OUGD502 - Evaluation

At the start of this year I outlined a number of aspects within my design process that needed improving. This included managing my time more efficiently and  
getting into contact with more professionals and people within the creative industry to help further my practice. These are shown within the blog posts of Studio Brief 1 where I have noted down my interactions with visiting professionals and other creatives.

Studio Brief 2 also let me better develop my contact with professionals. Meeting with Josiah not only helped me complete this brief successfully but helped me better understand working as a design professional. Prior to this interview I was unsure how working as a freelance designer straight out uni would work however Josiah's progression has better informed me of the opportunities available as a graduate. The helpfulness extended the interview as I received various feedback by email which helped me exponentially within my brief however it is also appropriate within any editorial brief. To further this, Josiah gave me a number of useful typefaces and imagery that can be used as research.

Projects outside of uni such as my three exhibitions and client work has been found to be useful in understanding how to talk to clients and other creatives in a more professional and concise way. They have also helped me to grow my audience especially on social media such as Instagram

Working collaboratively with Ben for Studio Brief 03, Life's a Pitch was something that I really enjoyed within this module. Our appropriate research and already established understanding of editorial design and publishing has helped made this project successful and something we hope to grow and commercialise in the future.

Overall I have found this module extremely useful in developing my practice over this year. This is something I hope to push further over summer and in the next academic year. Although I have a better understanding of how I hope to progress after my course, next year will help my ideas further and lead me to a career I enjoy and best suits my work.

OUGD502 - Creative Report - Issuu

OUGD502 - Creative Report - creating my publication

I mocked my first editorial up with simplicity in mind. I wanted my text and imagery to portrayed in an interesting but eye catching and easily read way. This is seen below:

After this first mock up was created I started talking to Josiah by email. Through this I received feedback about my design and on editorials in general. He gave me ideas that I will use from now on in my practice.

He also attached a number of images that were useful for research and inspiration. This feedback influenced me so much that I completely changed my publication. Each page was interesting and brought the audience to the page.

OUGD502 - Creative Report - Research and interview

I felt it was important that I knew about Josiah's practice before interviewing him. This meant looking through various sources online to find out what I could about him. I then started to think of questions i could ask within the interview.

I found this interview extremely useful for my practice as I found Josiah easy to talk to making it easier for me to ask the questions I wanted to know. I was also able to look through his portfolio with him and find out how each of his projects were created. My transcribed interview is seen below.

How did you get to work in Mexico and what did this involve?

I’ve got two revenue streams at the moment. One is my bread and butter work where I do stuff for an insurance company. This is boring, shit work but it’s what pays the bill. This pays for the stuff I actually want to be doing which doesn’t really pay but looks good. Without this work I wouldn’t have a lot of income because the people I like to work for don’t usually have a lot of money. I’m just on a retainer with three different insurances companies where they pay me once a month. I don’t usually have any influence on what I am creating and it isn’t work I particularly enjoy doing. They work for ticketing agencies and big music festivals so when I go out for drinks with them it’s the guy who own canal mills and wire, however one of their friends and business partners set up a bar/restaurant in Mexico and it was through the insurance companies that I met her. She was looking for a graphic designer. She came to me with a logo but I tried to pitch a new logo as it’s not that good. But she was insistent on the previous design so I had to art direct almost and build the identity around the logo.

What did you get to do in Mexico?

I was basically finishing things off. I’ve been working with them since November 2016 and they launched in the new year. It properly got started in January-February time when they flew me out to Mexico where I had planned to stay for four days but ended up staying for fifteen.

Did you spend your time exploring Mexico at all?

I spent a lot of time working on the beach and walked around a bit. It’s the benefit of being freelance. I could still do work for other people there as I don’t need to be in Leeds to do work.

What briefs do you enjoy?

I enjoy working with other disciplines as I don’t really like working with other graphic designers! Photographers, artists, product designers but mostly photographers. I’m now intact a visiting lecturer at Leeds College of Art on the photography course. I don’t take many photos but I make a lot of photo books so they get me in as a graphic designer to help students with this.

How did you manage to get this?

Adrian who is the senior photography lecturer at the university is sitting on a backlog of photographs that have never been published. We’re going to work together to create a publishing company where I create his books and they go under his name.

I was based in Duke Studios and moved out in January. I’m back at home at the moment but will soon move into a studio in an art gallery by the town hall. I’m going to be doing doing work for the art gallery in exchange for a studio space.

Did you find the workload as a freelance artist to be constant or was it difficult straight out of uni?

From the day after graduation I was like: right, I’m going to go for it. It was quite hard as I sat down at my desk and I realised I had to start and make money. It helped that I set targets so in a month I want to earn this much, in six months I want to earn this much. Even if it’s just revenue and not profit, I just wanted to get that much work done.

