Roughly four years ago I began my journey into world of graphic design, coming from a corporate/educational background. Working at Oldbury Academy for my working career has taught me so many important lessons such as business acumen, being professional, working as part of a team and how to deal with extremely tight deadlines. What my time at Oldbury Academy didn’t teach me was how to channel my creativity and get the best from it. I knew I had a reached a glass ceiling and wasn’t being challenged anymore and had to do something that would challenge me and help me grow into the person I wanted to become. I decided to apply for the Graphic Communication Bachelor of Arts degree at Birmingham City University and reduce my working week to two days per week. At 26 years old this was probably one of the hardest decisions I’d had to make about my career. The driving force for wanting to go to university was to understand the theory behind design; why has the designer put that there on the page and why has he chosen that colour for the logo. I wanted to train my mind to think like a designer and I knew the only way I would be able to achieve that would be to surround myself with creatives.
During my first year at BCU, I found it really difficult and considered on many occasions dropping out. I’m so glad I didn’t. I learnt a lot during the first year; mainly transitioning into a learning environment and being receptive to everything everybody said. I learnt the basic skills of graphic design and how to work as part of a team. The first project I worked on was the Introduction to Visual Communication module as part of a team of 6/7 people from different disciplines. I felt so out of my depth, having to work with complete strangers on what seemed like a mammoth project. It was throughout the first year I learnt to dissect the brief and understand how to respond efficiently.
Throughout my second year I started to develop an understanding for theoretical design and the links between formative research and creating successful final outcomes. The second year helped me develop more confidence for myself as a designer; I had a stronger belief in myself compared to the first year. I feel this was because I was learning to experiment and push my own boundaries in terms of my design work. I arranged a placement at PCL Digital based in Ladywood. PCL Digital are a digital printer who I have used for print work before. I wanted to increase my knowledge about the print process and how to get files ready for print without errors so spent a few months working there as a Graphic Designer on my days off work creating print ready design work. It was in my second year I started to realise where I saw my area of practice; luxury branding.
I really began to form an in-depth understanding of conducting informed primary and secondary research. I spent most of the first two months of the Major Study module conducting in-depth research and understanding the main projects I was working on. One of the projects I began work on was an augmented reality environment for the ordering process of a new car at Land Rover. It would allow the customer to see, in real-time, customisations to the vehicle they are interested in buying, things like colour, wheels, engine, price, etc. I did quite a lot of in-depth research for this project by interviewing a customer of Land Rover who had bought a new vehicle and the Head of Business. I arranged with Land Rover to have a loan vehicle for the weekend to study the cars information systems, the design of the system and how it worked as solution to interacting with the car from a customer’s perspective. During the development of this project I managed to create a sample video, demonstrating the kind of augmented reality a user would experience when using the AR ordering system for Land Rover. I created this using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator, using 3D motion tracking to allow me to get the visual elements I had created using Adobe Illustrator to ‘move’ in relation to the video footage and create a sense of augmented reality as the user walks around the vehicle using the headset.
During the Major Study module I began applying for jobs as a Graphic Designer at various companies; I got offered an interview with Birmingham City Football Club but was unsuccessful in being offered another. I was also offered an interview at Galliford Try, based in Solihull. The interview process went on for around four weeks and required me to work on 3 different example projects which I have submitted with this module. The first project was for Transport of London to help alleviate some of the negativity associated with traveling on the underground. The campaign I created was called “we want to show you how much we love you this Valentine’s” and was aimed at commuters of all sorts using the tube on Valentine’s Day. On Valentine’s Day commuters would be able to travel in pairs, for the price of one person. Beginning the project, I researched the brand guidelines and identity documents for the London Underground and started developing some ideas. The research I had done surrounding previous campaigns by TFL all had elements of logo ‘play’; the underground logo had been manipulated to look like something else e.g. a birthday cake. I wanted to take this project in the same sort of direction so began thinking about how I could manipulate the underground logo. I designed a love heart shaped logo that would later be used in all the campaign collateral. I received some great feedback for this project and was offered a second interview with Galliford Try. The second interview involved a further two projects where I was expected to create a visually appealing bid document/infographic, pulling out key information to questions in response to a bid for construction work. I was challenged by this as I had never worked on anything like this before so I had to research bid design and read some interesting articles about information design on TDL-Creatives website.
I was approached by Chris Hatton who is a Personal Trainer, Nutritionist and Fitness Model based in Reading with an online following of 200,000 people. Chris wanted a brand creating for him and a new e-commerce website when he would be able to autonomously sell his downloadable products, mainly being food plans, workout plans and some physical products such as clothing. Chris was clear that the brand had to be modern, contemporary but also bold and have a fitness look about it. I met with Chris to discuss his requirements more in-depth and to get a better understanding of where he wanted to take his brand, Hatts Health. This project was one of my most challenging, as this was paid work which made me feel more pressured to deliver polished, perfectly working results. Chris had a very clear image about his brand requirements and I had to work with him to alter some of those images to better suit the brand and the direction of the business. I supplied Chris was various logos as a starting point and then developed them from there.