Talking to Nick

Nick Entwistle was a year above me at Stockport college and has really helped and inspired me to produce good work. I think that it's good speaking to people like this who have only just left University and are now out there doing it for real in the big bad world.

It's good that I am able to ask him for advice if I am ever stuck on a brief and he always has time to take a look and give good feedback. I really do appreciate this as he knows what it it like just before you leave University and how scary it can be taking that big step.

He has kept me motivated and has shown me similar kinds briefs that he worked on in college and the kinds of things that he produced. I was fortunate enough to ask him a few questions that would benefit not just graduate graphic designers but any graduates leaving university in the creative pathway. It has definitely helped me a lot and made me realise that nothing comes to you, and that you have to work consistently hard to get what you want and to where you want to be. Here are the questions and answers below:

1. What do you feel you have achieved since you’ve left University?

I was lucky enough to have all my hard work at University rewarded with a job before I left, although it was also good as I was able to still study and gain a First degree. I also won a YCN award for a Castrol brief http://awards.ycnonline.com/news/post/09-10-ycn-student-awards-announced/ which was great as I also won a YCN award last year for Berghaus. These achievements can, however, be meaningless if you don't follow them up with hard work and a willingness to continue to learn as when you leave University you are definitely not the finished article.

Therefore the fact that I am still in the same job after 6 months, and being more and more involved with everything that goes on in the agency, is probably one of the most important achievements yet. Having won pitches for the BBC and CUBE Gallery before, it is good to bring that experience into the work place and it is a big achievement to have my ideas recognised and chosen against some brilliant creatives.

Above all the biggest achievement I believe is gaining respect in the industry and workplace. I have worked hard for it and now have some great friends at work and elsewhere in the industry. Being able to enjoy what you do is an achievement in itself. If you don't then it's not for you.

2. What advice would you give to students just before they leave University?

My advice would be to make the most of your contacts. One thing I have learnt since entering the industry is that everyone knows each other. Therefore, one contact could potentially give you ten more. Perhaps they may recommend you if they like your work. The agency where I work was recommended to me by someone I contacted in the industry after speaking to his sister who is a physiotherapist! It goes to show that the industry isn't all doom and gloom like everyone makes it out to be. With a positive attitude you will do well. Just by chance you might get a break like I did.

Keep a clean portfolio up to date and try and show it to as many people as possible. Even people not in the industry as it is the public you will be trying to impress with your work when you enter the industry. Their opinions count too and can be very valuable when finding what works and what doesn't.

Something I struggled with in University was letting go of ideas. You may have 4 or 5 good ideas and develop them all...if you are really honest with yourself you will be able to get it down to at least your 3 best for example. This will save time and make your final work much better.

Always go with your own instincts. Only take other students/tutors comments as advice. It is your own choice to do what you want with those comments. If you receive any negative comments about your work do not take them offensively. If you believe in your ideas enough then persevere with them. It is all too easy to give up on an idea if someone says something bad about it but be strong minded and you will get results. Sometimes you might be wrong and sometimes right but if you don't feel 100% positive about your idea then don't do it. Although you may make mistakes don't make an issue of them. Over the past couple of years people have said a few times to celebrate your mistakes as they make you stronger but my advice would be to forget about them. Don't mention them and focus on all positive aspects of your work as you will appear a lot more competent and confident.

Overall, my best advice would be to always remain positive. There is way too much negativity surrounding the industry. If you are good enough and want it enough it will happen. Too many people came in and spoke about the negatives of the industry when I was at University whereas there are, in fact, a lot of positives if you look on it in a different way like I do. Work as hard as you can and you will get your chance and when you do, take it.

3. Are you happy with what you do now?

I'm very happy with what I do now as the hard work I put in at University has paid off. I am working on a lot of big client accounts and producing some exciting work for the future. It is hard work with strict deadlines but it is work that you enjoy doing. There is something totally different to do every single day. Not many jobs can offer that. Of course I am lucky to have a job that suits me so well so soon but as you come to the end of your degree you should be deciding exactly what you want to do upon finishing your course. You can then focus on contacting people in that specific area. You then have a lot more chance of doing what you want rather than stumbling across something that isn't for you.

4. Where would you like to be in 10 years time?

My agency is winning some big contracts at the moment and growing rapidly so it would be great to work my way up through the company. I'd like to be going on video and photoshoots abroad etc and directing some great advertising campaigns. I would also like to give something back to education by helping people at University to get into industry. Aswell as this I'd like my own businesses to become more successful. Above all I hope to still be happy in what I do.