Did you have to really push people with emails and meet new creatives to get work?

I didn’t really have to contact people, a lot of work came to me. Throughout the whole of uni I met so many people and I found Leeds is a really close knit community of creatives and you just have to break into that circle so people know you. I did this because of Nest basically so from launching exhibitions at Colours May Vary, Village, working at Duke Studios, 

What is Researchhh?

I started the blog at the start of uni but it’s grown into quite a big thing now. I just started it as a really small tumblr where I would just reblog things I liked and I get around a submission a day. I like this as it saves me time looking for posts! So I usually stick it on and people get exposure which I find is easy networking as they email me and I have maintained a number of relationships through this.

Do you still get a lot of internet traffic from this blog?

I decided to move to Instagram as people were getting tired of Instagram and switched. There are quite a few big graphic design blogs on tumblr and I wanted to be the first that moves onto Instagram as you then get that traffic. I did this and now I’m getting more and more followers. I usually get around 70,000 impressions a week which means all these people are seeing work. I also find myself posting my own work on here as it is such good exposure.

A lot of blogs, especially on tumblr, specialise so precisely to get that audience so its either graphic design or fashion; it’s never both or it’s graphic design or photography; never both. So I just do stuff I like and other people like it too. 

I have long term ambitions with this blog where I would like to do a magazine with the same name. I hope to do this when I get 10,000 followers on Instagram. The small publication will feature work from creatives I like. I don’t even mind if I don’t make money with this, as long as I break even. The studio HAW-LIN also had their own magazine after their blog. It started as a blog with two interns at the design studio, Hort who would send images back and forth. From this they realised they worked really well together and so set up a successful magazine and design studio. 

What work do you like?

Studios like OK-RM, they’ve just created a new identity for the new J.W. Anderson show at the Hepworth, it’s worth checking out.

What kind of graphic design would you say that you specialise in?

More print based I guess so publications, editorial. Throughout uni I hated identities and if there was any brief that involved creating an identity I would avoid doing it but I’ve really enjoyed it whilst working freelance.

At uni we sometimes have to juggle 4 modules at once. How many briefs do you usually undertake at one time as a freelance?

I never thought it would be that busy but I have a lot of stuff on. Even if they are projects I am just starting and are waiting to hear back from people so although it is different to the course, it’s about managing your time.

I quite like freelance because I see a project from start to finish, if I worked from an agency it would just be doing pass work and I wouldn't see the full project it would just be: ‘can you finish this off for me’. As a junior designer you never really work on a full project. That’s why I basically wanted to go freelance as its jumping into the deep end but you get to see the whole project and control it more. It’s even learning how to pitch more and other skills.

What is your opinion on working for free?

A guy in Belgian set up a small t-shirt company but didn’t have any money. I’ve been working for him for a while but haven’t yet been payed however has said that once he does have money I will be payed. It will be such a substantial project as I have done the whole identity for it, the art direction for the spring/ summer collection which will launch hopefully next week. From that I can then do the art direction for the photoshoot and then it will hopefully continue on and become good regular work.

I found it was really hard to get people to submit for NEST. I knew that each publication’s focus had to be really broad so issue 6 which was my first was based off the letters N and E. It had to be like this as people never create work specifically for the magazine. The magazine was bi-annual so we produced NE in Spring/ Summer and ST in Autumn/ Winter.

I always planned to launch the first one before Christmas and the other one before summer but it always worked out that the one before Christmas was February and the one before summer was after summer.

One of my ambitions when I was trying to get it turned into a thing people knew about was letting the audience know it was free. At the time it was the college magazine but there were students that didn’t even know about it. I mean now, most people know about it because it’s everywhere which is good.

Even people who have submitted to next have gone far. Danny who was in first year when he submitted to one of my issues, is now in his second year and is who I am creating an exhibition for. We met through NEST.

Being so highly involved in NEST has given me experience in curating exhibitions which I have been able to use within my professional practice. I talked to the people at Colours May Vary about holding the opening party there which they agreed too without hesitating. I took a video of the whole printing process at Pressission and projected this within the gallery space and took pallets that the publications came on and placed them within the space.

He doesn’t really want to be known as the publisher behind this. It’s called the Cave Press because he’s just been throwing books out of the cave and this also forms the identity showing books within a cave. Easy.

We approach MKI, an independent close store in Leeds to do a photoshoot with the locations being the Uni of Leeds Campus. I worked with Ben Renshaw, a photographer and looked at the idea to create an A3 poster that would be folded. We like the idea of bringing folding into the images themselves. Especially because a lot of the garments that they sell are all about the cuts of the clothes so within the art direction of the brief it was about cutting the photos. A big no-no in fashion photography is having anything intersecting with the head but we quite liked it because it has these cuts.

