So last year I was lucky enough to work a huge range of festivals during the Summer – Reading, Beachbreak Live, Bestival, and the biggest of them all, Glastonbury. But with no Glastonbury in 2012, and all the tickets for 2011 now well and truly eaten up, how can you go about getting into the festival without having to resort to climbing over fences into Stone Circle, or trying to run through security gates?
Well there’s still a very limited number of spaces available with Big Choice, so if you’re looking for work, click here to apply now! There’s two days left to apply, so do it quickly now!
Good luck to all those who apply, and do let me know how you get on!
Over the past few months I’ve been lucky enough to make it through the three rounds of Target Jobs’ Undergraduate of the Year award for the Construction and Built Environment Undergrad of the Year award, which has been great! I hadn’t expected to make it anywhere near this far through the competition, and as of Friday afternoon, I was just a few moments away from finding out if I had won a placement with Laing O’Rourke in Hong Kong for the Summer!
Anyway, in the end I didn’t win, but still had gained a huge amount from the experience. Firstly, there was the practice of going through a rigorous interview with two senior members of the firm, and second there was the beautiful food and drink at the event, which (just like any student) I’d appreciated enormously!
So, it’s been a pretty busy 4 weeks so far and it’s not looking like it’s going to calm down much! It has been good though, and have had a great many laughs and successes over the period.
The main one would be that I’ve been working as marketing manager for an opera being put on at Warwick Arts Centre. Opera’s not exactly the easiest thing to sell – especially to students – so I was looking forward to the challenge. Anyway, in the end it paid off and we pulled in over £10,000, making it Opera Warwick’s most successful opera of all time and bringing in one of the largest non-student audiences to a student production the arts centre had ever seen! So that’s been pretty good.
After having both a brilliant and somewhat unlucky year travelling abroad this year, I thought it’s about time that I pass on my experience to hopefully help you out when things don’t always go to plan…
1. Check, and then check again, that you have everything on you
There’s nothing worse than getting to their airport and realising you don’t have your passport or tickets. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, that never happens to anyone, right? Well, unfortunately it does. One of my secondary school teachers was unable to go on the school trip after she suddenly realised she had no idea where her passport had gone to, and in the end, spent the week sitting in her lounge feeling a little sorry for herself. So, make sure, and then make sure again that you have everything you need to take away with you!
It may seem from this website that design is all that I do, and as much as I may love it, it’s not really what I spend most of my time doing. This, in fact, would be studying for my degree. A completely unrelated degree – that of engineering.
“A graphic designing engineer? Are designing and engineering really related at all?”
I often get asked this question, and to this I would actually answer to them yes, they are suprisingly related.
As a designer, you are set a brief, and you have to effectively find for them a ‘solution’ – that is, a design that fits to their brief, something that fulfils everything they were looking for. You have to do your research, find out what other companies are doing in their industry, and try to find a design that both conforms and differentiates their business, product or service.
So what do engineers do? Well, they get set a problem, where it might be designing a bridge to span from one surface of land to another or something similar, and then they have to find a design that would work. So apart from the calculations involved and the fact that an engineer’s mistakes may occasionally lead to mass death, they’re incredibly similar.
But which will I spend the rest of my life doing? Yes, I know I can’t do both forever, and soon I will have to choose my path, but it’s one that so far is undetermined. I love both paths, and no doubt will end up in the end going down neither of them. The one thing I want to make sure of, however, is that I do something that I love doing. And that’s what I will make sure of.
It’s been an interesting few weeks, in which I have worked on more design projects than perhaps I have in total previously in my whole life. From STIs and giving blood, to gulash and worms and liquid bread, I’ve done it all… in the past four weeks.
Union. I am now working at the Students’ Union at the University of Warwick, where I have been completing a never-ending stream of design work. It’s been great practice to work to such tight deadlines (last week I was given a deadline of 5 hours from being told about the work to when it had to go off to print!) and have worked with a huge variety of sub-clients. Trying to manage the balance between quality and time-constraints has been a battle, but so far I have felt confident in my ability to deliver, and the positive feedback is always a good sign!
Beers. Warwickshire Beer Company recently approached me to produce designs for some of their beers and to create a new identity for a new national brewery they are launching, which will see their brews appear across the UK. This has been and will be an exciting company to work with, where the work is very varied, and have been enjoying for a brilliant set of people. I’m looking forward to working with them in the future and the challenges that it will bring!
So, that’s been me for now. I’m going to finish off with a quick mention of an absolutely brilliant advertising campaign you just have to see. Go to the website below and give the whole thing a watch. I guarantee you you’ll be impressed if you do.
Festaff are a company that have now been providing stewards for festivals around the UK for a few years, and whilst they have a well-designed website, and therefore a good public appearance, unfortunately they have not been run particularly well most recently, and have been giving stewarding firms a bad name.
There are a number of organisations that have provided stewards now for a number of years, with the stewards being continually pleased with the agreement, though unfortunately Festaff have not followed this same pattern.
If you’ve ever wondered what a dragon that eat’s recycling looks like, meet Jacques. Last weekend I joined him on his voyage to Bestival on the Isle of Wight, as you’ll see in some of the following photos…
Taken from the website of We Are What We Do, the charity that ran Jacques, here’s a brief description about him and what his purpose was.
“Jacques le Trash, is our brand new rubbish guzzling recycling dragon and he was there to help lunchers recycle their rubbish.
Paper plates, plastic bottles, tin cans and cigarette butts were collected from passersby and given to Jacques, who apparently has a penchant for all things trashy. All rubbish was later recycled.
A team of mustachioed waiters accompanied the dragon, asking the crowd for donations to feed the beast and all donors marked with a dragon’s bitemark stamped onto their skin.”
Ok, so I have now spent a few days coming up with a new design and creating a WordPress site based upon it… from scratch! Usually I’d have a go at starting with an existing template and then modifying it to the design I want, but this time I started from nothing and built from the ground up.
So that part was easy. It was the other part that meant it took over two days rather than one!
It turns out that there wasn’t really a solution to making WordPress use one template for a blog site, portfolio site and an information site.
So, I have had to install WordPress µ, or WordPress Multisite as it’s otherwise known. The installation was as easy as anything – add a few lines of code, then a few more, and BAM, the new system is all set up. Except then came the problems…
I thought I would try and be clever and make the permalinks (that is, the page address) look nicer, so instead of having olivernewthgraphics.com/blog/2008/08/01/the-name/, I would just have olivernewthgraphics.com/blog/the-subject/the-name/. But then it decided to add an index.php to the address, which I subsequently tried to hard-code out, and then the whole site disappeared.
So then came a complete reinstall, and yes, you guessed it, I did the exact same thing again straight afterwards.
Anyway, the site is now (almost all) done and polished. It would be great to hear what you think of the design, so please leave a comment! (the feature of which I am adding on now!..)
