This lecture focused on warming us pinto what we were going to be studying in the second year of the degree. Peter explained to us about Placements and different ways of securing placements for your third year of study. He recommended that we should write letters to companies we would like to work for , this is because letters are very hard to ignore as they are directly addressed , where as emails can be handed down for someone else to open. Writing letters would secure a more friendly approach to the company instead of having a standardised email that is forwarded to multiple choices.
Not to directly ask for a placement in you're first letter is a good strategy of securing a placement as it allows the company or agency to get to know you as a designer and as a person , it allows them to see if you will fit into their team and have the right attributes for the job. Asking for feedback on your work from an industry point of view can also be helpful.
We then proceeded to look at more of a business side of Graphic Design, i enjoyed this because it was very different from what we learnt in first year , we were shown how to apply our designs to the working world. We started by looking at Different types of Graphic Designers:
Freelance - Someone who works for themselves
Agency - Team of Graphic designers that work on projects together
Company - There will be a creative team in a large company , e.g. Porsche , Creative Director.
We looked into basic forms of marketing Price , Product , Promotion and Place. These were the key points to look at when creating a product or design. We then broke each P into sub headings giving us a much more detailed insight into each point of marketing , For example:
Price:
- Cost +
Cost to:
Manufacture
Deliver
Package
Admin
&
Management
-Profit
element
Mark-up
can
be very high
100%+ in some instances
-Loss Leaders
Losing money on one product to excel sales in another
We then looked at different channels of thought. We looked at Convergent and Divergent thought processes. Convergent thinkers will focus all attention on the problem and chip away at it ever so slightly until they get the right answer. Divergent thinkers will approach the problem from all different sides using different methods to try tackle it , eventually ending in a fast or slow answer.
