Art College
Growing up on a farm in North Devon then moving to Croydon in South London was quite a big thing, especially as I was very shy. But I was determined to put myself out of my comfort zone to pursue my dream of working in design.
I went up a week early with the idea to find my feet and to make friends, but there were no halls of residence and one of my housemates told me on my first night, they don’t make friends as it has caused problems in the past. With only a payphone in the shared hallway and no computer, that first week was hard. I did manage to discover the area including a very large IKEA, and managed to get a job at a local bakery. This is where I met my lifelong friend Shelley, a Biology student, I also went on to work at IKEA where I met another friend for life Belinda.
Art college was a shift from the practical side of creating and designing to the academic, which at first I found difficult as I wasn’t a big reader or writer, I just wanted to create. But as the course progressed I understood the value of the theory and loved finding out the why and how of what we create and its effect on others.
I managed to save up enough in my first summer to buy my first computer, but I only managed to get photoshop, so I had to get clever with how I completed my work. Most of my ideas were articulated through in sketchbooks to make sure the idea was sound before I went onto the computer. Sadly two years ago in a cleaning purge I got rid of the sketchbooks but I have kept some of the work in photos.
Here are my favourite 3 projects from my degree:
Breeze
The brief was to create a brand for a family friendly space travel company. A lot of students went down the futurism feel, with lots of silver and metallic. I took a bit of a different take on it, inspired by the 1960s cartoon the Jetsons, I wanted a bit more of a retro feel to make it accessible for families. I choose the brand colours of orange and blue to create excitement and energy.I had great fun thinking about not only the design but the materials too and managed to find some amazing textured plastic. The final execution is a bit crude by today’s standards but I think the idea and concept was strong.
Edge
I had the idea to create a healthy fast food restaurant as I saw a gap in the market at the time. Unfortunately I didn’t have the knowledge or resources to actually make it happen, there are now many brands in the this market. I decided to make it a vegetarian restaurant and came up with the name ‘edge’ playing on the ‘veg’ but wanted it to have more punch and be memorable. The graphics were simple and bold and very colourful to have impact and compete with other fast food restaurants.
Material Girl
This project was in response to dissertation, ‘The branding of the Spice Girls’ I found it fascinating how they were one brand that had several variants within the brand to cater for different tribes. So a wider audience could feel like they could relate, and in their heyday they had so many collaborations with so many brands. And I was always fascinated by Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) saying she wanted 'more famous than Daz Automatic'. I created a fashion brand for young girls called ‘Material Girl’, the name was inspired by Madonna, and related to fashion. I created 5 characters for the brand and each personality had a different range. I liked the concept, but wished I’d been braver with pushing the difference in the personalities more, but at the time wanted to create a coherent brand. I definitely had fun with it and created my first t-shirts.
Final Show
I also was on the winning team to create the end of course how graphics, the concept we had was infectious creativity, the idea that as designers whatever we created went out into the world and has an effect on people. We got all our work and took it out into Croydon to take photos, working with the photography students. There were some amazing photos of the fashion students in the underground car park. We then had show posters go up around Croydon.
Reflection
During my time as a student at Croydon I learned that as a designer our work has a purpose, a job to do and that good design should not only look good but also deliver on what it needs to do.