PERSONAL BRANDING EXAPMPLES

30 DAYS OF DESIGN

After visiting the Scottish graphic design festival at Christmas I was inspired to start doing some poster designs of my own. I am going to kickstart this by doing a 30 days of design challenge on instagram. Each day I will spend no more than 20 minutes creating a poster design.  The posters can be about anything I am inspired by at the time. This will boost my creativity by making quick fun things each day rather than planning it out. 

These are my designs:

Unfortunately I only got up to day 17 and then I managed to spill water on my laptop. This threw me off as I was doing them every day and got too far behind. I also had a great deal of work to catch up on so lost time to be able to continue. 

The designs I did do were really beneficial to me. I gained a lot through doing them. 

• I gained interest in my instagram page and gained quite a few followers.  
• I learnt skills for instagram like how to hashtag in order to boost views and likes
• I gained paid work through doing the posters as it put my name out there

PORTFOLIO

M2 PLACEMENT

I did my placement at M2 Bespoke over Easter. 

I learnt a lot during my time there, including:

• how to work quickly under pressure
• design skills in Premier pro
• design skills for web use
• how to take my design knowledge and put it into a corporate setting
• working within an office environment with a boss and collegues that you must work collaboratively with.
• learnt about the world of marketing
• how to wake up at 7am 

M2 bespoke manage the social media for companies in order to market them to clients in a certain way. I was shadowing the social media team and helping them to create content for the blog and social media.

day 1- I was tasked with creating an infographic from the article https://www.td.org/insights/why-authenticity-is-critical-to-digital-personal-branding

They take articles off the internet, reword them and simplify them and then make them into an infographic to put on the companies blog. I then made a video of the infographic for the facebook page as it is better to have it in a different format. 

Day 2- After doing developments of the infographic but unable to get feedback as the managing director was out of the office, I instead started on the video for social media that would summarise the points made in the infographic. 

Day 3- recieved feedback on the infographic and video. The brief was changed slightly as instead of illustrated graphics they wanted to use stock images. So I spent the day annoyingly redoing the whole thing

Day 4- presented the finished infographic and then made minor adjustments and continued to work on the video 

Day 5- uploaded the final infographic to the website with the social media manager. And continued to edit the video.

The article was found online and will be edited to save time for the company. This curated content is very new to me and seems a bit like plagiarism.... But this is a quick way to put out content.

The idea is to create an infographic out of summarised information from this article. The infographic needs to represent M2 as a company so it will need to follow the branding colours, typography and include the logo. 

This is the finished infographic. I learnt a lot throughout the process and seeing it be fully published was very satisfying. you can see the full article here: https://m2bespoke.co.uk/blog/reasons-why-authenticity-is-critical-to-personal-branding/

HAWRAF

from the hawraf google drive I have learnt: 

1. It was very interesting to see how much they charge clients. 

It made me reevaluate how much I charge people for my work and that I should definitely put my prices up!

2. Their business plan was interesting to see how they intend on making money and keeping it flowing. This is something I struggle to understand how I could make real money freelancing but their business plan shows me how this could be possible. 

3. The discovery questionnaire is something I would like to start doing with my own clients as it is a good way to understand the needs of the client better and decide if the job is suitable for you. 

4. I like their list of negotiable and non-negotiables, I think this is essential when working in a tight environment with people every day. It is nice to put all of the cards on the table in order to know where you stand with someone. If I was to ever work with people like this, I would definitely do this. 

YEAR PLAN

Once I leave University my plan is to move home in order to save money. 

-Over the summer I plan to work in Tesco 2 days a week to give me an income. 
-I also plan to spend time remaking my website and add this years work to the site. 
-I plan to do the brief with Avesta when she goes back to America this summer. 
-I plan to work with Abby from Mangoes and Melons on another project in May and June. 
-I have an placement set up for the week commencing 17th June at Future plc
-I will go back to my placement at M2 to do some more infographics for them.
-I intend to use instagram a lot more as i have really benefitted from the 30 days of design challenge I did as I have gained paid work because of it.
-I want to develop my software skills further and expand into motion graphics.

Once the summer is over and I have completed some paid jobs and my placement, I intend to look for a longer placement somewhere possibly in Bristol where there are a number of good design studios that I'm interested in. This will hopefully lead into some sort of paid work so I can move out. 

In 12 months time I hope to be in a full time role in a company as a Junior Designer. 

FUTURE PLACEMENT

After an initial conversation with Rodney, he stopped replying to my emails before we had fully agreed a date. I sent him about 4 follow up emails and had no response from him for over 2 months. yesterday he finally emailed me back confirming the placement for the 17th June. 

From this placement I hope to learn:

• What it is like in a bigger office environment- my last placement was only in a small company employing around 10 people, whereas future is a massive company with at least 1000 people employed. 
• About magazine design and the process 
• I hope to develop my software skills further over the week with whatever brief I will be set.
• hopefully I can network some more in order to progress in the future
• Learn some more web design skills and possibly coding?