Questions

As a part of my brief at University I have to try and contact design companies with a few questions. I sent the following template out to a few companies - obviously altering some parts to link up with companies targeted. I only got a few replies and they had very minimal information on. So this is something I need to change. The one below was sent to Robert Dawson from Dawson Design.

Hello,

My name is Hayley Parle, I am currently in my final year studying a BA in Graphic design at Stockport College. Whilst searching through the Internet I came across your companies website, and I became interested straight away in your work and just wondered if I could ask you a few questions. The logo designs on your website were were what originally caught my eye as I have previously been working on an Identity brief myself.

I just wanted to ask you a few quick questions, you can simply answer Yes or No:

Did you study at University? Yes

How long have you been in the Industry? 10yrs

Is the "credit crunch" effecting the business? Yes

Do you find that as technology is changing all the time is puts pressure on you as a designer? Not really keeps me on my toes

Have you ever worked on a really great brief and got a great result and the client has changed it? Nearly every job

I look forward to hearing back from you. I hope you have the time to answer my questions.

Thank you for you time

Hayley Parle

Mike Rigby Lecture

On 26th November Mike Rigby came into my college to give a lecture. I really did enjoy this lecture, as it was completely different to other lectures we had had. Mike studied at Preston for 4 years on a Graphic Design course, he had a one year placement between the 2nd and last year and finally graduated in 2002. Since graduating he has worked for Imagination London, Chase Manchester, Landor Sydney, Moon Design Sydney, Pentagram, Mark Studio and True North.

I was extremely interested to hear about Mike's experiences whilst working aboard. He advised us that taking a break is really important and he did this and it resulted in him finding work abroad. Mike had put together some of his pictures he had taken whilst on his travels, I was amazed. Travelling is always something I have wanted to do, him showing us these seemed unreal as we are used to seeing all the work designers have done - which he did do- but he shown us all the places he had been and told us stories about his experiences. It just goes to show that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

Mike talked to us about the positives and negatives of working in the design world. It is nice to hear both sides. A lot of which we had heard before, it is interesting and challenging working within the design industry, you meet and collaborate with different people and are forever learning. You experience new things like photo shoots, award ceremonies and as he explained even working abroad. As with everything there is always some negatives, as we are always told graphic design is a very competitive industry, with long hours with unpaid overtime, there is a lot of pressure, client interference and sometimes the pay isn't great. Though if you are passionate about the job and are willing to put the effort in you will succeed. This last comment is one that should always be thought about. No matter how difficult something may be.

Placements are essential to help in finding a job after graduation, placements increase your pace of working and you get the experience of working on live briefs with real deadlines. You begin to contact others designer which could lead to more placements or even the possibilities of job opportunities. Having a strong portfolio which contains great ideas that are equally well executed helps you to become notices and get the chance of a placement. Having a positive attitude to your work is essential, being negative about your work will just bring your confidence down. One thing that Mike said, which I found to be a great but of advice was "rejection is a part of design, it doesn't mean that your not good enough."

I really took on board the advice that Mike gave us. He was soon moving back over to Australia to work, which I think is great for him. It just proves how quickly things can change.

Dress Code

When in New York I went to visit a design agency 'Dress code'. I went to the company with Amy, a student I had done previous work with. Amy organised the visit as when she came across their company she was interested in the work they had created for MTV. The company consists of two men, Dan and Andre. Their work has been recognized by many awards, they have appeared in lots of magazines, coffee table books and even 3 museums. They met while studying graphic design at California College of the Arts. From there they went on to work for different companies including MTV, before setting up there own studio. Dress code offers a complete set of services - Branding & Design, Motion Graphics & Direction, Strategy & Naming, Web Production & Development.

As I mentioned Amy arranged the visit. We travelled down to meet Dan the co-founder of the company. Their work area was very spacious and clean - It looked like a nice environment to work in. Both mine and Amy's portfolios were set out in a box, this isn't very common over in New York and he really liked this. He had a look through Amy's portfolio and then had a look through mine and commented on the strong pieces and which pieces should not be in my portfolio. He mentioned how my typography work did not look strong in the situe I had put it in. As Amy and I had been working on pieces of work together we shown Dan the work to see if he could give us ways to improve these. He really liked out e4 work and commented on how the style used was really nice and we should stick with it - which is what we intend to do.

Overall I think the visit went well, he told us to keep in touch and I think the advice he gave us will be good for us in the future. Just before we left he gave us a book that he had written himself all about leaving University.

