Creative Convos Week - Professional Workshops

Creative Convos week was eye-opening, having industry professionals come in and talk with us about different roots that they had taken or how to set up your own business shaped the overall week. With each speaker giving a different perspective to the design industry and how we can place ourselves within it had helped me to realise how I can get from being a student to working in the industry doing what I want to do. 

Dines - Studio BLUP

• Goals/objectives - have ambitious goals that you can work towards as this is what helps most successful creatives thrive the most as it gives you the direction and motivation to do what you want to do. As a freelancer this is what will help to get you to the places you want to work for as Dines explained by having the goals he had he was able to achieve a lot from working very locally while he was at the start of his career to now where he is working with global companies like Nike and Adidas. 
• Professional email - It can be difficult as a student to get industry connection, one thing that can really help is having a professional email/domain rather than using something like Gmail as this helps you to stand out in email inboxes. 
• Upselling yourself - By making yourself seem better than you actually helps to get opportunities that you may not have got otherwise. He also talked about taking any job even if you can't do it as you never know what this could lead to. 
• Reaching out to people - The power of social media is mad if you want to collaborate with people using the likes Instagram don't be afraid to aim for someone with a large following as this will help to give you the coverage you need to get bigger and better jobs in the future. 
• "Omnipresent"- This was a word that Dines introduced to us it means, being present everywhere. But in this context, he spoke about how remaining relevant and knowing what is hot and what is not can really help you to get the clients the best ideas they want as well as allowing you to produce work that audiences will relate with. 

As well as a very engaging and insightful talk from Dines about his business and industry we also did a Dragons Den style pitch which gave us the opportunity to present our ideas to him to get some valuable feedback as well as practising presentation skills. Rob and I pitched our collab project (WYS) to him which was very useful as he took a liking to the idea and helped us realise that the possibilities are endless and that we shouldn't be scared to put content out there. As well as this Alec gave us some tips on presenting the idea and how we could improve on that - 1-minute pitch, by getting the idea down to 1 min this will help us to realise what it is we are doing and this will really help us in the long run when talking to clients etc. 

Rose Nordin

Currently, a freelance graphic designer and illustrator based in London, with a particular interest in self-publishing and DIY culture. Her presentation was very insightful for myself and Rob as the self-publishing industry is where we would like to put ourselves in a years time so it was very useful to hear from Rose about what she does and how she manages to make a living from it. 

• Print Fairs - These are one of the best ways to meet people within the publishing industry and is a really good way of getting your work out there for artists and other "zine heads" to see out work. This is something that we will be doing from this point onwards as we need to meet as many people as we can to get WYS to where we would like it to go. 
• Artist residences - Many institutions offer artists residences to freelancers. Rose is currently working in Somerset House in London where she is producing content for them as well as producing other work on the side. 
• Arts funding - Many different organisations which offer to fund creators that have ideas that will help to benefit the arts culture within the UK. These funds can give you the budget to work freelance this is something that I will be looking further into as this could give us the leg up we need to make WYS a profitable business after uni.  
• Physical work - If you like to make books the make them physically as this will show others what you are capable of and can really impress professionals. 

The second part of the day was a zine making workshop which we had worked together as a year group to produce. The idea of the zine was an A to Z of industry which consisted of our thoughts on the industry and what we think it's going to be like. We each came up with a word that was one letter of the alphabet, we then had to make a collage/design for a page in the zine. My word was "experimental" this allowed me to be very abstract with my piece. I used many different materials to make up the word I then placed all over the page in true DIY style. Once you had created the artwork we photocopied each design on to a3 paper this then allowed us to put together the zine using a new binding method that I had not seen before which was the bound with super-clips. This was a lesson in how easy it is to make your own zines as we made it in under 2 hours. This has also encouraged me to look into new methods of binding for future projects. 

Robot Food 

A Leeds based studio that's main focus is packaging for food companies or similar. They are all about making things fresh and new which has allowed them to produce some very interesting and innovative responses to briefs for large brands. Although this is not something that I am directly interested in doing it was very interesting to hear about how they had both got to be middleweight designers at the agency. As well talking about what Robot Food do they also showed us an internal project called Project Disrupt. This challenged designers and other members of the agency to come up with 3 new ideas for a new household product which included a new style of cheese packaging, clothes cleaning service and a 21st-century air freshener. It was really interesting to see how much they produced in 5 days and how beneficial working on a small quick passed project can be to help you think more about the target audience and stand out from competitors. 