We scouted this location before hand and knew what places would work well such as the car park. We then found out the exact right time where the shadow cuts across the frame of the photo. We also tried to focus on colours so picked out a yellow throughout different shots. The photographer would take a series of shots then show me as the art director and I would tell him whether I wanted the image framed differently or timed by the models differently. Timing was especially important throughout the day. We chose a day in October time for the shoot when we had limited hours of light so I had to make sure we didn’t spend too much time in a location between shots.

That’s why I like working with photographers who know they aren’t graphic designers, you can respect their practice and they can respect yours.

So I was art directing this, I collected the right materials. These are also in fact my sunglasses also, I thought they looked cool so thought why not, let’s shoot them. and these are actually all shot outside using the natural sunlight. It was an amazing day and we were going to shoot it with a few studio lights but the sunlight worked well. We did photos for three different styles and made it look as professional as we could. We bought the sunglasses and then sent them back after the shoot. We improvised during the shoot using white and black card, mirrors and the natural sunlight. It was also all shot in his garden but people don’t see this and the final results came out well.

More questions were recored and asked however found these answers to be most useful

I also made some useful notes whilst with Josiah:

OUGD502 - Creative Report - Finding a professsional

At first I was unsure who I would interview for this brief. My practice is broad and I am unsure what type of professional work I would be involved in later in my career. I first asked my aunty who has worked within the fashion industry as a designer and a lecturer whether she knew anyone appropriate for me to interview. Through her I was able to contact an illustrator and Creative Director. Although I exchanged dialogue through email with these professionals, I felt I could find someone more suited to my practice.After researching a number of other graphic designers and studios I decided to look at Josiah Craven.

Josiah is an ex student from Leeds College of Art and works as an independent Graphic Designer in Leeds. His practice varies and is often very conceptual. I first came about Josiah during my first year at uni whilst learning about Nest, the uni's magazine. From this he has developed his practice into a professional career. I decided to message him on Instagram as we have followed each other for a while, making it easier to make conversation.

After talking to Josiah for a while I asked him if we could meet as this enabled me to find out more about him as a creative and his practice. This also meant I could photograph him for my book. This was also a way I find I can get more comfortable with talking to people as I often interact with models with small talk whilst photographing.

OUGD502 - Life's a Pitch - BLEP

An important part of your professional growth is to develop an ability to work collaboratively and productively with others. Working in small mixed groups drawn from a number of LCA creative degree programme’s you will  develop fully and pitch a professional proposal for a public facing venture to best showcase and promote the individual works of the collective . This could take the form of ( but certainly is not limited to) an exhibition, publication or online presence , or perhaps a combination of these. Through research and planning you will explore the basics of how to identify an appropriate venue, audience and market, structure your team to optimise your individual and group skills and knowledge, investigate the legal and financial obligations of developing and launching a creative initiative, seek appropriate professional support & advice, plan and control finances and effectively promote, brand and communicate your presence to external parties and partners. 

Your team will pitch a fully developed proposal describing and visualising the  showcase  with appropriate visual aids. 

Your individual presentation should be based on the analysis and content that you have been introduced to throughout the module and your experience of working in a collaborative partnership.

I decided to form a collective with my house mate Ben Cooper. As we are both photographers in our spare time, we had previously planned to do a project together however this brief enables us to explore this as part of a uni brief. The outcome for this brief would be a presentation in front of peers from the course. 

After recently getting my photo on the cover of a Blame Your Parents Press zine and not receiving neither a copy nor payment, I came up with the idea to create our own independent publishing company. These were the notes we made prior to the presentation.

We felt the first thing we should do in regards to starting the publishing company was to come up with a name and design a logo. After settling on BLEP, a nonsense word that seemed to work our ideas, I set on creating a logo. My experiments and final design can be seen below.

We put our ideas into a presentation so we would be able to explain our ideas to peers and tutors.

OUGD502 - Leeds Print Fair

I attended this event as I knew it would better inform my practice. The variety of speakers and topics they spoke about certainly helped me with this. Speakers included design studio Dr Me, an editorial designer for It's Nice that and Pat Bradbury from People of Print.

The two talks I found most interesting were that from It's Nice That and People of Print.                   is a designer that works on It's Nice That's publication, Printed Pages. He discussed his own career as well as the increased popularity of the editorial. Being an avid reader of the publication myself, I found this talk interesting and informative.

Pat Bradbury is the creator of the website, People of Print which documents successful print pieces and publications. He has also produced successful publications such as Print isn't Dead Magazine and the poster zine series.

These are my notes from the talk:

After this event me and Ben were able to talk to Pat about BLEP, our idea for an independent publishing company focussing on local creatives. He gave us the idea to start our project on kickstarter. This would enable us to fund publications without the need for ads. He also suggested that our first publication was open for submission. This means it will reach more people as artists involved will show or page to a larger audience.