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.

Learning how to set up artwork for print

Contact with professional printers, manufacturers etc. is something I've never had to do over my time at uni. For Hilda Quick's branding, I decided to hand letterpress business cards. This meant having letterpress blocks manufactured from another company.

Alex recommended a place called Photocast as these are the people who produced his plates.





One thing that didn't even cross my mind before was the process of artworking before sending off to print. This was a little challenging but it made sense to me in the end. Something I'll carry through to next time if I decide to get my own business cards done.



Finished Plates

For the price, I was impressed with the quality of these.

Personal branding thoughts

Branding is always something I've struggled with; it's not my strongest area. But nonetheless, I need some of my own to represent me as a designer.

Looking into different areas of my practice helped form an understanding of how I would want myself to be portrayed.

I'm not typically an eccentric person so immediately I want to stray away from any bright, obnoxious branding that would typically would for someone else quite out there in personality traits. More subtle, pastel colours would be more in fitting with me if anything.

I much prefer my practice when in collaboration with others, simply because I think that two minds are always better than one. You can always learn a lot from collaboration be that knowledge or skills or both. I feel that one day working in a studio or at the very least alongside someone else will definitely fit me best.

Internship dates @ The Elephant Room

After long discussion regarding dates for an internship, finally dates for me and Jon to go down together were set in stone for the 9th-12th.