This summer, I worked as an intern at Creative & Print Studio, who create all the graphic design materials for the University of Reading, as well occasionally for other events happening in Reading (such as exhibitions for Reading Museum, which I worked on). In this 4 weeks, I learnt an invaluable amount about what a Designer's job is, and what is expected and in what time frame. My colleagues were amazing, and I can't thank them enough for this opportunity.
What my job involved:
• Working on deliverables from the initial brief to the final product (not always from start to finish)
• Sourcing appropriate and eye catching imagery to be used for a range of deliverables from the University image banks and Shutterstock
• Communicating with a large number of clients on a daily basis over email and by phone call
• Working directly with colleagues to design, as well as taking on most jobs individually
What I learnt
My 4 weeks at Creative & Print taught me so much about the leap between University and a job in Graphic Design. At my peak, I worked on 15 different jobs individually, so record keeping and file organisation was vital to ensure you remembered where you had got up to on a job, even if there was a time lag between design sessions. This is much different to the University way of working, where at most you only have around 4 projects at once. Before this experience, I found it very hard to visualise the workload of a job, and I actually really enjoyed working on such a diverse range of projects at one time.
Time scale also hugely differed from University work, as well as on a job to job basis. My quickest job turn around was around 4 days, with the updating of the TennisPark leaflet, which required new prices and copy to be inputted, as well as for new images to be sourced and edited to match the TennisPark identity. This was quite stressful, but the final outcome ended up looking really good, and my client: Justin, the Duty Manager at the SportsPark, Reading provided some lovely feedback "excellent communication, extremely prompt and the artwork produced has been exactly what we are after", which made it all worthwhile.
The original yellow image sourced from Shutterstock, to the final deliverable.
Some of the deliverables I worked on:
• Leaflets
• Posters (from A4 to Bus Stop size)
• Brochures
• Postcards
• Banners
• Campaign branding
• Playing cards
• Uniforms
• Events calendars
My favourite projects
My jobs ranged from creating a whole new visual identity for a campaign, to just updating a prospectus from the 2017 version to the 2018 version. Jobs required different levels of design thinking, which made me more excited for jobs where I could create the document from scratch.
My two favourites have to be the design of the Lumos and Together Festival, as well as the campaign #NeverOK, which had a message that really hit deep with me. You can read more about these two projects by clicking on the links below.
