Former Students Lecture

Two of the BA Graphic Design's former students came in today to speak to us about what they have been doing since graduating last year as well as telling us about their experiences of the course itself. They both won awards at the end of year exhibitions and were entered into the 'New Blood' section of D&AD.
They told how important it was to get into college as much as you can as you could miss important information and being around other people is paramount to improving ideas you couldn't do on your own.
As they both got chances to exhibit their work in London, it gave them the chance to build relationships and contacts with people and show their talents to thousands of people.
Out of 2000 students Dan and Steve won one of the 40 awards given out which is a tremendous achievement.
This led to numerous offers of work which surprisingly they turned down. They explained they would rather not work on designing kebab house leaflets forever and would rather work on the bigger things. I respect this as it would be easy to take the money and they have decided against this.

They told us that, due to them always being together and doing the Colleges promotional work, they had received some negative comments and jealousy. This led to some bitchiness because it was always ' Ste and Dan '. This wasn't a problem for them because they were getting slagged of for doing good work. I have experienced this myself to some extent this year also.
Instead of accepting the jobs they were offered they decided to go on some placements with the likes of Thoughtful and The Chase and currently both are on placements with Mark Design and McCann Erickson.
They have had some poor interviews with people who have no appreciation for real design and they had no interest in working for these people
With so many people graduating each year from Graphic Design in the North West, Dan and Steve's advice to us was to build up contacts with people, continually improve your portfolio, enter competitions and try your best.

The talk was a very interesting insight into life after graduating as we often see fully fledged companies and don't see how people start from scratch.