Hope these answers help you in some way.

Let me know if you need to ask anything else.

Nick

YCN Student Awards 2009/10 Results announced - News - Awards - YCN

awards.ycnonline.com

Here is the link to his website where I have found his work very influential and something that I want to be able to produce as soon as I leave and be able to start adding to it, just as he is doing now.

www.ne-design.co.uk

Jonathan Barnbrook

Jonathan Barnbrook created Barnbrook studio based in London, designing for a variety of clients but also creating typefaces. He showed us some very impressive work that he had created for David Bowie. Here is the image of it below:

Jon told us that languages are still evolving and that new typefaces need to evolve with it. It was interesting to see that he had started creating his own by taking photographs of architecture and logging where he had been and for example used arches from churches to create the letter ‘M’ or ‘W’.

He suggested starting up a business or a company when we leave University, but I would perhaps like to join a company for a couple of years so I know what I’d be getting myself in to and so I knew more about the industry.

I quite liked the way that Jonathan used red slides in his presentation so the audience knew what was coming next and his slides were quite dark and included video clips to keep the viewer engaged. I will try to do this in my next upcoming presentations.

Work for Newclear Design

Whilst I went to meet Phil from Newclear Design we spoke about a lot of work related things to do with graphic design which put my mind at ease just knowing a little bit about what the industry is like. The problems that you come across and how collaboration has worked for him to create his company. Overall we got on really well. To my surprise he phoned me a few days later and asked me if I would help him to design some flyers for a club near me called Heart and Soul and the night was created by Casa. Phil rang me on the Monday and wanted it done for Wednesday so he could have a look at it on Thursday and send it off for Friday. He also said that he was going to create one himself because they have a contract with Heart and Soul to create all of their flyers so they already have a set style that they have used for a few years. He didn't want the same style from me and wanted it to be a bit different to see what they thought of it. The brief said that the colours had to be black, red and white. He said that it is quite hard to use these colours and for the flyers to still look like it had a Christmas feel to it. So I decided to stay away from making it look gimmicky and superimposing Santa on a set of decks. I wanted something that was sophisticated and contemporary. So here is what it looked like above. In the end they went with Phil's design as it looked more like what he had done in the past for them but he phoned me and said he was very impressed and would like to be able to talk to me soon about doing freelance work for them which I am thoroughly looking forward to.

Graduating

Graduating has to be one of my greatest fears and something that makes me wonder if I'll be successful when I finish higher education. I've heard so many stories from people that haven't made it and have had to get a job that they don't even want to do just to pay the bills. It's quite scary also hearing some of the bad experiences from the people that had just graduated within the last 2 years from Stockport. I mean not all of them had bad experiences but some of them did and it is very worrying to think will that be me? I've just learned that I must never give up no matter what and just keep trying. I have been making a lot more contacts this year as it has kind of been a kick back to reality that this is my life and my work nobody else's and this is what I want to do. I do feel a little more confident as I say over the past couple of months as I feel that my work has become a lot stronger and my ideas have become a lot quicker as well with the help of Lisa and I am very happy about this but things need to just carry on this way and I would like to carry on doing portfolio visits before and after I graduate as I've realised that this is another foot in the door to meeting great graphic designers and could possibly be an opportunity to work for a good graphic agency.

Journal

For the past 3 months I have been working on my journal which has to have a theme about what you want to talk about. It's all about myself and what has worked for me and what has not worked so well, also who and what my influences are and how they inter-link with my recent projects. I decided to go for the journal as it consists of having to write 5000 words and to do a 20 minute presentation. I felt at the beginning I would be far more confident about writing about my own work instead of doing the dissertation which is 8000 words on another persons work. I started by writing my journal as a diary and found that this was not how things were done. If I'm being completely honest I found writing the journal and preparing the presentation at the same time as working with Lisa on 3 projects really really intense. I did get to the point of breaking down just a week before doing the real presentation but realised for this industry you have to be pretty thick skinned. Nothing has ever made me upset before whilst being at the college but I got very good guidance from Gary Spicer about how to change and better my journal for the deadline. This made me feel so much better after speaking to him about where I had gone wrong and the kinds of things they were going to be marking when our work was handed in. I think it was perhaps just being put under the pressure of having to get everything done and just before Christmas too. However, I realise it is possible I have done my presentation which is a big step forward and I am currently still editing my journal and working on talking about how things made me feel whilst I was working in my pathway and adding more quotes from great graphic pioneers. The theme in my journal is collaboration and how I feel better and I can see how different my work is when I work with Lisa. All I need to focus on now really is looking at more graphic books so I think over Christmas I will be in the Library collecting and finding more sources and going on Athens to see if any other journals have been created relating to collaboration. I have learned that researching things that you don't already know about really does help for the moment that you need to know it and again in the future. I have also learned that it is good to boost confidence for the future in presntation skills.

