PPP End of Module Evaluation

My personal and professional practice this year has drastically improved compared to past recent years. The complete freedom over our own projects, coupled with the opportunities that have arisen from meeting new people have hugely helped to improve myself as a designer.

Undertaking self-initiated briefs this year have given me the chance to expand my reach to both people and places, working alongside others on projects meant I could learn from different people with a variety of skills. It’s also allowed me to engage with other like-minded individuals that has formed new connections.

Seeking portfolio feedback from a professional recruiter, helped a lot in developing my promotional material to a higher standard that is expected. Creating a CV and digital portfolio that is up to date allows me to more easily and readily apply to internships when they arise.

My branding is one thing that has been neglected up until now. Finally having a brand for myself that can be distributed across platforms and collateral will help me spread my name by networking with people at events, whilst also creating consistency throughout my website and professional documents.

My first professional work experience during April at The Elephant Room gave me a real insight into the working world and my place within it. The studio culture there was engaging and fast-paced, that coupled with the different personalities in there made for an exciting few days.

Getting more involved within social media is also going to be a goal of mine, both Instagram and LinkedIn are extremely useful platforms that serve as a great way to interact, meet and collaborate with people through. LinkedIn especially is great to find out about potential internships or jobs which will prove useful in the coming months and years.

Moving forward from university I plan to stay fully engaged within the professional world, by going to talks, design festivals and going out first hand to meet different studios. This will be kickstarted by a month internship in London at The Elephant Room with Jon. Following on from that we plan to go and explore other countries meeting and working with studios, meeting new people, experiencing new cultures and gaining a better understanding of society as a whole and developing our skills and knowledge all the while.

Branding photoshoot

Business Cards

middle black stock

CV











Invoice



Cover Letter

Website updates & Link

www.elliott-taylor.co.uk

Receiving feedback from both Alec and a mixture of people at The Craft Agency helped me to improve my website by giving me pointers on layout, thumbnails and the actual projects themselves.

Branding collateral

Aside from my website and business cards as my main way of getting my name out there, I developed a few other little bits that tie things together.

Email Footer



CV

Invoice

Cover Letter

Thoughts on my PPP Presentation

Presenting is always something that scares the sh*t out of me; I've never really been the confident, stand up and speak type. But in all honesty, the past three years of doing PPP presentations has only given me confidence in, not just my public speaking ability, but also my work. Having to talk about my own work in front of 15-20 people is daunting. 

Regardless, out of nowhere, this year around I felt much more confident even without notes... somehow. I feel like the presentation flowed well and went to plan. This, coupled with the positive feedback I received, has massively boosted my confidence with speaking in public.

Feedback

A good balance of floating your own boat and showing the work to prove it. Sometimes it's easy to show too much work or do the opposite and talk too much about it and not show much at all.

"It was nice to see your branding staying consistent throughout each slide"

Business card designs and final ones(Sent off to Moo)

Creating a few different styles of business cards whilst still keeping them simple helped me choose something that worked in fitting with my branding identity.


I thought there could be potential for a branding mark that could represent my brand.



Final business card designs

front

back

I chose this design because i feel it gives each bit of information enough spacing whilst the front has the prominent branding on.

I decided to get my cards produced at Moo based upon good recommendations from friends. I got 50 cards @ 600gsm for £20.

Updating my Digital Portfolio

After receiving feedback from Fionn, I worked on updating my portfolio to a more consistent professional standard. Using a grid helped to create a consistent layout throughout my portfolio, whilst my branding gave it that little touch of myself that it didn't have before prior to having self-branding.

Feedback from Fionn @ The Craft Agency

After meeting just over a month ago with Fionn from the Craft Agency, she gave me some super helpful feedback on my portfolio. Keeping in contact with her I sought feedback on my current CV and portfolio before sending it off to apply for an Internship over in Copenhagen.

Having a professional recruiter oversee my portfolio and CV definitely helped to give me confidence in them both. This will help as I plan to apply for more internships moving forward.

Developing my personal branding

I wanted my branding to be simple and clear, my name and what it is that I do as a professional. I wouldn't consider myself an eccentric person, hence there being no need for eccentric branding. I feel that for the most part, my name would suffice if done correctly.

Initially choosing a typeface that fits me as a person was difficult. Typically my preferred choices are sans serif for their simple, clean look. Experimenting with upper and lowercase helped me quickly narrow down to lowercase; uppercase feels too loud and obnoxious.

I finally settled on Bio Sans, a typeface that is a smooth combination of structure within the letterforms whilst still possessing a smooth, slightly rounded touch.

When used in italics it makes for a sleek look.

I wanted to focus on the idea of my practice being collaboration focused or at the very least focused on meeting and working alongside other people as this is where I thrive the most.

I initially experimented with the + & signs but felt they were too cliché. Instead, I opted for a more ambiguous underscore which is suggestive of someone or something else to be able to fill the gap.

Example of how the branding could potentially expand into the collaboration space.

I also thought about how typically on old computer the underscore would flash as a suggestion to type something or in other words for something to be put in its place.

