Guest Lecturer - Tom Maurice

Last Wednesday we were lucky enough to have guest lecturer Tom Maurice from SunHouse Creative, Bath come in and talk to us about putting together an effective client pitch.

It was an extremely inspiring lecture and was fantastic to get the chance to see so much of his work.
Sunhouse has an impressive CV that includes clients such as the BBC, Danone, Marmite, Coca Cola and Hunter, it was interesting to be able to see the materials used when putting forward a pitch to a client. 

Tom explained his journey of temping at the BBC and going through a recruitment agency which he strongly advised us all to do. He also went on to say that we should never burn bridges with anyone throughout our time in the design industry as we will no doubt come across the same people later on.

Tom opened my eyes to the fact that you should always stick by the rule 'you're only as good as your last job'. You need to keep delivering otherwise the clients won't come back.

Tom ran through the process of putting a pitch across which was really interesting. Firstly, always take a printed presentation and don’t rely on computers because 1. they’ll slow you down and take the rhythm out of your presentation 2. they’ll probably crash sometime. He explained that you should always go in with positive comments and then move on to the negatives of the original design, however justification is essential! You should always show the client how you've reached your final idea and the process you went through so that they feel as involved as possible. You must always convince them that you know what they are and who their audience is.

I was pleased to hear that Tom thought it was extremely helpful to be able to have adequate drawing skills to speed up the design process. This was encouraging for me as I thoroughly enjoy that part of the design.

So, all in all, it was an exceptionally interesting lecture with plenty of useful hints and tips that are bound to help me in the long run. 

Here's SunHouse's website if you fancy having a butchers...http://www.sunhouse-creative.com/

My final design for a client's locksmith company's website

I created this Website design for my second client. He was looking to update his site so the idea was to change the whole look of the page yet keep all the vital information as clear as possible. After meetings and discussions we eventually decided on the colour schemes, layouts etc, which both he and I were very happy with.

The new design is much more modern than his previous and has apparently already attracted a lot more customers.

All in all very successful :)

My Final Design for the Digital Design festival, 'Ether'

More of my designs for Ether...

This next few designs were created with the theme of music in mind...

Some of my Images created for the design festival 'Ether'

Album cover designs...

After having a think about what part of Digital Design I would like to work towards specializing in, I've decided to look into the idea of album cover artwork as that is something that has always interested me from the design itself to the story behind it. Here is one example that I came across that I feel personally inspired by...

This album artwork was created by Ian Wright in 2008 for T.I's album 'Paper Trail'.


Wright has used strips of random pieces of paper layered on top of each other to create this unique effect, which i think works extremely well and is different to the normal Hip hop album covers i.e studio photography, thuggy imagery or simple logo placement.


Not only is the image made up of layers, but I think the meaning behind it is too. Some think that it was created to represent T.I's legal troubles - scattered paper, maybe legal documents - authorities trying to piece together against him and yet he beat the case and rose from it. So it could be a representation of what he had over come and this being the result of it.


I love the way that Wright has used more of an arty, abstract look by creating the image by hand instead of on the computer. Apparently one of the ideas behind the artwork was to stray away from the digitalised view that every artist seems to be coming out with right now and go for something more natural.

 

“We didn’t want to just do a typical cover, especially for my sixth album,” T.I. told MTV via e-mail. “I wanted to try something a little more different. The illustration for Paper Trail pays an obvious homage to my rekindled affinity for writing my lyrics down as well as displays my commitment to keep my art slanted towards the abstract.” [ MTV.com ]