1. Do you think that it is beneficial for students to have industry experience before graduating ?
I do think it is imperative to have some kind of experience, Creative Directors see working placements as par for the course when looking at a graduates CV but sometimes you can make the situation work to your advantage. I’ve recently seen a graduate (Tom Lovell) who set up a small independent agency on a not for profit basis and just asked for submissions of briefs doing the work for gratis. To me this displayed a great deal of initiative, passion and sound thinking as this was work he could have chosen to do in his own time. Of course it only works if the work is of a good standard and good practise is carried out.
2. Do you think graduates are prepared for the Design industry ?
Certainly more than when I graduated, there is a greater worldly knowledge which is in part due to sites like formfiftyfive where an understanding can be built up through discussion groups.
3. When receiving E-mails, Letters etc, What do you think makes a individual stand out when contacting you ?
a good sense of self branding, this should be done with great consistency throughout. And attention to detail, many creative directors are wily old typographers who can spot bad justification, poor alignment and kerning a country mile away. Your CV should be a proud document of your achievements, treat it as such.
4. What is your attitude towards students contacting the company? Are you happy to help or do you get frustrated by the amount of emails you receive ?
I try to answer as many as possible, a wise man once said ‘the higher a monkey climbs, the more you can see its arse’ so I try not tp be a monkey.
5. As a company would you take on a graduate who had no industry experience ?
5. As a company would you take on a graduate who had no industry experience ?
That would be a question for the CD (Paul) but if you were to hire a graduate with no experience you’re working with a clean slate, one which carries no bad studio habits and obviously very keen to learn. Teaching can take up a great deal of time though so larger studios are more likely to do this.
6. Do you think it is important for a design student to have a online blog? If so, what do you think are the benefits?
Not at all, I like to browse the sites of people we’ve had in in the past but only to see how they are faring. Those with passion and an addictive nature towards design will be more inclined to be doing and not just saying. Plus blogging won’t really be second nature until those who have grown up with it achieve the loftier design positions (if blogging stands the test of time that is).
7. As a designer what are your goals for the future?
To refine. I’d like to reach my late twenties with a clearer knowledge of what I want to achieve through design, a mantra if you will, whether to make the world a prettier place or communicate with clarity above all.
I then asked rich to refine his answer given in Q5. I asked rich to clarify what was meant by 'bad habits'
Normally most good studios have set ways in working within certain programs so that when any designer who picks up the artwork they know how the files has been put together and how the text (if in indesign) has been affected so that it kerns correctly, this can also happen in altering images in photoshop. By Clean slate I meant that the graduate is not too comfy in these programs (ie. Years of flattening image files so that they can not be altered at a later date) and can easily adapt to good working practice unlike some more developed designers who are harder to convert.
