The ‘managing a team’ videos were great and allowed us a great insight into the corporate world. Collaborating with others is obviously something we will be doing a lot of within the industry, but that side of the world is not something I often look into. I found it really insightful and found the meeting planning and presenting section particularly interesting, as I believe anybody can give a meeting, but it’s definitely a skilled that once mastered can put you ahead of your colleagues and I think that some of the tips given in this section in particular are things we can transfer into our working life. I had also not given much thought to the make up of the teams that I will be working with and understanding that every team is made up of a similar structure with decision makers in the core and stakeholders on the boundaries is a really interesting way to look at things and I look forward to transferring some of the tips I have picked up into my working life.

The talk was very inspirational, as she is a young designer who graduated 3 years ago and already appears to be on her way to having a really successful career, it shows that it’s possible to achieve something so quickly and straight after university. 

This particular talk was very influential to me personally as she is a graphic designer who studied at the same university with similar experiences to myself. I like her way of thinking and finding inspiration in nature and in just very extraordinary places not just usual research and books.

 Her style is very minimalistic but she adapts for Penhaligon's the British perfume house as their style is quite chaotic and not necessarily in line with her traditional approach. I like the way she devides two separate styles for work and for her own pleasure. 

She talks about mental health a lot and portrays in her work her own personal struggles with anxiety, which is very similar to what I feel myself and definitely made me feel more confident about the future and the opportunities that may meet me following university.

 

It was particularly interesting the fact that she was working in typography in both English and Arabic and was able to be successful in both languages and scripts. I also enjoyed her piece that looked at where her family had been through the years, it’s given me great encouragement to draw on my personal life for inspiration in my work itself.

 

Once more, seeing how relatively fast she was able to go from working for companies, constrained in the pieces she created to going freelance was also encouraging as that is my ultimate goal and the fact that she was able to go freelance so early in her career is great and somewhat of an inspiration to me.

 

Having done a workshop with Naima only a day prior, it was interesting to take a deeper look into her broader work and even her career as a whole and seeing how the things she taught us the day prior she has used in her personal work.

 

Naima created a really good image of the industry and it is certainly an industry I would like to be involved in in the future, whether that is as a branding industry or as a more broad graphic designer with a really good base in Typography, Naima was definitely able to show the industries pros and cons that she has encountered personally.

He also runs his own studio “we made this” since 2014, along with other designers, this gives him the ability to work amongst other designers on projects.

His presentation was full of useful advice for designers at the start of their path. One of which is to  always remember the licensing side of your work, maintaining an eye on copyright so as not to run into any legal trouble. He also recommended we send a lot of emails to the studios we admire to show our work and show them what you can do and what you like. Also, show off, keep ourselves out in public, enter competitions and post our work on social platforms.

He also gave good advice around the financial aspects of the industry and how young designers  always tend to set their rates lower than the industries averages. He taught us to always try to see how long it would take and how much work it requires and not to underpay ourselves. Once more, not to forget outside financial aspects such as rent and setting up a studio and whether it is actually financially worth it.

I think this advice, although precious now, will be worth its wait in gold when we graduate and we are looking for ways to get our names out there and work with successful studios.

I am a great admirer of Alistair’s work and all the lessons he has given us, both in this lecture and over our time spent with him.

In the talk we were divided into small groups to discuss and create a company that we would like to work for in the future, discussing aspects of the company such as creating a name, a logo, colour scheme and the core values of said company. Each group had a timer, decider and writer.

In my group i was to be the decider, so I took it upon myself to be a decision maker and really make sure that our discussions were on track and decisions could be reached upon the different aspects of our company. The project really made us work on our interpersonal skills and demonstrate our communication skills in a way that would be similar to how we would need to communicate within the industry.

As I did not know my peers in person previously, we set to introducing ourselves and discussing what aspects of design we believe our strong points are and what we can bring to the table for the company. Learning that we were four graphic designers really played a hand in determining that we would name our company ‘4D’ representative of the fact that we are in fact 4 designers.

Once determining our name and establishing what we all bring to the table, we took time out to create a mood board about our company and how we want it to be perceived. We went away and took 10 pictures from Pinterest and once everyones picks had been sent to me, I arranged them into a collage that reflected how we wanted our company to be perceived by the public.

With the name of the company decided and the purpose of the company set, we then decided to come up with a logo. Once more, after a brief discussion on what we see the logo looking like, we all set to creating a logo privately, then compared and voted on the logo when we were reunited in the chat.

Following the vote it was decided that we would move forward using my logo, a logo based on a really slick, simple design with a black and white colour palette.

I learned a lot from this project and was a great reminder of the importance of team work and taking it upon myself to be a leading member of the team and look forward to similar projects like this in the future.

