By: Lina Oktaviani & Himawan Prakosa
Once in three months, we organize an enrichment training to help the employee improve professionally and personally. We believe, this would bring big benefit not only for company but also for employee themselves.
The training could be about anything, be it lifestyle or skill related. This time, we have design trend implementation training for designer and communication training for support staff.
Design Division Workshop: Design Trends Implementation
As designers who work for various customers around the world, we need to be aware of how graphic design change dynamically every year, or even every month.
The first enrichment training of 2019 was held on March, where we were introduced to the dynamic trend design of 2019. We pick up from there, and this time we were going to implement the trends directly in a project. It’s not enough to only know, you need to practice it on your own to obtain deep understanding of it.
That morning, the training was opened with a thrilling small game to find out which team we were in. We had to solve a math problem written on back layer of our name tag. So, we needed to ask one of our friends to solve the math operation and tell us the result number.
Once we know our team, we quickly moved to be with our team, because there is a benefit that would be given to the team whose members gathered the fastest.
In less than 10 minutes, all the 7 teams have reached their base and filled up the tribune. Now, we were ready to kick off the first session.
Mira Marika, our Creative Director, explained the 7 items that become big parts of the 2019 trend. They are: asymmetrical design, open composition, broken grid, overlapping shape, the element weight, negative space, and rising color trends like gradient, bold and mono color. Each item has its own way in conveying message through visual elements.
The new trends are dynamic and breaking the constraints. The use of layouts and design elements in the example intrigues us to explore the new trends and learning that there are many rooms to elevate our design.
Through astonishing animated slides, Mira presented us the eye-opening examples that we can use to enhance our day-to-day work for the clients.
The first session was over, next was the time for practicing the knowledge to gain deeper understanding.
Each team had to choose 1 out of 7 main trends and implement it in their design. The team whose members gathered the fastest was given early chance to pick one item before other teams.
Then, each team was given 10 minutes to discuss how they will implement the trend through the elements, like shape, color, font type, and visual ambience in the slides they worked on.
Right after discussion, everyone went to their workstation and had 15 minutes only to execute their new knowledge. It was a rush, yet exhilarating experience. The 15 minutes passed in a blink of an eye.
Our 7 newest recruits aka the newbies was appointed as the representative of the team. They were responsible to merge the slides from all team members and presented them in the front. They revealed the design trend they picked and the reason of the elements usage such as color, shape, font and overall look.
After all of our works assessed by Mira, we had 3 teams awarded with best execution and coherence. Team 7 that picks gradient trend was in the first place. Team 5 and team 4 was on the second and third place.
This event supplied us new perspective and enlightening inspirations. We are sure that these would help us in creating a more satisfying and relevant design for our customers.
Support Division Workshop: Communication Games
Support Division got “communication” as the theme of the enrichment training. The materials cover communication in general. What’s interesting was that Yudha, Reza, and Rizal as the organisers had the sessions in games format where we compete to get the most points.
We worked in pairs throughout the sessions. Each team sat face-to-face with their teammates. The new trainees joined us in their first ever enrichment training at 24Slides. Also joining us was Sartika the Head of Administration.
In the first game, we did a “shapes drawing” game. We placed laptops as partitions between each team member, and one of us had to describe a drawing while the other try to draw it on a piece of paper based on the verbal and gesture descriptions only. There were three drawings to replicate, and we needed to make the drawings as similar as possible to get maximum points. This activity helped us train our ability in understanding and describing information to get the same perspective.
The second game was much simpler, but we had more things to do. Before we got started, some slides about basic parts of communication was presented. There were ten basic parts we need to comprehend. Afterwards, the knowledge we got was used to answer some case examples, including a new one that each team created. We also gained points from each part of the cases.
The latest game was the most exciting as we were introduced to a game called “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”. It is a game where we need to cooperate to defuse a bomb. The game was already installed in the laptop of each team, and we were allowed to read instructions and do the tutorial first.
Later, we took turns on who would be the “technician” and who would read the manuals as the “instructors”. The instructors should leave the room so that they couldn’t see the bomb on the laptop screen. Each team used mobile phones to communicate. The technician – who knew very little about the defusal manual at first – should defuse the bomb within the limited time based on the instructions given by the instructors. Teams who could defuse a bomb completely would get extra points. This game allowed us to learn new things in communication, mainly in filtering and using important details.
As the final result, Erin and Himawan claimed the first prize as they collected the most points. Najma and Lucky were the first runner-up. With just one point away from the team behind them, Jay and Sartika were the second runner-up. Apart from the prizes, we got new knowledge and improvement in communication that can be applied to both internal team and customers. Of course, all those were learned in an exciting way in this enrichment training activity.
