Today we discussed possible questions we could ask about an industry in general and directly to a company theses are some of the question we came up with.
General:
-How do you find clients?
-How does marketing work? how do you market yourself?
-What kind of equipment is used?
-How are contacts found?
-Whats happening in the industry at the moment?
-Who's at the top of the market? who do you look up to?
-Where are the jobs?
-Who gets the jobs? / kind of people
-How many employers are there?
-What kind of size are the companies?
Company:
-What qualifications do you require?
-Is working with other practitioners important? partnerships?
-What do you specialize in?
-Is there training for employees?
-What benefits / bonus's / support do you get? staff discount / commissions
-What work do you have / up and coming?
-How do you allocate work?
-How do you present to potential clients?
-How do you market yourself?
-Size of company?
-Structure of company? how it is organised / hierarchy
-Staff and roles
-Regularity of work?
-Income / salaries
-Skills / experience?
-What type of people are employed?
-Where do you advertise jobs?
-How long do people stay in their jobs?
-How many sites do they work on?
Ethics - influence on work?
-Health and safety requirements
-How are employees paid? hour / job / work
All these questions can help me with ideas when I contact an employer or company to try and get an idea of who is out there who could possible be a potential employer in the future.
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Graphic Designer
Today we had a graphic designer from Brond come in to talk to us about his work and a bit about the industry. His company is made up of two main designers including himself and they bring other people in for specific jobs if needed.
Most of their work comes from referrals or by approaching a brand, suggesting improvements to start a conversation going which may lead to development and to a pitch.
He used to do product design at 14 and some graphic design work in his free time, then did A levels and foundation Art, he decided to go onto graphics as he thought it was more free than product design. Using interests that he had, he began finding himself jobs by asking companies that he was interested in such as O'Neil if he could show them some ideas, he did say that often first ideas were rejected but it opened the door for conversation and often lead on to him being able to do some design work for them.
Some advice that he gave us was that you need to develop skills quickly and always try to keep learning, be yourself, be original and be interesting. Working through holidays is a good idea as it is making you continue to learn and the more experience you have the better you can become and feel more confident about what you are doing.
What to consider when looking for a job.
prepare /presentation skills / keep active
really try to involve yourself in creating networks and contacts, meet people.
when you are producing your work know why you are making small decisions such as changing a font or color.
note down when you have sent your CV's and follow them up, employers might be looking for someone who is showing a real interest in wanting to work for them and might be more likely to consider you over others. Show energy and be a good communicator.
Ask open questions
Do you take people on? rather than have you got any jobs
Be flexible, if they invite you somewhere such as to a design show etc make sure you are able to go to make a good impression.
Interviews
show energy and enthusiasm be open and understood, show skills and ability, have the right attitude and make an effort.
When asked questions such as why have you done this say the obvious then expand on it.
If you have older work in your portfolio which you look at and think I could have done that better, then do it if you are thinking this then what is the person who you are showing it to going to think?
The interviewer might not be creative so explain to them why you have done something and why it works, why it is good.
Go to interviews with a question to ask even if it is simple as it will make them more relaxed and be better interaction.
If you are considering a brand update...
Look at the current design, make notes on it what is it telling you, colour, text, illustrations
consider how it could be changed, pick out the words that you don't want the brand to be saying and change them from the way they are currently linked to the design.
Unique
Everyone has a different life experience and outlook, make good use of this people will probably want to hear your opinion be engaging with a group discussion.
One way in which he designed a logo on request from a company was to first make the designs in black and white and create separate colour pallets and also to have the designs with different font changes such as upper and lower case bold and medium weight, under each design he wrote a few notes on why he had made the choice of colour, type etc so he could explain this easier to the company.
He said that it is important to have loads of interests, and not to guess but to use market research if you are unsure of something as knowledge leads to good design.
If you have an idea for a design write it down and if it doesn't sound good then it probably won't be
Most of their work comes from referrals or by approaching a brand, suggesting improvements to start a conversation going which may lead to development and to a pitch.
He used to do product design at 14 and some graphic design work in his free time, then did A levels and foundation Art, he decided to go onto graphics as he thought it was more free than product design. Using interests that he had, he began finding himself jobs by asking companies that he was interested in such as O'Neil if he could show them some ideas, he did say that often first ideas were rejected but it opened the door for conversation and often lead on to him being able to do some design work for them.
Some advice that he gave us was that you need to develop skills quickly and always try to keep learning, be yourself, be original and be interesting. Working through holidays is a good idea as it is making you continue to learn and the more experience you have the better you can become and feel more confident about what you are doing.
What to consider when looking for a job.
prepare /presentation skills / keep active
really try to involve yourself in creating networks and contacts, meet people.
when you are producing your work know why you are making small decisions such as changing a font or color.
note down when you have sent your CV's and follow them up, employers might be looking for someone who is showing a real interest in wanting to work for them and might be more likely to consider you over others. Show energy and be a good communicator.
Ask open questions
Do you take people on? rather than have you got any jobs
Be flexible, if they invite you somewhere such as to a design show etc make sure you are able to go to make a good impression.