In our presentation we included all our work done up to this point, which included some research of names, logo, riso printing colours, colour palette, client’s preferences and some more bits and bobs.

During the presentation, we got a lot of feedback and comments. One of the most important feedback was about the name as we made names connecting them to the university, which the teachers felt we should have stayed away from as the agency wants to distance itself from just the University and take on its own identity. 

Also, we need to focus on particular case studies of existing products and brands. Look closely at the way they promote the whole product rather than just a logo or other elements on its own. Look at the whole image and get an idea how we can do something similar and successful. 

Moreover, it was incredibly useful to be able to look at each other’s work during the presentations and see what they thought about and done so far.

The most useful think we learnt was about the names, how abstract those names were and how successful they sounded compared to our own. Our group definitely benefited from learning how we could improve our work and it motivated us to work even harder to produce a stronger identity outcome.

Also, it was clear, that we are lucky enough to be able to meet every week and get along as a lot of groups have struggled with times to meet and in some cases were not getting along very well. We all have our differences in taste and subjects but it should only benefit us rather putting us apart.

For the next phase, we should focus on names, look at particular case studies and look at typefaces.

As a group, we struggled with names at first, as the bunch we created weren’t successful and we had to start from the scratch once again to generate better oneS. 

Each of us had some brain storming of the names on a slide where we tried to generate various names and attempted to maintain an open mind in the development of them.

Our clients preferred Lookout Agency and Abundance of arms.

Abundance of arms  is fun and the alliteration is quite unique, it suggests lots of people are available to create. This idea could be fun to work around.

 

The name ‘Lookout Agency’ suggests that the agency is always looking out for the new talents to join them. They are also looking out what’s new and cool first. Thus name is representing the agency beliefs and thoughts and could be something very strong with such a meaningful context behind it.

After a group discussion alongside the tutor, we decided to focus on “Lookout Agency” as the context behind it is something that the client is looking forward to and this could be also fun to create an identity for.

We were tasked with finding and looking at typefaces, which could potentially be used for our agency.

The first task was to find existing products which included typeface we particularly liked. Three of us did independent research of the things we liked and felt the biggest connection with. We all agreed that we needed 2 typefaces, one for the logo, names, captions and titles and the other one for general information and promotion.

We then all created a few slides each with the examples we liked and thought would be suitable for the agency identity. After a group discussion, we chose 6 typefaces we liked the most, 3 bold and fun typefaces and 3 simple, sans serif ones. 

For general information, we looked at some prices and found a few typefaces which needed to be purchased and some that were free such as Montserrat typeface. 

For the bold typeface for logos and titles, we proposed more for the inspiration rather than for the actual. We didn’t find any free typefaces but we didn’t have any intention of using any existing typeface as we were planning to produce the custom one specifically for the agency’s identity anyway, to do so we would use Glyph app which will allow us to produce a fully usable typeface. We will start from the capitals and some characters only to focus on quality rather than quantity of the letters.

Once again, we presented those slides to our peers and the tutor for the feedback. Our tutor was pleased that we are planning to make our custom typeface but she asked to focus more on existing typeface for general information, and look more into prices, finding two similar typefaces with and without cost for the client to make the further decision. 

Through the comments supplied we can see that the client likes the bold and fun design like Extra nice as it is a very simple and playful design.

When doing case studies we looked at various aspects so the client could determine what they are connecting and what they don’t have a connection with.

 The client liked the ‘animade’ case study, as it’s very colourful and playful in its design too. We should definitely focus carefully on what the client likes rather than our own preferences moving forward. 

The client didn’t connect with the royal academy of music as their identity feels too bland for them and that is something we should stay away from.

The client also didn’t connect with yahoo and McDonald’s case studies as they prefer small and fun companies and not huge commercial ones.

Although the client did not connect with every case study, it was important to really get a feel for what they liked and didn’t like. 

We received quite positive feedback on our mood board, as they were “playful and fun examples”

We received a few comments about the development work as well. 

One of the clients comments was about the hand type logo, they said it was so fun and they love it. But we should add eyes inside the two o’s which could be animated as well.

The client also wants to see stuff being animated as once again it brings extra emphasis to their identity as fun and playful.

For the next step we should present 3 further identities for the client to choose from but we should keep in mind what the client wants “fun, colourful and playful design”.

The client then gave us feedback on these slides, plus the design testing we had done the week prior. This feedback helped give us a sense of direction- knowing what design direction to pursue.

We created more designs and made more moodboards to quantify this feedback; we explored patterns, type and logos further.

During thursday's session this week we spoke to emily. She liked some of the work that we had created and wants us to explore the type and the “eyes in the oos”, the eye mascot character and the squiggly lines pattern created in riso colours . This also came with critics and tips to develop our work.

Tasks: