Category: Field Year 2

Work placement has been a massive learning curve for me, I’ve learnt more about design, the industry and about what it means to be a designer. It has definitely exceeded my expectations of work placement. I found learning about the designers really interesting hearing their stories made me inspired to work for this. One thing that will stick with me from this experience is about creative; reading, listening and traveling as much as I can will help me to find new interests and with new interests comes new sources of creativity and inspiration. This will aid me throughout the rest of my studies because finding creativity recently has been difficult for me and know this will help me in the future. It has also exceeded my expectations by showing me that you learn when you’re working, they don’t expect you to be perfect and it’s a safe environment to throw ideas around.

Doing work placement has reaffirmed to me the reason why I decided to study graphics and has made my desire to work within the industry even stronger. From work placement I wanted to give myself an idea about where I’d possibly like to take my career after university. It has helped me see that currently I think I’d like to work within a studio environment rather than an inhouse design setting. I feel that this experience will change the way I approach my studies and has helped me to develop my own design process further. The ideas and work methods that I have used within the projects., will continue to aid me throughout the course of the rest of my studies.

I had a really positive experience in both my work placements, that if I had the opportunity again there isn’t anything that I would do differently. However, as mentioned before I have learnt many lessons from this experience about design and creativity that I will take these lessons away with me and continue to practise them as much as I can. I would recommend work placement to any students in the future because it has been one of the most useful experiences, I’ve had from being at university. I would say that it would be helpful to any student within the art school as it will help you to see what it’s like to work within your industry, university can only provide a certain amount of reality to the projects. Whereas it’s different when you’re working on a live brief.

Overall, I have really enjoyed my time on work placement it has inspired me to continue to work hard and gain the knowledge and understanding of graphic design. It has also shown me that it’s a continuous industry of learning, as a designer you are learning every step of your career and continue to do so. Over the summer period I am hoping that I can gain some more experience within the industry by finding some placements that I can do within my own time.

For my last week of work placement I have been back at Girl and Boy Studio. I have learnt so much again in my last week of placement, and it has made me realise that I like working within a studio environment. I really like the studio culture and just being around other designers, made me feel creative and I think that this type of environment is where I would like to work in the future. Some of the discussions we had made me realise that I need to look wider for inspiration – read as much as I can, travel and watch things as much as I can. These wider interests might spark something creative something different. It’s also an industry where you can continuously learning, which is one thing that I really like about it, everyone is learning along the way.

At the start of this week I continued with the work that I had been doing in the first two weeks, bringing it together into a presentation like brand guidelines. This was a really useful exercise for me as I learnt about making sure that the brand marque is drawn correctly, with clean lines. Leanne showed me how to use invisibles and guides to insure that my illustrations are accurate. This is something that will help me moving forward when using illustrator for other projects. During this I also learnt more about Pantones, and how to choose/show a Pantone in a brand guidelines. I was able to learn how to show the CMYK and RGB numbers of the Pantones. I found this really interesting as I haven’t considered using a Pantone in my work before. I think in the future this is something that I should continue think about.

 

 

Later on in the week I was briefed in on another project that had come into the studio. This was another branding project but looking at brand proposition rather than the marque. I found this an interesting project to look at in my last week as I haven’t experience this type of project before. I learnt that it’s important to think about the words first, the essence of the brand, this will help develop brand language. When speaking to the team I learnt that this is something that really should be at the start of any brand project, start with the essence – what’s the brand about?

I was tasked to come up with some ideas about the language, look and feel for the project. After sitting down and discussing the core values about the brand and what they do, we then separated to think and develop our ideas before bringing them together I learnt that through doing this that I need to stop being so precious about my work, I shouldn’t run with one idea for too long, it needs to be a fast, get the idea out on the board, then move on, the more ideation at this stage the better.

I also got the chance to go to a client meeting with Leanne and Duncan. This was another useful experience for me as it was interesting to see how they work with clients getting shots to help aid illustration for part of the work that they are doing. It was interesting to see how they do this process getting the right angles and movements.

 

At the end of this week I was also able to sit down with Duncan and go through using InDesign. I found this useful as it showed me how to set up documents for print, talking about ratios, how you need to ensure that you’r working in 4’s when printing, different types of grids, master pages and much more. Overall these past few weeks working in Girl & Boy studio has been a real learning experience, I have learnt more about design, the industry, culture and me as a designer.

 

Throughout this post I will be answering the following questions.

What have you learnt about yourself as you continue your placement in terms of skills, knowledge and about yourself?

How do you feel about the most recent experiences and have these feelings impacted on your work at any time?

In what ways are you now better prepared for each day in work?

Can you identify areas where you would like to improve your skills, and how do you hope to do this over your final days on placement?

This week I’ve been lucky enough to be able to join the Graphics Team within Cardiff and Vale Health Board. It has been a very different experience for me this week in comparison to the first two weeks, as it’s an in-house environment. This is a really valuable for me to experience this as well as working within a studio as I might one day end up working in this type of environment.

