Skill Evaluation

Skill Evaluation

This year has been the most productive in my life thus far. Fully engaging with the final year of the degree course has had great benefits both personally and for my future career. When comparing my work this year to that of last, the progression is more than significant. I feel that I have a much deeper understanding of the graphic design discipline and have an appropriate skillset in the adobe software for industry level work.

As such, I have aspirations to apply for an internship at Lundgren & Lindqvist, a Swedish graphic design firm based in Gothenberg. I have been following their website for most of the year and their more alternative projects and heavy focus on publication design has both intrigued and motivated my practice. Their style is very in-tune with my own aesthetic, and thus the sort of design I see myself working in on a professional level. Plus, the opportunity to live in Sweden for three months would be a valuable growing experience.

Through the occurrences taken place throughout the year within my engagement with professional correspondence, I am aware more than ever of the need to persist and stand out. Simply sending an e-mail is not enough. Hence, with my new self-branding, and time in summer to carefully curate my website, Lundgren & Lindqvist can definitely be a plausible option.

Nonetheless, this is not set in stone. I also want to explore my options within festival design. This has always been something that interests me, and a 10 week course in Bristol offers students the opportunity to learn from Emily Eavis herself. I believe with my experience in music visual design and overall branding campaign’s, this is an area I could possibly thrive in.

Since I spent the year really engaged in the extended practice, more of my external commission work was for friends. Instagram is a platform that has stressed me out in the past, however since engaging in the small profiles I have set up, I have a better grasp at the scope of opportunity available in building connections and gaining clients. As such, I plan to make an effort after Uni to branch out and utilise social media to gain more freelance work on the side of whatever I do. This is aided by the knowledge learnt from PPP sessions as well as through peers who have popular profiles, into the most successful times to post, and how to cater to a graphics audience through the production of your work – e.g. scanning imagery and favouring black backgrounds.

My social media pages will be further supported by the ongoing development of my website. As I now have the domain for a year, I have intentions to populate the website with a constant refresh of content as appropriate.

London has a lot of opportunity and I feel very lucky to be based in such a vibrant city. Over Easter alone I managed to go to multiple free talks and events dedicated to creatives. I plan to distribute my business cards to an appropriate audience through these opportunities, and see where that takes me. My plans are loose because you never know what opportunity is going to come knocking.

Nonetheless, I do know for sure that whatever I decide to do it will be in a more alternative studio space, that prioritises independent/grassroots/small-scale companies over the big corporations, as that is a big part of my ideology.