Porflion Visit - Box Creative New York

Whilst in New York me and two other students from my College visited a design company called Box Creative, its based in Manhattan and is innovation, interactive, and artist-driven. The company is only small - only a few members - but this was one thing in which they enjoyed about how they work. The two designers who set up the business were brothers Joe and Andy, whilst there we spoke to them about our portfolios, design in New York and ideas of which we were working on at present. Overall I found they were very impressed with the work we shown.

The first thing that they picked up on was the presentation of our portfolios - boxes - as this had never been seen before and looked very clean, crisp and fresh. One thing they commented on was how the up and coming thing around New York is to have a website displaying all work instead of a portfolio, it is easier to see and look around and flick back and forth too and obviously easy to distribute around. This is one thing I am looking into doing as not only would it show my work in an interesting way but it would also be another piece of design and I would be able to have a certain look or design running throughout it. As they said one thing they would advise is to design an identity to run throughout the portfolio maybe including a logo. I found this to be a great idea.

One thing they picked up on was the use of Typography and said it was one of my strong points, this is not something that is pushed over in New York they are more image based so they were very impressed with this. Within my portfolio I have elements of my design work on the page to compliment the work, I wasn't sure when I was doing this whether it would be liked in the design world as a lot of portfolios I had seen were very plain and simple, this is advised by the tutors at my college but I wanted to try something new as I didn't like my original portfolio that was set out in this way. Joe and Andy seemed to like this layout as it gave the whole page a purpose. I was pleased with this feedback.

One thing that was picked up on that I also noticed was the quality of some of the images in my portfolio. This is something that I need to change, they advised me that vectors are advised rather than pixels so this is something I am going to look into changing, especially on my typography brief.

They liked my Heals end sting as it is creative yet simple and the layout is kept very simple to add to the simplicity of it. They seemed excited with the e4 storyboard that is still being produced at the moment for d&ad but advised to keep pushing the idea to see how far we can get it.

Overall I found the visit very interesting and helpful, I will be sure to keep in contact with Box as I was interested in the work that they were doing as it was keeping up to date with technology. A lot of their work was flash based which is something I would be interested in learning more about.

Container

I attended a lecture by Container Plus that was based on collaboration within design work. Louise Vormitag who came to do the presentation advised that one of her colleagues she works along side now, Nicola is in fact an old college friend. After graduation they were scared about going into the world of work - as anyone would be- and decided to stick together as they had done work together during their education time. Although working as a team they produced two portfolios - one each - and when one of them had a visit with design directors they would take the other portfolio with them. With doing this they got some work.

One of the first projects the pair worked on was for Selfridges, it was designed for the cafe. The design was in the windows and they were drawn directly onto where it was being shown so the drawings and designing of the whole thing was sort of like a performance and people used to gather around and watch. I thought this was great as it was just something that wasn't planned but turned out to be a great success.







Working in a collaboration has many advantages as you help integrate each others strengths within your design work.

Another piece of work they did as a pair was for the launch of the Volkswagen Fox, they were given four rooms to design at the Copenhagen's creative lifestyle hotel. The idea that they went with was using playing cards as their basis so each room was given a suit and a whole story was shown using imagery in a very illustrative manor. The club room had a seductive feel, they brought people in to do the textiles side of the room.

After many projects had been done and they had a good client base they decided to extend the size of their business which unfortunately didn't work out too well. Although collaborative work has its advantages it can also cause problems especially if a dramatic change is made. The relationship between two people suddenly increased to many different relationships with more opinions and ideas which resulted in decisions being harder to make. Louise continued to work with Nicola after the break up of the company just after a year and also with one of the other women involved in the increased company. This is where Container Plus was formed as it is known today.

Louise shown us lots of her work and a lot of which I thought had a lot of variety in the medias used. This shows why collaboration is such a great thing to encourage. We as students are constantly being encouraged to work with other students on projects and I personally have found it a great opportunity to develop ideas. The majority of my work this year has been collaborative and I do recommend it to anyone as a student as this is how it works when out in the world of design.

Dave Sedgwick - contact report

After the talk Dave came into College to do I emailed over to say thank you and on his reply asked for a PDF of my portfolio which I sent over.

Here is the response I got.


I really appreciated the feedback Dave gave as I personally agree with everything that was said. I think a re-brand would be a great thing to put into my portfolio as I do enjoy branding briefs, I am going to have a think and decide what brand I would enjoy doing and also work on expanding the fold outcomes as I think that is brilliant idea and I am sure it would give my portfolio a new depth especially designing a website as it is something I am interested in doing and is also something that is becoming a lot more common.

Sandy Karman

I came across some work by Sandy Karman, who is a young Indonesian designer. His work shows some interesting elements.