipstamatic iPhone app

One workshop, Shooting from the Hip, showed us a variety of different uses of the  Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. For example, placing different textured papers or cellophane over your lens can transform your image into something truly unique and ownable. Check out some fellow ranchers’ photographs here. This trend of using Hipstamatic prints as art is becoming more and more popular. So much so, it can even be seen on the walls of the new HCB office space.

Making this sell to clients in healthcare, typically a more conservative industry, might seem far-fetched, but innovative photography such as Hipstamatic can potentially be exactly what our clients on the cutting-edge of medicine are looking for. Even more so with its budget-friendly cost.

A few other favorite workshops included Ink on Paper by Casey McGarr where we experimented with flatbed press printing and woodtype; and Move a Little Bit by Chris Sickels, where we created our own stop-motion animation with some of his handmade characters. Both of these often-forgotten techniques could easily be woven into existing campaigns or become a strategic part of future campaigns.

As designers, we constantly seek new techniques and ideas, no matter what service or product we’re promoting. Design Ranch was a great reminder that some of the best ideas are the simplest ones. It’s not just about turning something into a perfectly typeset and digitally transformed piece. I encourage fellow designers to put down the computer mouse and set off in search of  a few new (or old) sources of inspiration.