The Elephant Room 

These guys are a new advertising agency that is trying to do things a bit differently. The team has a good range of people working for them each bringing in values that help to make the agency what it is. Although advertising isn't something that I have considered working in their talk was very useful as gave me a better idea of how businesses like this are created and what it takes to get to where they are now even though they are a very new company. 

• Own what you're about - if you know what you want to do become the best at it so that people have no choice to employ you. 
• Don't disregard personal work over portfolio - the smallest things can make a difference if you should people work that is relating to your values and passions this can go a lot further than just showing work that you have done to tick some boxes. 
• Potential vs experience - Showing potential is very important if you can show future employers what you can do for them, in the long run, this can sometimes beat experience as they would see you as an investment. 
• Creating the right role - leaving uni can be difficult and so can find the right job but by creating your own role its helps to make that easier and will help make this transition a lot easier. 

The POP UP Agency - Abraham

By far the most influential speaker of the week, Abraham spoke to us about his business The POP UP Agency which tackles briefs in 48 hours their focus is on consulting business on how they can use creative ideas within their companies and it was very interesting to see how this works. But what was most interesting was how the business was created, is talked all about the realities of setting up your own business straight out of university. Abraham's style of presenting also was very informative/inspiring has he made what he was talking about very real making a lot of us think that anything is possible. 

• "Checking in and out" Having the right state of mind each day helping you and the people around you to feel more comfortable when working together as it gives you an idea of how others are feeling and helps to put you in the right mindset to work. 
• Prototyping ideas - use the time we have left at uni to help prototype business ideas as this is when we are able to mess around with different ideas to make sure that they work once we leave. This is something that I found very relatable as WYS can be trailed now easily while we have all these resources around us. 
• Getting clients - in the beginning, it can be difficult to get work but by using family and friends this can help lead to better and better work in the future. 
• Don't get caught up in the idea
• Don't be afraid to ask for help - when talking to designers etc. don't be scared to ask who they know as most people will know other people that you could do work for. 
• SET GOALS - it is very important to have a set of goals as this makes it easier for yourself if you have something to work towards. 
• Don't be afraid to try things
• The most valuable part of the business is the 'creative process' - how do you work if you have this figured out it makes the rest of the business stuff a lot easier.
• Pricing - don't sell yourself short!! Think about the value of the services you're offering. 
• Sustainability - you need to be realistic with money if the idea is going to be sustainable so how much money are you going to need to earn for you to make the business worthwhile. 
• Salary 33% Expenses 33% Savings 33% 
• Sale 60% Development 20% Execute 20% 
• Mentors - getting yourself a mentor is a very good way of being able to get a different perspective on your ideas and can help you go a lot further in your career. More than one if possible. 
• Self-promotion - always talk about what you're doing and be confident in your ideas
• Reading a brief and analysing every part so that it can be put into one sentence, this will help you to understand it better. 
• Don't lose sight of your goals - it can be difficult to stay on track when you are creating your own business so it is very important to have achievable goals. 

As well as the very informative talk from Arbaham we also took part in an workshop exercise where we split into groups of 5 and had to come up with ideas for a new business that was based around our personal values. 

Rather than coming up with ideas as a team we were told to do this indavidually in a short amount of time this helped for us to come up with a good range of values. Keeping these values in mind we then had to come up with as many ideas as we could in 5 minutes, once we had done this we took our favourite ideas to the table were we wrote them down for everyone to see. We then had 15 minutes go round the table adding to each idea indaviudlly. This way of working really helped to get the idea as developed as possible at this early stage  the time limits help you to think about the ideas differently to normal as you reallt have to push yourself to come up with new ideas. Once we had this done we then decided on idea to take forward to the final stage but to do this we used a graph which looked at the difficulty of the idea vs how cost effective it was and the aim was to have both evenly balanced to get the perfect outcome. 

After adding all the ideas to the graph we had a clear winner which we had all decided on, to complete the task we then had to each write the idea using less than 240 characters and 6 emojis. The idea of this is that it really helps you to figure out what the idea is and makes it very easy to explain to others, this method is soemthing that I will be applying to my practice as it helps to clarify a lot when coming up with ideas and reading briefs.