The Creative Futures week is an annual event held at Glyndwr University with the premise of guest speakers visiting from all aread of the design industry and giving informative talks and holding workshops for students in order to give them inspiration and/or guidance and information on how to achieve certain goals or career paths. Taking place over 4 consecutive days, Creative Futures featured a range of sessions available to be attended by all students who were interested in the specialism of the particular guest speaker(s).
I attended multiple lectures over the week and found most of them beneficial and eye-opening in terms of the information given out to us advising us how to work and found the feedback from guest speakers to questions very helpful.
The first morning we were introduced to a speaker from Salford University who spoke to us about his previous work (of which collaborations with "poverty" stricken areas and installations in said communities stood out) who spoke to us about creating work and and also earning money from our work. He gave use plenty of facts, figures and charts to see how factors like tax affects designers and their income and spending when it comes to work.
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| One of the books published by Octopus. |
That afternoon I attended a lecture by Yasia Williams-Leedham who is Deputy Art Director of Octopus Publishing in London. A graduate of Glyndwr University (formerly NEWI), she spoke to us about her specialism of book jacket design and showed us examples of designs created by her publishing companies from simplistic story books, punk-themed books and cookery books as well as showing us various clients of theirs such as Levi Roots (who found fame from BBC's Dragon's Den with his Reggae Reggae cooking) amongst others. Yasia also explained that some of the work they publish is from students at Glyndwr who's work is spotted at end of year exhibitions.
The third session I attended was more of a life-guidance and personality-based talk, almost bordering on psychology-type themes. The speaker gave us various activities in pairs and groups to complete, including writing a sentence/quote which described ourselves, three words to describe ourselves as well as an activity based on having each of us imagining an elephant and seeing how different everyone's thinking process was (some people had just a regular grey elephant whilst others had a pink elephant, for example).
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| One of Kirsteen Harris-Jones' illustrated covers |
A very interesting and appealing lecture I attended was by another former design student at my university, Kirsteen Harris-Jones who specialises in the field of Children's Illustrative books. Signed up with the "Bright" design agency (which she explained was a very helpful thing to do), she took us through her work and the stages it takes from the first developmental ideas of working to the end result. Kirsteen explained how at times, feedback from employers and companies can be quite cutting and can knock you for six so it is necessary to develop quite a hard-skin as soon as possible and to not take criticism personally.
We also had a talk from a gentleman who works at the BBC in London who gave us information on how to handle ourselves in corporate environments should we end up working for a large company. He gave us tips on how to prepare for interviews, the best ways to talk about our work and what employers (especially from large companies like him) look for in a designer.
Also, I attended a session which was titles "How NOT to be a Designer" which featured information on how to construct portfolios in a manner that is 'different' and not something which the employers are used to. Also, he advised us how to make our CVs and applications stand out and other general rules of getting your name and work noticed by employers.
Overall I found Creative Futures very interesting indeed and am looking forward to seeing what speakers will be coming next year to advise us ways to improve and showcase their talents.
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