Welcome to Tanya Marie's Blog.

Hello! :)

I'm finally tired of blogger.
I'm currently having fun with Tumblr.
A peek at my portfolio can be viewed on The Caribbean Creative Network.
I'm pretty in love with twitter. But my website is a Work In Progress I'm finally decided to get to.

So bear with me and please twiiter or tumblr me instead.

Kindest Regards,
Tanya Marie Williams

IamTheNuBlack and I'm in ARC the Magazine!

Despite starting the New Year with massive car troubles.
The New Year still managed to start off well with two published interviews.

One online for 'I AM THE NUBLACK'

And the another for the first Issue of the print and emagazine ARC. arcthemagazine.com

Thanks so much for both. It's just the push you need to keep going!

ARC Magazine is a quarterly Caribbean Art and Culture print and e-magazine published out of St. Vincent and the Grenadines by artists Nadia Huggins and Holly Bynoe. We are endeavouring to form a creative platform to offer insight into current practices across the burgeoning creative industries, while bridging the gap between established and emerging artists. Within the recent motions of integration there is a critical space developing where, for the first time, we can envision a converging nexus of artists who want to share their creative experience.

ARC Magazine presents a formula, an experiment and an imaginative body of curated work that exhibits the trajectory and the motion of artists who practice within the region. Within our collective networks, we are finding it necessary to make the common man and the aficionado aware of possibility of art, its evolution, trends and ‘personalities’. We also feel the need to provide a forum that celebrates creativity, its determination, dialogue and pleasure. It is our ambition to inspire and give voice to a new generation of independent, DIY and emerging artists who remain fearless while battling the parts, fractions and whole of their varied cultures. At ARC we want artists to negotiate their own space by offering a neutral ground that will license discourse and varied creative insights into the mind of an artist.

ARC is a projected motion that goes up, outwards and beyond into a space of curiosity.

arcthemagazine.com

A Blog Post About Work.-'Hi client, nice to meet you'

I've had the title of Senior Art Director for no more than a year max.

All the time before I've been 'Graphic Designer'
Working my but off, doing my thing.

But people react to titles.
Whether it be school titles, work titles, class titles, titles, titles, titles…. It' a very interesting, not so fun thing… But this is less about titles and more about the work (As the work is really what I am about.)


Today I went to what I realized was my first creative meeting with a client for work in the initial stages of the design process.

Usually what happens at work is that, research, questionnaires, meetings and more meetings and so forth happen with the directors and marketing reps etc with the client and then a creative brief gets to us creatives and we start working it out from there.

Interaction with the client and myself will most often happen many weeks later when you're sitting or standing in a cold ass meeting room presenting your Design.

This is the first time you are meeting the client and you are terrified! Because you're about to bear your creative soul to the client and all their minions of partners that are either going to give you a round of applause or tear you apart!

You're also going to be the person they engage with most of the time about questions, possible changes, additional creative and reply to every email, phone call and random 'drop in' that happens after.

Hi Client. Nice to meet ya!

Now for the most part, since I left Advertising about 3 years ago I haven't had Traffic Managers or Account Execs etc… So the whole middle management or extra memo passer-person has not been a part of my life.

There have been many moments where I miss the good Account Exec and all those people that break down and decipher the client's many questions and request and bring it to me in a nicely typed out memo that I more than often want to chew up and spit out. Many times because obviously those are the request that I don't agree with. But i do sometimes miss the management of it. ( I repeat-TheGoodOnes)

After working in Abovegroup for the past few years I've gotten unaccustomed to the 'Ad. way' and more accustomed to the small design studio way. And I've found positives and negatives to both.

But today while having a fairly good meeting with a client for a new job at the very beginning of the process for the first time I thought wow! You don't seem as scary when I'm not meeting you for the first time in a presentation room where you are not only just meeting me, but my work to!

Also today I thought, 'What on earth is a Senior Art Director if this is the first time I've ever been involved in a 'early client meeting'!?' …. I lie, I've thought of this before but chose to ignore it because at work I already always feel like I'm swimming against a tide trying to keep my head above a constantly rough, constantly urgent list of work to do...

It was nice to hear the client talk about their company, their ideas, their maybe bad jokes as they try to explain the job they put intense hours into everyday, the way I put intense hours into working to visually communicate their company to their shareholders, customers and potential customers.- There are things I just wouldn't get as fast reading an audit or brief. There are things the client might say that sparks the first creative stroke for me that may not have been picked up in an audit.


I've been asked how is it that sometimes I do such stunning work for personal freelance clients but sometimes don't have that same pure creative rawness in my work at my job. - That could be insulting, it could also be true and it could also not be. Either way I've done far more work at work than I have for freelance clients and several of these are in my top 10!

But the fact is my work 'at work' is judged by so many before it reaches the client. You start it with a sense of already preconceived judgment and there's also the fact that when you work for a company you are working under a company's already preconceived 'styles' and sometimes ideas. It is the nature of work or maybe just the nature of some companies.

There are so many different variables that affect both situations.; The creative job at the desk and creative job in many scribbled notes on my bed-head.


When I'm working with a client on a personal project I'm talking to them and getting to know them and what they want to communicate.

I have no preconceived styles or ideas, I'm ready and open.

Of course also you can be far more picky when picking freelance clients and it's often a far smaller budget so that's a bit of a cheat.

There is a lot less stress and worry of failure and the worry that your idea may have to beat it's way through to even reach the client.

At home, there is a freedom and a trust in myself that still comes far easier than it does at work.


Whether at work or at home I start everything with a blank slate and start Thinking.

At work the research done by the team is a tremendous asset. Especially when you are molding something from something you don't know and have never met.

At home on my paint splattered desk, markers, colour pencils, open sketchbooks and uninterrupted space, it's a blank slate as well. Time To Think.


From Jr Graphic Designer in an Advertising Agency, to Jr. Art Director to Senior Art Director, freelance or home. I have to open my mind and most importantly LISTEN to the client, then Start To Work, because I have no idea where I will end up until I start to Work.

It's All Work.