On Tuesday the 6th of January 2009 I met with Keith Hague who runs Storm advertising at there offices in Manchester.
The company's clients include Planters world famous nuts,Fosters and big D nuts. most notably they are the creators of the big D nuts campaign using cards that slowly revealed a model behind the packets of nuts.
The Company is quite new and had been started by Keith after working in the design industry for a number of years, on that particular day the office only consisted of myself, Keith and 2 other designers both working on separate websites, but it seemed to be a tight group of people. while i did speak to the other designers it was only briefly as they were quite busy but i found that one of them was only a couple of years out of education himself but already seemed very settled.
First i began by talking to Keith about the course i was on explaining how it was a course that enabled me to look at a lot of different areas of design like web, video animation ect.
I explained that i was mostly interested in graphic design but getting very into video and film.
I had brought quite a bit of work trying to show i variety of the kind of things i had done, and had even brought a paper portfolio with some work printed and mounted in it, but unfortunately i didn't get to show this work he was more interested in seeing what i had brought on my laptop,
i would have liked to show my paper portfolio because i think it has more impact when it comes to static work rather than seeing it on a computer and also thought it would be different for someone in not just a graphic industry to have, but i think the main reason i didn't show it is because i only had quite a large folder so it would have taken up allot of room, so i think in future i will buy a smaller folder to present.
I started of by showing earlier work that i had done on the course so i could explain how i had narrowed the types of work i had been doing down to what i liked, i started off with the first piece of 3d i had done to show what point i had started at, and then i showed my 3d kerrang ident and i explained how i had been coming back to it and tweaking it as time had gone on to what it originally was, he liked the 3d stuff as this was an area he had not had much experience in himself.
Next i showed a series of graphic style images i had done in concept studies, he liked the style of the work but specifically picked out a pieces that i had been discussing with Christinia in class when i was putting my portfolio together as the strongest of the set and we discussed all the points about it that made it strong, and this was good because it made me feel like i understood what people in the industry looked for in a piece of work that they pin pointed all the things we are helped to work at in college, the only downside of this part of the crit was that i didn't have the brief from that particular set so i couldn't quite explain what it was to represent so that is some thing i have to make sure i can explain perfectly in the future.
Finally i went on to my video work for my self directed project and I explained how i really got into this project and thought this is somewhere i might want to head into, he really liked the advert i had done for personal safety especially the strap line, he said that it word work even better if there were some more close up shots of the group of people at the start cutting between the people instead of just the one wide group shot, but that it had definite potential. I noticed that the comment about the opening shots is exactly what rick had said about the video so once again this showed that the course was really helping work to the fine points that will get my work noticed in these kinds of meetings.
After i had showed my work i asked to see some of his work and how things worked at the company as far as pitching and having problems went, he told me that allot of clients he has worked for before would come back on the strength of work he had done before, and he showed me a series of pieces that he had done for "Planters world famous nuts" he said that the brief was a very good one because the product was very good so it was easy to work with, but then the problem was they liked the idea so much they came back with another brief which he said was extremely difficult because the product wasn't good. so this was a problem they run across in the industry when a valued client comes with a bad product.
As part of research for my critical journal i asked what he felt about what is the limit for offending people in advertising and how do you approach something like that because i had been looking at violent road safety adverts, this started a little debate in the office with the other designers which was really interesting while the newer guys said that they would know what kind of line not to cross and they would make something they thought was at that line but then tone things down if the client asked too, Kieth said that that's not the way to do things he said that if you have an idea you do it and if you answer there brief perfectly and put the message across in the most effective way you have to stick to your guns and not give in to company trying to change a good piece of work, i thought this was a really good piece of advice too hear from someone who's worked successfully in the industry and that it was thinking like that what can get you were you want to go.
