So yesterday me and Sarah set of on a road trip to London to check out the Graphic Design walk being run as part of the London design Festival. It wasn't fun setting off at 6:30am but with the 3 hour trip to London we didn't have much choice! And it didn't help when Sarah told me she hadn't ever driven to London before (she's a good driver though..Honest!)
Anyway.. once in London we had to meet at the base camp which was located in Hackney central to get the map which guided us to a number of studios who had opened their doors for the day. Having limited slots meant we decided on the 3 studios we wanted to check out the most. These were, April ran by 2 female designers, Them who had a team of about 15? And Catherine Nippe a designer who works independently.
I've always had a perception that graphic design studios are huge spaces with at least 20-30 creatives working together so I guess it was a bit of reality check seeing that April was ran by 2 designers who have a great client list! Their studio was relatively small with 2 iMacs and a macbook but had a great feel to it. They had a selection of their work to view which was great too see cause it's just not the same seeing something online. With mainly print based work which was editorial you could see they focused on clean and simple layouts with a key emphasis on bold type.
Moving on we visited Them, who's studio I loved! We were greeted by Roas Powloski one of the founders of the studio. The studio has been running for about 6 years and has a core team of about 15 designers, again with a impressive client list. It was interesting knowing that 1/3 of their work was commercial, 1/3 arts based and the other 1/3 was charity/non profit. Something which I had never considered when thinking what type of work different studio's might do and just how diverse yet controlled their projects are. Rosa also gave some advice for student and graduates, saying that as the industry got more competitive it was more important to gain industry experience and sending generic emails isn't enough - a phone call with a senior creative or creative director asking for 5 minutes is always a better option.
Finally we went to the studio of Catherine Nippe. A Swiss graphic designer with a range of print based work. It was great to see a independent designer working on such huge projects. Also got a copy of her current work - printed onto newsprint which looked really good!
A great day all in all really opened my eyes to the creative industry. If there's any spelling mistakes in this blog post its cause I'm tired.. Photo's below - the rest are on Sarah's phone.
More photo's to come...
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