Working as a Pair

Over the past 3 months Lisa Baines and I have decided to work together on 3 projects which are: Redesigning and repackaging the Pro-Plus packaging, the same for The Body Shop and Repackage and POS for Ted Baker. I didn't really realise how intense these projects were going to be before we started them. Every time we tried to pick a brief together we always went with the one that we thought would excel our skills in what we like to do which is very ideas based. The people that had decided to work in pairs were expected to have gone through 3 briefs and have a final outcome to put up on exhibition boards just before Christmas and the people doing one brief in a pair and one brief on their own had to do two. I think that possibly if we only had two briefs to do then our final outcomes could have been created a little better. As throughout these briefs we we found that actually going to execute the final design though was not that good which is something we will definitely have to work on before we graduate. Overall I have found that me and Lisa have totally clicked as a pair and this is what I want for my future is to have a partner that I can work with and be able to bounce ideas off each other to create some good work. I have learned that the saying "two heads are better than one" is really relevant to the way I feel about working and studying in my own pathway and I will keep in contact with Lisa when I graduate and perhaps we can help each other out with projects and briefs in the near future.

Riitta Ikonen

When I knew about Riitta Ikonen coming in for a talk with us and the Illustrators, I had never heard of her or knew what she did. I decided to do some research and found that she studies Illustration, and has a very eccentric style and notion about her work. There is a lot of playfulness in her work, and she doesn't take herself too seriously. Her main focus is costume and also theatre costumes. She produces her own costumes as she has had the ability to sew for a very long time. She is inspired very much so by nature, and she finds interest in collecting and organising anything she finds and can take home with her. Photography is an important role within her work also, because of the nature in how she works with a variety of locations, it is vital that everything she does is photographed to record her work, as this is the only way in which it can be recorded in stills. I really appreciate this as I myself love photography and try and introduce it in to a lot of my own work. It is something that I am definitely considering getting in to when I finish Graphic Design and perhaps doing Photography for a year afterwards. I like the fact that she challenges herself to work as differently as she can every time she produces a piece of work. I want to be able to have this way of thinking when it comes to doing my final major project.

Brand Orienteering Workshop

Owen Stevens from Brand Orienteering gave us workshop on branding; he has lots of experience in the design industry working as a copywriter for Y&R, Saatchi & Saatchi, Slaymaker and more.

This to me was a very useful talk about how branding and design works and how it can be effective as a design. I am already using this information about branding now as I am working on product and packaging design with Lisa Baines in my class. It will also be helpful for future design work into branding work and other things areas which work in brand or logo design. It helped me to understand my brief and our brand we were working with. He gave us some really good tips we went though them by getting in groups together to understand branding.

I am glad that I had the chance to learn this process because I have thoroughly enjoyed working with repacking and rebranding products so I will probably be carrying this on and doing something like this in my final major project as this is perhaps what I want to get in to in the near future when I graduate.

We didn't make it!!

Whilst I was in Berlin one of our first visits that had been arranged for us by our tutor was at an agency called Hello Me. We went as a big group and spent about 30 Euros getting to a destination that we had been told to get there for at 14.00. In total there was probably about 10 of us perhaps more that met up outside a building. There were no signs or buzzers to go through to the agency that we found a little weird, however, we got in the building and starting walking up some winding stairs. When we'd all got to the top we rang the bell and a lady came to the door and explained that we had come to the designers house and not the actual studio!! We were all mortified and made our way quickly back down stairs. We started looking at different routes of how to get to the agency. We made our way across a busy road in the pouring rain hoping that there would be another bus running by to take us there, we found that the only bus that was running had already been and gone at 9.00am. I was not prepared to spend any more money on transport as I didn't think I needed that much money and had already spent most of it getting to a place that wasn't correct. Most of us decided to head back to the hostel and save money for our other visits we had planned. I don't necessarily think that this was our fault but in all fairness we should have checked that the information we were given was correct before we went and looked in to taking the tube where it wouldn't have cost us as much. I must admit that I am useless at map reading but when there's a will there's a way.












