After Christmas myself and Juliette Brookes had the opportunity to continue working on a competition brief for The Roses Awards. We had chose the brief, Supermarket Sweep, which involved rebranding and repackaging a supermarket brand of your choice.
We really enjoyed the challenge of working with packaging but were inexperienced in developing 3D models and wanted to produce a professional model to send off for the competition. The box involved a complex net which included a sliding mechanism which opened to display wide awake eyes as we had chose to rebrand ProPlus, which is a caffeine stimulant. After making possibly 100's of nets and dreaming about eyes popping open, we eventually decided on a working net but was struggling to create the final product to a professional standard. Our tutor Guy Lawrence came to the rescue by advising us to contact a good friend of his, Andy Mairs, an iconic designer from the chase. Guy kindly gave us his Mobile number and told us to contact him to see if we could arrange to meet up as he lived near jules. We were very nervous about contacting him as we felt incredibly cheeky as we were asking a lot from him, eventually we took the plunge (with a bit of encouragement from guy) and contacted Andy. He couldn't of been more helpful and arranged to meet us later that week, we met him in a bar near to where he and Jules live and were physically shaking by the time we were due to meet. We was both in awe of him as we couldn't believe that he was actually taking the time to talk to us about our project.
Guy had advised us to take our portfolios, but we were worried about taking up too much of his time, but he was extremely patient and after discussing how he could help us with our Proplus packaging, he took the time to go through both our Portfolios. His attention to detail was amazing and he raised valid points about the importance of not only the work within the portfolio but also the spelling, type and attention to detail which can be as important as the work your displaying. He gave us loads of advice about what we could change and brought up some small details, which was really good as it made us think about the impression your giving by not paying attention to the finer details.
We discussed how important it is to make sure your portfolio is 100% and how it portrays you as a person, he also made a point of trying to change your portfolio to suit the agency you were showing it to and how important it is to understand and research the agency you are visiting. He gave some realistic advice about how to stand apart from competition and to make sure you leave something behind for the agency to keep, he advised producing a disc of your work so that they can look through it in more detail or in the future.
He was very patient and gave us both some fantastic advice, not just about our portfolios and our work but also about the industry, he also produced our ProPlus box, which he delivered personally to Jules's house the following day and offered us great advice about printing and paper stock.
We wish to keep in touch with Andy and will always be grateful for the help he gave us.
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