Creative Futures

Creative Futures 2013

?Creative futures was an opportu-nity for art based students to be given an insight into the industry. The university invited a range of experienced artists

and designers from within the creative industry to tell us about their jour-ney. There were a total of 65 speakers that shared their knowledge and gave priceless tips

on how to get that all important job. The week begun with an opening talk from Dr Stu-art Cunningham who is head of the creative industries here at Glyndwr.

The introduction explained how the week was going to unravel and also an explanation on how important these talks are as they give priceless knowledge from

people within the industry. In theory the event was a chance for students to take the time to think about what they want to do once they finished their studies.

Written by Carl Redfern

How NotT o B e ADesigner

This talk was presented by Robert

Ball, a designer currently working for “The Partners” design firm. He started with a short introduction

about him self and his career which, although brief, was very interesting. The fact that he started in illustration and moved to design

interests me and his chose his career in design for similar reason I did. He gained his job through a 2 week work placement, this must surely be an inspiration for student

to go and get them self work experience and work placement at firms as it is a good way to immerse your self in the industry and possibly gain employment. The partners main focus is

on branding and they take an interesting and “out of the box” approach to briefs. Mr. Ball explained that Branding is “Creating the appropriate work for the appropriate people” and that as a branding

company they cannot have a signature style. The approach each brief differently and there for crate a individual and tailored outcome for each task. I think it is a great way of creating work, too many people

create a style and get stuck in a design rut and create similar work over and over. This is not good design practise and every company is different and there for you work should be. Possibly the most interesting case of this was

when they were given the brief to create a screen saver for a accountancy firm. On the surface this appeared to be a dull task however with some creative thinking they came up with the idea that they should have a screen saver and that they should turn off there screen instead, thus saving money and electricity. This Ingenious piece of thinking took no design skill to create as they were selling the company “nothing” however due to the creative thinking and ideas produced my The Partners they were able to sell this concept and it was herald as one of the greatest green concepts of the year. Robert followed this with an interesting quote saying ” Don’t mirror companies, don’t create something you think they will like. Have the confidence to create something you like”. I really like this idea however I feel it has its limitations. Companies like The Partners are able to create such this due to there reputation and respect within the design industry. I feel it would be much harder to do this as a young unknown designer as your ideas and designs will be less respected. On the other hand its ideas like this that make designers and if you are not creating interesting and innovative designs then you will never stand out. The next section of this talk was about “How not to wright a CV”. After many years in the industry Robert said he has seen many C.V’s and portfolios and gave a few pointers on the subject. He claimed that he rarely reads C.V’s sent in and that it was “all about the portfolio”. This is an interesting insight into the way employers look at potential employees and something that I’m sure

all students will have taken not of. After this he gave a few obvious tips about creative a C.V including “keeping it clean” and “make it simple and easy to view” One of the final points addressed in this talk

was about inspiration. He said that you should look for inspiration in different and unusual places.. “If everyone looks for inspiration in the same place, then ever ones work will be the same”. This

is a valid point as I feel that the internet is so prominent in everyday life that sights such at Behance and Tumblr have a heavy influence on the work everyone creates. This

is evident when seeing people final pieces of work in university as there is a generic theme running throughout. Perhaps with some outside influence

and inspiration the work produced would stand out more. This talk was incredibly interesting and gave a real insight

into the working of a current designer.

“KEEP CALM AND GOOD LUCK”

Written by Simon Amor

Gareth Lawn is a graphic designer. He graduated from North Wales School of Art & Design, Glyndwr Univer-

sity in 2008, as a print designer. He talked about about his meth-odology of work of having a brief and going threw the five stage

process, research, generating mood boards, and ideas up from early stages through to the final art work. He presented himself like a person

who lives and grow up in the design world, he had very important advise as what we have to do to get the job, like to learn how to use software not only

illustrator and photoshop and indesign but others like dreamweaver and after effect and so on, learn other disciplines like web design,and illustration because,

to be a successful graphic designer we need to know as much as we can about everything know it sounds like a lot but that’s what it takes to be successful. He is also a web designer,

he took briefs, generate blueprints he liaise with clients and it is a very important to stay in contact with your client and developers about the site functionality. He did not learn web design at

Glyndwr university it was like a learning curve and a challenge to do it. He was ambitious and cheeky but it paid off because he made an impression by experimenting and using screen-printing that helped

him to generate ideas that sell and get the ideas that the agency are after, the lesson is to make research about the agency you are applying for, to generate ideas that they are looking for. Now a day designers need to have

good grasp of print and web design, having the ability to design for both is a massive advantage. Skills: More we have more it is in design world, we need to be multitask but the ones that are more often wanted are: Knowledge

of software’s or at least basic knowledge as many software’s as we can and if we opting for web design we need to learn HTML and CSS. Make sure that the people or the agencies know about them. Further more we need

to put a lot off efforts, be hard working and enthusiasm as well as collecting as much information’s as we can using blogs, reading books and looking at other designers work. Make yourself known to others,

expose yourself using the same tools like blog, facebook and others, to be a good designer we need to live, breath and think design, it is like learning a language, to speak another language we

need to think using the same language you want to learn. Asking for feedback is a good thing from your peers and accept the critics and know that it is not personnel, that helps you to

progress. There are some questions we need to ask ourselves.

What type of work de we want to be doing? Do we want to specialise in certain area of design? Where do we want to work?

Written by: D Zermani

Gareth Lawn

M E M E M E

Yasia is a deputy art director of Octopus Publishing Group. I have researched into the website of this company and their statement reads ‘Octopus is a leading publisher of illustrated books. We are comprised of nine imprints, and as a group have extensive expe-rience of working with high profile authors, trusted partners and associations to produce exciting, market leading books.’ Yasia first explained about how she came about this job when she left university. She started out by emailing people and sending off her portfolio to company’s for junior design jobs. She then got a job in a magazine in which she stayed for 4 years. She then went into book design and applied for a job at Octopus Publishing in which she now works at currently. We were also told when designing jackets for books you need to make sure that they are exciting and stand out to the audience. After listening to Yasia speak I think its shown me the ways you can get around trying to get into the business you want to work in. If you create a portfolio and work hard within the jobs you get you can accomplish anything.

DESIGN &ILLUSTRATEDPUBLISHINGYASIA WILLIAMS

Written by Benjamin Seas

Created by

Carl RedfernSimon Amor

Ben Seas Lilly Fan

Daoud ZermaniKatherine LuJen Rowlands