I had arranged a portfolio visit with my friend Chloe Hollinshead at Smack Communications. We knew that it was about 15 minutes away from our hostel if we were to travel by car. So together we had decided before we even went to Berlin that we would split the taxi fare equally there and back. We had spoken to one of the designers at Smack Communications previously whilst in the UK. Her name was Susan Schutze. She had planned for us to be at their studio at 14.00 on the 19.11.2010 which happened to be the day that we were leaving. As we had previously spent so much money on getting taxis here there and everywhere we had only a limited amount of money left and because we had problems at the airport when we arrived in Berlin as our transfers didn't turn up, we decided to not take chances and save the remaining money in case our transfers weren't to turn up again.

Out of this I have learned that I need to be more organized and not only to let other people down but to not let myself down. Also to sort out transport before leaving. I put a lot of it down to being in a foreign country where I found the German language to be very difficult to understand. But I have taken this as a learning curve and will organize myself properly next time.

Deadline!

Whilst I was at home one evening I came across a television programme called 'rudetube' on channel 4. I saw something that was very inspiring to me and helped me massively in a recent project for I am doing with a friend in my class for Ted Baker.

This short film was created by a guy called Bang-Yao Liu. I looked online to find out a little more about him and came across a blog post that another girl had created where she had asked him a few questions about his animation I was unable to copy the interview on to my blog so here is the link to the questions asked below:

http://www.8asians.com/2009/06/17/8-questions-for-bang-yao-liu-the-creator-of-deadline-post-it-animation-piece/

I really took a shine to this animation as I know and understand how much pressure us students are put under to finish our work to perfection for the deadlines.

As I mentioned previously I have decided to use a similar kind of idea for my work. I have decided to use ambient media in my Ted Baker brief as I think from seeing this it has a big effect on the public social networking sites and can get passed around like wildfire if it is funny and witty enough. This piece of work actually made me say wow.. So I hope to get the same effect when I finish my brief.

Here is the animation below:

Come design with me...

Come design with me was a night that our graphics pathway had put on to invite graduates that had been through the same degree as me at Stockport College graduated and are now in the big bad world.

We decided to invite them to our college at around 6pm until 8pm on the 07.10.2010. We all gave £3 in the kitty to get a couple of bottles of wine and some nibbles. Then anyone who wanted to afterwards could head over to the pub the Nelson to have a couple of drinks to end a good night.

We had discussed as a group during the day what we were going to ask the ex graduates and how we were going to ask them questions. We understood that the people that were willing to come and talk to us would have to literally most of them just finish work and set off to our college , so we wanted to give them a nice relaxed environment so that they didn't feel under any pressure.

We decided to go with the idea of having a tombola with sweets in it. We were going to sit in two circles and bring the couches in so that it didn't feel as awkward for them as well as us. During the day we all wrote down as many questions that we could think of on little pieces of paper for the tombola so that when we span it we all had different questions to ask everybody.

This worked really well and we did this for about an hour and a half. The only criticism I would have about this is that the graduates didn't swap half way through so we didn't get a chance to speak to everybody.

This night really did help me to understand what it's like and what to expect upon leaving University. We got lots and lots of answers that all seemed to be pretty similar... word hard, and never give up. One big factor that they brought up is that they stressed that it was better to make contacts now whilst we are still in college so that when we leave we are not going out there with having no engagement with the graphic industry. I didn't realise how important this was really but I have started E-mailing different companies not necessarily for a portfolio visit but just to ask a few questions so that they become familiarised with who I am. Even though I would say that portfolio visits are a real help in making contacts as you are meeting them face to face, they get to know a little bit about you as a person and likewise and they can give you good critical feedback. It also builds confidence to actually go out there be confident about your own work and to be able to talk about it. I thought it was good to meet these graduates as again it adds to the list of contacts and it was nice to see what kinds of graphics they went in to. Some went in to product design working for big companies Adidas, some went in to advertising, some have even collaborated and made their own company for example last years students that worked with Thoughtful have now created their own group called Lost in The Forest, which to me is very impressive.

Some parts of the talks were quite tedious and scary though because a lot of them had a lot of bad luck with actually getting a job or getting anywhere or having to move on because the job that they liked wasn't for them and that they had to work until early hours of the morning to meet deadlines for not a highly impressive wage. This really has opened my eyes to this course. Since the graduates came the workload has seemed to pile on but it is a challenge. I have to get my head down and work solidly through it and be prepared as some of the ex grads said "to not have a life for a while". I do love what I do and I am prepared to make this happen. I'm just glad now that this has made me realise that everything is not so rosy and it is definitely not going to come to me, I have to grab the bull by the horns and really go for this if I want to be noticed.