I feel like this idea could work as a gif.

Starpack student awards shortlisting!!

Me and Courtney got shortlisted for the Starpack Student awards for our packaging piece that aimed to reduce food waste! This is exciting as it's the first time my work has been considered for an award.

We won the pitch!!

Absolutely over the moon with the news we received the other day. The work we developed and proposed for The Elephant Room last week, won the client over! 





!!!!!!!!

By complete coincidence also, since then Jon bumped into Katy whilst down in London for the D&AD festival and she asked us to actually produce the final designs for the campaign. Of course, we said yes, but only when we finish university as the workload would have been ridiculous. This is exciting as this is the first genuine piece of client work we will have had as a duo - maybe the creative duo might happen after all!

Learning how to letterpress business cards

Seeking help from the traditional print tutors to develop hand pressed business cards for my extended practice was fun and useful. Traditional print has always been so far distant from my practice (aside from when I finally tried my hand at screenprinting last year) so after advice from Alec to get them letterpressed I figured this was something I could learn myself.

Around 200 business cards would have cost £120 to be letterpressed by a company. Instead after coursing enough free samples from GF Smith and buying the woodblock letterpress plates (around £50) the project all in all cost less than half that of outsourcing to someone else (no doubt not as high quality but a high enough standard that the client was happy with).

Mixing Inks

Test printing business cards

Final Cards

The one gripe I had with them was the quality of print on the back, embossing didn't work as well since the type was so small so by mixing a slightly darker ink than the colour of the paper, it enhanced the emboss creating a subtle print.

Feeling confident in my abilities to letterpress business cards now (after doing over 100 of them) I think this is something that I could potentially do for my own personal branding as the finish feels much more tactile than digitally printed business cards.

London in a nutshell

Future summer internship @ The Elephant Room

After the 4 days me and Jon spent at the agency, they went on to offer us a further month paid internship over summer. This was exciting as I felt that we must have done something right to be offered it in the first place. This gave me a huge boost of confidence knowing that my abilities are competent enough within a professional workplace.

This month, I feel, will give me a good headstart on the industry getting stuck straight into client work amongst other creative people. Hopefully then from this, something else might stem that will further me into the industry.

Internship experience thoughts @ The Elephant Room

The experience down at The Elephant Room was crucial to my development as a designer, it gave me a real-world insight into the process and immediacy of projects undertaken. Working in such a fast-paced environment made me realise that I can adapt to a professional environment, hopefully up to the expected standard. Working alongside Jon in my internship allowed us to work at a much faster pace, by bumping ideas back and forth off each other, we managed to develop and visualise ideas for 2 different clients, with those ideas being presented to the client, which in the end won them a new client - The National Trust. 

The studio culture at The Elephant Room was ideal, the team was 6 people all with different skill sets which made it small enough that we felt appreciated. The initial placement was only 3 days, which extended to 4 days then ultimately I was offered an extra month over the months of summer which I am hugely excited for to get stuck back into the professional work life.

Even though it was only 4 days in total working down at the Elephant Room, it's safe to say I learnt a hell of a lot in those few days. They set the bar high for what I'd expect from a studio after experiencing the studio culture there. 

I think it's safe to say we felt appreciated!

Working down @ The Elephant Room

Me and Jon got the wicked opportunity to work alongside some a bunch of creative, interesting people for a couple of days. Within those few days, they had us plunged head first into the action. We arrived at a busy time for them, they had 5 client pitches that week and needed ideas for said pitches.

Our first project was to work on Symantec's sponsorship of an XBLADES event, in short, we had to think of ideas for a drone racing event. These ideas had to revolve around getting people involved in every stage of the event, before, during and after. This was super exciting since our first bit of work was for drone racing, we were half tempted to buy a drone ourselves.

We created decks for our ideas to keep it concise and to the point:



Our second project was for the National Trust, this we started on the Thursday. With the concept already set in place (revolving around people's stories associated with national parks) we got cracking with creating some visual content for the campaigns.

The visuals revolved around a collage of pictures from the national parks that people would send in along with their stories. The collage aesthetic works well because it portrays the look of a notebook or journal.




We spent a day on this (The Thursday) as the client was coming in the next day on the Friday. They ended up cancelling with the meeting being pushed back to Tuesday. So we are yet to find out the result of the pitch!

London Nike ON AIR

Whilst down in London for my internship, I came across an Instagram post advertising Nike's new campaign ON AIR going on in Shoreditch.

This was set up in the Capital of each city across the world to get people involved in creating their own Air Max shoe. This would be based on what the city means to them on a personal level, making each design uniquely interesting.



It was interesting to see what actually inspired the origins of some models of Air Max, especially considering their inspiration was old rave posters from the 80s/90s, something I'm hugely inspired by myself.













This one was based off 90s acid rave scene.



Seeing first hand the process of designing a shoe was interesting, especially seeing different people's perspectives on the city and what shoes mean to them. This shoe adapted to the climate as it changes, hot = red and cold = blue.