Interviews
show energy and enthusiasm be open and understood, show skills and ability, have the right attitude and make an effort.
When asked questions such as why have you done this say the obvious then expand on it.
If you have older work in your portfolio which you look at and think I could have done that better, then do it if you are thinking this then what is the person who you are showing it to going to think?
The interviewer might not be creative so explain to them why you have done something and why it works, why it is good.
Go to interviews with a question to ask even if it is simple as it will make them more relaxed and be better interaction.
If you are considering a brand update...
Look at the current design, make notes on it what is it telling you, colour, text, illustrations
consider how it could be changed, pick out the words that you don't want the brand to be saying and change them from the way they are currently linked to the design.
Unique
Everyone has a different life experience and outlook, make good use of this people will probably want to hear your opinion be engaging with a group discussion.
One way in which he designed a logo on request from a company was to first make the designs in black and white and create separate colour pallets and also to have the designs with different font changes such as upper and lower case bold and medium weight, under each design he wrote a few notes on why he had made the choice of colour, type etc so he could explain this easier to the company.
He said that it is important to have loads of interests, and not to guess but to use market research if you are unsure of something as knowledge leads to good design.
If you have an idea for a design write it down and if it doesn't sound good then it probably won't be
Sunday, 13 March 2011
Spike Island Visit Write-up 3.2.11
On the visit to Spike Island there were two main exhibitions on show, the first was by Sean Edwards which included photography, film sculpture and drawings was a representation of time spent in a shopping center that was due for demolition, he made studies of his time there which is shown in his work on display.
Another section of his work 'Tea at my father's House' included a set of 13 photo studies which I found a little more interesting than the other work although neither really impresses me.
There was also another exhibition on show called 'Invocations of Blank Paper' by Martin Creed, Ryan Gander, Vlatka Horat, Gareth Long, Anna Molska and Ignacio Uriarte. The idea of the exhibition was that it "uses the blank page as a metaphor for the processes of creative expression" Again I didn't find this exhibition very good, if anything I was more distracted by the video clip of daffy duck placing in the corner, although the piece of crunched up paper in the stand did make me think a lot it was more of thinking how can you have this as an exhibition piece.
Spike Island itself has some good space for exhibitions, including large rooms for constructing any large pieces, and also has a lot of studio space that people rent out, although we didn't get to see them exactly I can see that there is some good opportunity for working space in the future if I ever needed it.
Another section of his work 'Tea at my father's House' included a set of 13 photo studies which I found a little more interesting than the other work although neither really impresses me.
There was also another exhibition on show called 'Invocations of Blank Paper' by Martin Creed, Ryan Gander, Vlatka Horat, Gareth Long, Anna Molska and Ignacio Uriarte. The idea of the exhibition was that it "uses the blank page as a metaphor for the processes of creative expression" Again I didn't find this exhibition very good, if anything I was more distracted by the video clip of daffy duck placing in the corner, although the piece of crunched up paper in the stand did make me think a lot it was more of thinking how can you have this as an exhibition piece.
Spike Island itself has some good space for exhibitions, including large rooms for constructing any large pieces, and also has a lot of studio space that people rent out, although we didn't get to see them exactly I can see that there is some good opportunity for working space in the future if I ever needed it.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Script
I wanted to add a little more interactivity to some areas of the site and decided to look into effects for the images, enlargements and slideshows. The first think I did was to look on Dynamic Drive as I had used it before and it has clear instructions to help edit the html.
I found this code which allows you to magnify sections of the images on mouseover
This is what it looks like on my page it also has an effect where you can choose the amount of zoom, and if you scroll while you have the box over the image you can zoom in more.
I also added this code for a fade-in slideshow on the main navigation page to fill the large gap but still have some good space.
When I saved the files to use on the website I made sure they all had names that were easy to locate and similar images I just changed the number to make it easy when editing to swap images in the html
Friday, 11 March 2011
Designing my website
I decided to start designing my website and once I start designing a website I can't stop
Using the navigation plan that I made before I based the pages that I needed on this.
I will have an intro, Contact page, CV and Portfolio page with more links to work
This is the main navigation page I wanted to keep everything very simplistic and clean so I've used mainly white and a slight bit of pink just to ad a small portion of colour to the pages.
This page links from the portfolio and currently has a link to my art and graphics work and a home page navigation that I drew up quickly in illustrator.
This is the page from the art work link and it shows a few of my piece of work, the image thumbnails are enlarged sections of the work and when you roll over them with the mouse they show the whole image, you can then click each one as a link and view the image in full.
Roll over effect
This page is one of the links to the enlargement of an image, I also added some arrow links so you can click through the images at the larger size without having to keep going back to the main menu.
My next step is to create an intro page, contact page and CV
Friday, 4 March 2011
Business Plan: Advertising costs
http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/traditional-marketing/print-advertising/costs.html
Small ads for papers, costs and background information link
Advertising Paper Rate Cards research
Large Magazine brand rate cards research
mirror group rate cards
Sample business plan idea link
Small ads for papers, costs and background information link
Advertising Paper Rate Cards research
Large Magazine brand rate cards research
mirror group rate cards
Sample business plan idea link
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