Another visitor! (and the search for a placement begins!)

Today we were visited by Tom Morris from Sunhouse Design.

Tom started by telling us that finding placements could be difficult with many businesses in the area as a lot of them are either small design houses or freelancers - keeping the companies small to minimize costs - advising us to aim mainly for the bigger agencies if possible!
He started out with a degree in graphic design and managed to get a placement with the BBC, who are apparently a great first time employer as there is a very diverse range of positions and types of work within the company as they are very large.
Eventually he left the BBC and joined a company called "Epoch Design" (who have since merged with a company called Loewy) and worked there for a while before finally deciding to strike out and form his design house with a few colleagues.
The initial stages of setting up the design company were very difficult, often having to offer services for free to obtain publicity and recommendations as opposed to actually earning money!  Thankfully for him he had been working in the design industry long enough to have built up what he termed as a "Black Book" of contacts within the industry - this gave him a starting point in finding new work.
One thing which he pointed out during his talk was that in the world of design, "You are only as good as your previous job" - which is a helpful thing to remember when choosing jobs once you start to make a name for yourself!
Sunhouse design now do a range of different jobs for many different types of company - some examples of this being the BBC, Danone and even work on the Marmite brand!
The later part of his talk was focused around giving pitches and trying to win work, he told us:

• It is much better to pitch on a physical medium if possible (instead of a digital medium) - Sunhouse almost always print A1 boards to use in their pitches as this gives you more control over the pacing of the pitch and protects against many common issues like colour loss from projectors and data issues (broken files etc).
• The pitch should contain more than one solution to the problem - also including progressions of ideas, justification and explanation.
• When designing the solution it is best to first analyse the brand or employer (who are they, what is it etc) - which could take the form of a brainstorm - and also to try and analyse the consumer, their patterns, likely places they will be impacted by advertising etc.
• Often it is not a problem to take large amounts of inspiration from existing products/designs - this should be done carefully to avoid possible legal complications and accusations of plagiarism!
• It can be best to show different "routes" of ideas - for instance he showed us an example where route one of the design concepts was following the current format of the brand (minor changes) and then other major ideas were grouped into their routes.
• Sometimes when creating concepts for a pitch it can be much quicker to draw them non-digitally! 

He also said that although many pitches are paid (some for the pitch and some to the winning pitch) - they can often be very time consuming and expensive!  The two pieces of advice he offered for this were that it is often unwise  to pitch on a project which already has many other companies doing the same, and not to pitch if the project is too far out of your "comfort zone".


And finally!  I have started properly looking for placements today!  They seem to be quite few and far between at the moment (one company told me that this is the wrong time of year at the moment as many houses are busy focusing on Christmas projects at the moment!) but I have called quite a few places, and out of those phone calls have been told to send various information (CV/Portfolio etc) to three of them - which is a start I guess!!