Student Publication Visiting professionals - Replys to interview questions

Student Publication

Reply from people we emailed:

Andy Lodge

When did you first become interested in art and design?

Primary School.

What inspires your creative practice?

The constant need to make the next job better than the last.

What is the importance of having a strong portfolio?

See the answer to the next question…

Do you think it’s become easier or more difficult for young designers to get noticed with in the industry?

Technology has made it so much easier to discover, research, follow and get in touch with companies all over the world. Combine this with increasing numbers of graduates means it’s even harder to get that first job, they are out there but the companies recruiting can afford to take their pick of the best.

And what is the best way to get noticed?

Great work, presented well with understanding and passion.

What advice would you give to young creatives about to enter industry?

Make the most of Social Media (Linked in as well as Twitter). Research the companies you want to work for thoroughly. Work hard and be passionate about everything you do.

What is your favourite exhibition you’ve been to this year?

Haven’t been to any this year yet but my favourite from last year was

Philip-Lorca diCorcia at The Hepworth Wakefield.

What is your favourite piece of work you have designed?

I’m pretty pleased with how the new ‘Saltaire XS’ range brand turned out for Saltaire Brewery.

What are the benefits of being a self employed designer & art director?

It’s definitely more rewarding but there’s more responsibility too. You might have complete autonomy, but dealing with every other aspect of the business threatens the time you want to spend being creative.

What advice would you give to young professional’s thinking of setting up there own studio?

Talk to as many people in the business as possible, everybody’s journey is a different one but there’s something to learn from them all.

What is your favourite typeface?

At the minute it’s GT Sectra and Neology Grotesque as we’ve just used them both on our new brand.

What would be your dream brief?

I really don’t have one. Often the briefs that initially seem to be the least interesting, bring the most rewarding outcomes.

Numiko

Who and what is Numiko?

We are a digital agency with an abundance of passion, expertise and energy, which we use to help our clients achieve wonderful things through user research, design and technology. Our clients include Design Council, Channel 4, Nesta, WaterAid and Goldsmiths, University of London.

What does the name Numiko mean?

After graduating from Uni in 2006, six of us got together to form New Media Collective. It was an exciting time and by pooling our talent and skills across

But a few years’ later, six became five, then four and we weren’t really much of a collective anymore. The company was beginning to change with us employing some exceptionally talented people and we had created a portfolio of re- ally high-profile clients. It was time for a rebrand and from playing with new-me-co, ‘Numiko’ was born! We’re pleased to say nearly 15 years on, three of the original six still work at Numiko (along with 20 other people!).

Describe your design aesthetic in three words?

Crafted, Inspired, Engaging

What is the importance of digital agencies?

When we started out in 2000, we were part of an exciting new world of ‘new media’ but now we’re joined by loads of other digital innovators all vying for audience share.

We try to be different - our team is made up of researchers, strategists and designers. We solve problems and go on to realise them. We’re interested in what makes audiences tick and the most exciting ways to engage with them, time and time again. The online environment is so fast-paced – it’s our job to keep ahead of trends and audience behaivour, and to then use this insight to create experiences that make a positive difference to real peoples’ lives.

What has been your most rewarding brief?

The brief we were given by the Design Council was ginormous, and we were allowed to really get our teeth into it and completely redo the website from the bottom up. The main objective was to create a site which re-established the public face of the Design Council and cement it as the com- mon denominator across everything design, in all areas of society and industry.

The discovery stage of the project took six months alone, as we engaged with stakeholders and us- ers to find out what was wrong with the current platform and what could be better. From this re- search we identified 48 different user groups! To be able to design for all these different users, we grouped them into seven categories, which enabled us to define functionality and content require- ments across the site.

From here we created a definitive set of design principles to ensure a consistent and coherent expe- rience throughout the site. These included focusing on the important content, using bold imagery and typography, and championing functionality to create a simple and elegant design. We settled on a series of design patterns that could be deployed across dynamically generated pages – these patterns became our building blocks; like lego, every pattern fits together in browser.

In terms of design what is your favourite website and why?

Without saying it would have to be designcouncil.org.uk! We developed this site over a 12 month period and it engaged everyone in the studio at one time or another – and it still does. We wereexcited about this project before we even won the tender, so to be given the brief was such an exciting moment.The main aim for this project was to create and organic and intuitive user journey through a beautifully crafted site; mirroring the Design Council’s own objectives of creating functional and innovative designs that better people’s lives. When the site launched in February 2014, it received critical acclaim from the design community, in the UK and abroad. It was named Awwwards Site of the Day – an accolade voted for by industry professionals with an interest in design, usability and creativity. It also featured in Design Week and was listed in .net magazine as “an inspirational site”.

What is the importance of ethical design in your studio?

We don’t work with clients that sell cars, or Lynx. We come to work and solve problems on things that we really care about, for people we enjoy working with. We always focus on the users and creating organic and intuitive user journeys. Users are always at the heart of our designs - not how much profit we might be making from a job.

