We gathered expectantly on the morning Thursday 25th March, when we were to be given generic and specific feedback from the council, via Adam and Dan. The first thing to mention was that overall they were very impressed with the amount and variety of ideas on offer (especially from second-year students in five weeks) and Adam suggested we give ourselves a round of applause. We did. In more detail, the general feedback was as follows:
Clearance for take-off – There were at least three council departments in attendance, including Recycling and Corporate/Promotions. Like any bureaucratic organisation, everything has to be cleared and signed off by everybody from the tea-boy upwards and so nothing could be decided upon for definite that day. One wonders whether sunflower season would have passed before any decision was made.
Show me the money – Of course they wanted to know how much everything would cost. Adam suggested the college may fund some projects if they benefitted students, but this was clearly always going to be an issue.
Rules and regulations – Like any organisation, they have strict corporate guidelines that any project must follow. They want any council department and project to conform to the whole, so as to appear unified and this means Wrexham is the name and the big pink ‘W’ is the logo. This makes sense – the Co-Operative were recently advised to conform similarly with their rebranding across every department, and by The Chase (slightly more of an authority on such matters than a bunch of students could claim to be). Characters were permitted, but not as any kind of ‘figurehead’. Nor can they speak or have a name. Not sure under what circumstances they must remain nameless, but anyhow – I wrote it down so it must have happened. Apparently the council had great trouble getting their character of ‘Recycle Michael’ approved. I’m not surprised, he’s crap.
The BIG question – Bearing in mind the above point, we each now had to consider whether we wanted to work ‘for’ the council and conform to their guidelines, or further develop whatever we’d been working on in order to gain personally from any work done from this point, regardless of whether it fell within their remit.
Too slick – Oddly, any design that looked too ‘corporate’ (e.g. Swiss school) was a no-no as it makes the council look competitive, which they can’t be. (Not sure this affected our particular approach – not a whiff of Helvetica). They do like vibrant colours though.
Renegade programmers – The council’s web team are apparently a law unto themselves. Embedding Flash might be a problem and there was a general fear of anything web related. If we were to follow this route, we would have to persuade the council that any development would sit easily and neatly within their own site.
War is stupid – Any web-games but be free of shooting, violence, or negative imagery. More generally, pastiche is out. Councils are not generally noted for edgy comedy anyway, or indeed any kind of comedy beyond recounting the exasperation at trying to obtain bin bags and being informed that they have no record of your address, despite the frequent Council Tax bills. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that this is a different council. But they’re all the fucking same.
Difficult child – Young boys are hard to engage so the council like anything that will get them interested. Well – shooting, violence and negative imagery would do the trick, but see the point above.
Other stuff – The council did see ideas that might fit other projects, but not Wrexham in Bloom so it may be a little premature to throw anything out just yet (such as Heritage Trail ideas). They generally seemed to like things they could adapt (ruin).
In terms of specific feedback, ‘The Immense Team’ (Adam’s words) apparently impressed with everything bar the website. The fact that this was central to the whole fucking project clearly escaped the council’s attention. We were also told, once again, that the whole thing was too complicated and that we should simplify things and get it on to one board (not eleven). Maybe there’s something in that. I was still reluctant because I’m stubborn like that, but things sink in eventually. Either that or cave in.