The team were really welcoming to me showing me around and showing me the type of work that they do in the hospital environment. It was really interesting to see what types of jobs they get coming into the department and how they work when it comes to designing. It was interesting to see other designers work, see there working methods and other processes. They have provided me with a various tasks to complete this week while I’m there on placement. Through doing this it will allow to experience everything that might come through the department, to allow me to get the full experience of what happens there. I have learnt through doing the placement in health board that my skills have to be used in a slightly different way to normal, the work is more formal rather than having a creative element to it. However, I think that these jobs that aren’t so creative can pop up in both environments.

The tasks I were set were mainly printed based posters and leaflets which was interesting as due to the environment in which I was working meant that there was a lot of type that needed to be placed, which was different from the other work which I have done. As majority of the task I was doing were print based, I was lucky enough to be able to go down to the print room on site where they print majority of what they produce. This was a really interesting experience for me too see how the take what I do on indesign and then change it into being able to print. I found learning about the printing systems and how they need to check that the colours set by the designers match the printers set up and the paper stock that they are printing onto. I think I’d like to have the opportunity to walk around a larger printers as well in order to understand more about there side of things. As a designer you spend time conversing with printers so to have a small understanding of the terminology used would be beneficial to myself.

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At the start of the work placement with the health board I was nervous that I wasn’t going to enjoy the atmosphere due to my own fear of the hospital setting. This would have initial impacted the work that I did at the start of the first day on the placement, however, as the week went on this didn’t impact my work at all. Knowing that I was strong on the first day of my placement allowed me to prepare myself for each day in work.

While I was in the team I learnt more about my ways of designing, and throughout the last days of my placement I am hoping to be able to learn more about using both InDesign and Illustrator. As I know there are things that I can learn that will help me when designing. I am excited to continue my last week of work placement  and continue learning more the industry.

At the start of my second week on work placement, I am still at Girl & Boy studio in Barry. This week I have been tasked with creating some editorial page layouts using the branding I worked on last week.  Before coming on work placement I was really interested in editorial work, so I was excited to get set this task to learn more about how designers approach editorial design.

After spending the morning designing some spread I had a catch up with Leanne & Duncan who went through the spreads that I had done already. This was really useful as it helped me to see what elements of my editorial were working and which elements I might need to consider further. Part of this process was learning how to use character styles, these I had heard of before but never learnt to use. These basically mean that you can easily use the same point size, typeface and colour throughout the document. Learning how to do will help throughout the course of my editorial work and hopefully working in the industry in the future. Another thing them suggested to me was thinking about the furniture on the page. Not only have I learnt so much about how to use InDesign but I have also gained so much knowledge about the industry. I’ve learnt about new studios I hadn’t heard about before, learnt more about printing methods and about working methods. This has also taught me that I need to have more faith in myself as a designers and not be afraid to show what I’ve worked on.

Over the past week I have so many enjoyable experiences when it comes to learning from the designers at the studio and being able to listen in on client meeting to see how the designers work with the client to come up with ideas. I think I have been able to develop all my skills, in terms of design and communication in the past week, through the task I have taken on and the feedback I have received. I think that I can use all the knowledge that I have gained in the past week to help me improve my design work but also my presentation skills. (This is a key skill that I have to use throughout university).

I have really loved my experience these past two weeks and I think that it will continue to enjoy my work placement. I think because I have enjoyed working in the studio this has impacted the work I’ve created, it has made me feel more confident about my work and has made me feel at ease when sharing my work with the other designers in the studio. I am still keen to learn more about skills, about the industry and about design in general.

For this first week of my work placement I have been at Girl & Boy Studio a branding, website, illustration graphic design studio in Barry.

Overall this first week has been awesome, I have learn’t so much already and it’s only my first week. The studio has played a massive part in making this first week of work placement and amazing experience. This is my first work placement as a designer in university so everything is new to me and really exciting. I have been absorbing everything in, taking notes and understanding seeing the ins and outs of how industry works.

One my first day the team (Leanne, Alexis & Duncan) were really welcoming and showed me their current project they are working on. This was interesting for me to see because it gave me and insight into how different designers work and find inspiration, it will help me develop my own practice. Throughout the week they asked me to shadow and help on their on going project for the Goodsheds development in Barry. I am lucky enough to be in the studio at the start of this project which means I am able to see and understand the ideation process of creating the concept for the project. Through shadowing the project has enabled me to develop my Adobe Illustrator skills, which is useful as this is the programme which I have struggled with in the past. I have also had the opportunity to explore Adobe After Effects further through experimenting with ideas about how elements of the brand could be animated and used. This again as useful as I haven’t done much animation and I am keen to push myself further with ideas.

During my first week here I have also had the experience of few client progress meetings. It was really useful to see their reasoning behind the design descions as well as seeing all the considerations they made. I found it useful as well to see how they pitch to clients, selling their concept idea, this is something that I will learn for as I think it will help with my presentation skills in the future. Summing up, my first week on placement was amazing and I’m looking forward to continuing this journey. I’m pleased to be gaining more experience of branding and commercial side of graphic design.