The DBA Education Seminar was part of the programme for the Design Symposium North at the JMU Art and Design Academy held on Thursday 25th November. The Design Symposium is a full day and evening of workshops and lectures run by the DAB and D&AD, it hosted lectures by James Bull (Director and co founder of Moving Brands), Adrian Shaugnessey (Graphic Designer and writer), Jonathan Kirk (Consultant Up To The Light), Ann Rimmer (Founder of Clock Creative and Chris Conlan (Managing Director, Love).
To attend the education seminar, I registered for tickets with the Design Symposium and received an email with confirmation and details.
The seminar was introduced by Ann Rimmer who is the director of strategy at Clock Creative. Based in Ramsbottom in Lancashire, Clock creative are an award winning creative communications agency, they have recently won The Design Consultancy of the year 2010 Award for demonstrating to the judges continuous strong business growth, carving out a strong reputation for strategic and creative excellence and industry leading client retention. (http://www.clockcreative.co.uk/news/index.php?qsNewsId=20)
Ann Rimmer's talk was about an interesting concept of positioning yourself as a brand within the design industry, she began by outlining the key terms of branding and how these can be transferred, to personally promote yourself as a brand to integrate yourself into the industry. The four main points were impact, clear proposition, personality and key differentiators, giving industry examples of how design agencies have understood the brand and delivered good design solutions (eg: Clipper Tea). She explained how the process taken to effectively promote a brand, can be altered to effectively promote yourself as a designer within the industry.
The points Ann made, and the alternative way of thinking about yourself as a brand was an interesting idea. To use the same process with your personal development as you would with the development of a design project, is something which I hadn't thought about until I attended the seminar, but is definitely a process which I will use in the future. She raised important points about discovering and promoting a unique selling point about yourself, and attempting to have a unique proposition which will differentiate yourself from others. I found this thought provoking as it is sometimes tempting to attempt to promote a wide range of skills, and other designers have advised the importance of having a broad range of skills and to promote these through your Portfolio. I suppose this mainly depends on the agency in which you are promoting yourself to, which was another point which Ann made, she discussed the importance of ensuring that the agencies you apply to, do actually suit you, personally and professionally.
The idea of actually picking which agencies you want to work at, was initially not something I was comfortable with especially last year, when first arranging Portfolio visits, as I just wanted the experience of gaining advice on my work and didn't really have the confidence to approach agencies which I really admired, but this attitude has changed since I have had the experience of visiting more agencies, as I now have a better idea of what interests me and the kind of atmosphere I would be comfortable working in.
Ann advised that when approaching an agency to make sure you have done your research, to understand what the agency wants from their designers and how you can deliver this, which I think is a really important thing to think about, and also ties in the need to choose agencies where your work or strengths are suited to the agency.
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