Intro
In December 2016, Design Studio was entrusted with the task of Creative management for Cognizance, the annual Technical Festival of IIT Roorkee. I was given the position of responsibilty of Co-Convener (Design) for the festival which meant to lead the creative team and coordinate with the administrative,promotion and sponsorship team.

About
Cognizance is the second largest technical festival in Asia and has a budget 1.25 crore rupees. It involves more than 150 events, workshops, exhibitions and live shows for around 3000 participants from all around the country. It also has 179k+ followers on social media.
I already had two years of experience in working in the Cognizance design team, so I knew that the team comprised of a co-convener(final year student), 3-4 managers(pre-final year students), 4-5 executives(sophomores) and 4-5 members(freshers). But this time, the team for this edition was much smaller. I started with only two executives and zero managers. Thus it was important to have a well thought out plan to proceed upon.
We decided to build a design philosophy around the theme for the festival - “EUREKA 2.0”. This process involved days of brainstorming and research.

We started by designing the COGNIZANCE brochure. It was an extensive process and we did a lot of iterations. After countless hours of research, browsing hundreds of websites looking for inspiration, brainstorming, scrapping ideas and dreaming new ones, we were finally able to come up with a design philosophy that we were happy to go ahead with. You can view the complete design of the brochure here.

As we were a team of only three. Slowly, we started picking up pace. We were thinking both quicker and better. As soon as we finished working on developing a design language, we discussed all the deliverables with the promotion and marketing team of cognizance and penned down the smallest thing possible that we needed to design and that too with the deadlines. The white board we used did not have an inch left to write anything else after we were done with listing the deliverables.
We realized pretty quickly that if we were to even hope of finishing our work on time, we needed more hands on board and my experience of 2 years with cognizance had taught me the shortcomings that we had in the past and also the way to pull those off. So we planned our recruitment process and around the end of January, after shortlisting candidates through written tests and then interviewing the shortlisted candidates, we recruited 10 juniors to be a part of the design team. The new recruits, although possessing a good design sense, still had a lot to learn.

Teaching can often get very grueling. That is where grit and passion come into the picture. We explained each of them the design language that we developed and tried to inculcate the basic principles of design by making them go through design references that were essential in making them work efficiently. New recruits were given the job of designing events’ posters and other marketing collaterals were being taken care of by me and the two designers whom I started with.
These are some of the posters for events that see more participation.

We were right on track and the new recruits proved their metal as the fest days came closer. 5 weeks before the fest I met with the promotion and marketing team again and revised the deliverables as the new sponsors came in and some events were canceled. Then the job of designing flexes and banners was started.
We used themes for flexes of different categories like image manipulation for robotics based events and flat graphics for theme events.

Designing for Cognizance also involved various creatives like advertisements, bags, T-shirts and ID cards.

While learning something new, failure is your best friend. It is the only way we can learn to do better. Often when we thought we were through with a design, it would get scrapped and we’d have to start all over again. Sometimes, the event for which we had spent days designing posters and flexes got canceled.

Conclusion
It was in March, just a couple of days before the fest, that we finished our project. First time in my three years of experience, we were the only design team to finish the job early.
The first that I learned fronm this job was that your team will only follow you when they realize that you are also making sacrifices with them.
The Second thing that I realised was that in the end it is always about the people you worked with. It was because of the contribution made by Anchit and Jayant, the two pillars of the team with whom I started this project, we succeded.
The days of the fest were some of the best ones so far. Roaming around with no care in the world, getting pictures clicked with our designs and eating amazing things all day long! Working for Cognizance has made me better both as a designer and as a manager but most importantly, it has given me many amazing memories.