How do you create a friendly studio culture with a large number of employees?

We have an open plan studio with break-out spaces for people to sketch, share ideas and play games if they want! Everyone is treated equally and we value and respect the uniqueness that each person brings with them when they walk through the door. We encourage people to walk or ride a bike to work – we like to keep fit. We get a massive box of fruit delivered each week from Leeds Market that everyone can tuck into - healthy body, healthy mind and all that!More seriously, we share our experiences, successes and failures so we can grow together as a team and provide a better service to our staff and our clients.

What is the relationship between a designer and a developer?

Instead of passing projects through the studio like a production line, we work on projects in cross disciplinary teams. This enables designers and developers to work collaboratively from start to finish on projects. We live in a device-agnostic world where websites need to look and function brilliantly no matter the device, and this is only possible when you have designers and developers working together to solve each and every part of a website together.

What advice would you give to a young creative wanting to join a digital design agency?

 Our advice would be to gain as much experience and feedback about your work while studying. Build up your portfolio and make it available online – potential employers will want to see examples of your work. Enter competitions and try and gain valuable experience as an intern. You don’t need to be able to code to be a digital designer but having an understanding of the basic structure of websites and even a little knowledge of HTML can go a long way.

If you could redesign any website which one would it be and why?

Wikipedia would be quite the challenge! Simply because of how important it has become to everyone online - it’s used by all for information about every kind of subject. Redesigning a site like that would be a huge undertaking - it’d be great!

What is your favourite UK city?

Leeds, of course.

Something more

Who and what is Something More?

We’re a design studio based in Leeds, but working anywhere and everywhere. At the moment we are made up of three partners, Jon, Si and Stephen.

How did you three decide on setting up Something More?

We’d worked for a long time together at Elmwood. We’d all learned so much over the years, and it had given us the confidence to go out and do our own thing. The time felt right for a new challenge and to build something new from scratch.

On your website it says every brand should be a wonderful experience how do you go about achieving this?

Our belief is that if you make things wonderful to use, people will take notice and gravitate to them. It seems obvious in some ways – why would you make a brand that wasn’t a wonderful experience? Why wouldn’t you design things to put people first? Yet, it’s amazing how many companies don’t put these things first.Design and creative thinking should be a central part of how a brand works. The best brands are the ones that have strong ideas and principles that run through everything they do. They have purposes that extend beyond just ‘selling stuff’. Design isn’t a nice visual trick that just wraps around at the end.I think we hold a strong sense of optimism about design and the amazing things it can do. As a designer you are in an incredibly lucky position where you have the opportunity to make powerful changes in the way people see and interact with the world. Design can make a difference in an infinite number of ways, big or small.

How do we make sure it’s a wonderful experience? I’m not sure that there’s one specific thing we do, but putting people first in whatever we create is always front of mind. It’s important to be objective about what you are making and think about it from the users’ point of view. Designs don’t exist in a bubble on your mac – you need to think about how they are going to live in the outside world and how people will interact with them.

Do you think your work has an overall tone of voice?

Something we are very aware of is to not create a house style. A tone of voice that develops in a project should always be true to that specific challenge and client. It needs to be considered and relevant to whatever you are doing.

Left unchecked, house styles can naturally start to develop around what you know, what you are good at and what feels comfortable. Over time you can get jaded by what’s worked and hasn’t worked in the past. Experience is important, but it can also be a hinderance. It’s important to approach things from a neutral start point every time and embrace the unknown. A new project is an opportunity to learn new things – if it feels a bit uncomfortable that’s always a good sign. Getting different perspectives is also invaluable. We have a strong culture of collaboration with people outside of the studio – different writers, illustrators, photographers, typographers, animators (etc) who all bring in new ideas and talents to projects. They challenge us and help make things better.

What has been your most rewarding collaborative brief?

One thing we’re really excited about is designing our new studio. We have taken residency at Duke Studios’s new building on Sheaf St. The downstairs space is a big open-plan floor, so we are taking the end-section to build an independent, stand-alone structure within it. Whilst we’d had a lot of thoughts about how we wanted to use the space, we quickly realised we would get a much more interesting (and usable) concept if we collaborated with someone on it. We’re now working with an architect who are helping us to develop plans for it. Giving up a degree of creative control is a little frightening, but also exciting as we’ll get something different and much better than what we could have ever done ourselves.

What did you hope the Graphic design students would get from your workshop?

Hopefully people came away with the idea that design can be a really powerful force to change the world around us and the way people see it. It’s easy to be drawn to briefs which already sit in nicely designed worlds; museum identities, book covers and gin packaging, etc. We wanted students to be thrown into a brief that was intentionally a bit unglamorous – but then see how they could interpret it to be really exciting. The most rewarding challenges often deal with things you don’t like or didn’t know about in the first place. If it’s something you wouldn’t normally have chosen it allows you to approach it with a more open mind, with fewer preconceived ideas about what it ‘should’ be. The problems we gave were open-ended to encourage students to establish a big idea and direction before they got into drawing things up.