Whether you’re a painter, a graphic designer, a fine artist or photographer, our sole purpose is to create - whatever that may be. Before I would struggle with starting to create work because my laziness would be screaming at me (which is also the reason I don’t practice) but now that I’m starting to get a taste of the real industry, I’m being shocked into working for it - putting in more time and more effort to enhance my imagination and skillset.

I know right? A lazy artist? That makes no sense, how can I be an artist if I have no work to show for it? It’s why I have imposter syndrome but with the fear of not being able to do what I love because of my lack of skills, I don’t want that to be the reason I end up taking a normal office job where I cannot be creative. With the time I have left of my DPS year, I’m going to put in more effort to learn and practice for everything I need to become the best artist I can be.​

As of now I can’t confidently call myself an artist but by the end of May, I hope to confidently be able to.


Bibliography
Immerman, S (no date), What Is The Artist's Role in Society?. Available at: https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/what-is-the-artist-s-role-in-society
JobHero (no date), Artist Job Description. Available at: https://www.jobhero.com/artist-job-description/
Daffurn, H (2015), Times Have Changed: The Evolving Role of an Artist. Available at:https://blog.artweb.com/art-and-culture/the-role-of-an-artist/
Sachant, P (2019), Who is Considered an Artist? What Does it Mean to be an Artist?. Available at: https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Art/Book%3A_Introduction_to_Art_-_Design%2C_Context%2C_and_Meaning_(Sachant_et_al.)/01%3A_What_is_Art%3F/1.03%3A_Who_is_Considered_an_Artist%3F_What_Does_it_Mean_to_be_an_Artist%3F
Widmer, J (2018), The Four Fundamental Roles of the Artist. Available at: https://prezi.com/p/n0htugxq-dtl/the-four-fundamental-roles-of-the-artist/?webgl=0
University of South Carolina Upstate, (2012), Roles of the Artist. Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/mdickins430/ch-1-roles-of-the-artist
Christensen, T (2010), What Does it Mean to be Creative?. Available at: https://creativesomething.net/post/428455618/what-does-it-mean-to-be-creative


Images
Remembrant
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437392
Yayoi Kusama
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/#love-forever
Kara Walker
https://www.wnyc.org/story/artist-kara-walkers-new-work-domino-sugar-factory/
Willard Park
https://www.encirclephotos.com/image/free-rubber-stamp-at-willard-park-by-claes-oldenburg-in-cleveland-ohio/

It is February, and I’ve just finished a 4 month internship at Design102, a social design company that creates campaigns across all government sectors. I applied for the job because a majority of my work at the end of 2nd year was social design based, and as rejections came in from branding agencies and I kind of realised I had limited options in what jobs I could apply for. 

​Don’t get me wrong, it's not exactly what I wanted to do, but there have been a lot of pros! The office was filled with welcoming and kind people, I was filled with anxiety but I settled in really easily, and I’ve had some great opportunities on professional live briefs. I didn’t find any of the work stressful, but I’m going to be honest, I was bored. It was a lot of making graphs, using istock and creating very coorperate design. I know this sort of design needs to be done by someone, and its ethical, but I feel like my creativity has been shattered. It’s made me think a lot about what I want to do as a career when I graduate. If i’m going to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week every week doing something, it should be something that excites me an fulfils my creativity.

​Thinking about this a lot ended up making me feel quite depressed. I’m not sure if I want to do another internship, any least for now. From the beginning of DPS I’ve never felt confident with my portfolio and I just feel like a jack of all trades, OK at everything, not great at anything. I'm taking this opportunity of not interning to try and get my creativity back and flowing with my own personal projects. I’ve decided I’m going to spend a bit of time solely working on my portfolio and skillset, I’ve always been interested in 3D animation from seeing so much of it in current design, and now is my opportunity to improve my skills in this.

A few pieces of inspiration:

I’m also about to enter the D&AD new blood briefs, some of the brief options include challenging sexual conventions of sex and disabilities, money managing and mental health, and creating behaviour changes towards a sustainable lifestyle. These are all great examples of purposeful work that can be as bold and creative as you want to make it with no limitations. I am much more excited by the possibility of creating something that’s fun to make and looks good, as well as serving a purpose. I want to implement this idea of work in my SIP, and hopefully after this I'll have an answer to whether I think purposeful work can be exciting.

​In terms of what I’m going right now, I do feel like I’m in a massive time of uncertainty, I’m controlling my own schedule and what work I do each day which is a bit daunting especially after having a routine everyday in an internship for so long. I have absolutely no idea what the rest of my year holds but I’m staying positive about it.

SARA TITILAYO LAWAL :)
GRAPHIC BRANDING AND IDENTITY 
 
PART ONE: INDUSTRY, MY FIRST WORK PLACEMENT (BEING A DMA) AND ADAPTING TO A  NEW PROFESSIONAL  ENVIRONMENT

Since Monday 7th October 2019 I have been working at Add People, a Digital Marketing Agency  based in Manchester. Since working here, I have learnt a lot about the process of Digital Advertising, SEO, PPC, Google Ads and Facebook Ads. More importantly I have begun to understand why these features are so critical during the developing growth stages for small to medium sized businesses. During the few months I have been working at Add People I have had the opportunity to work and gain training from numerous departments within the business such as the marketing, strategy and SEO teams. This has been extremely beneficial in terms of my learning process.

One of the core reasons I chose to study Graphic Branding and Identity was due to my curiosity regarding the impact that branding has within global and local economies and businesses. Specifically, understanding how businesses market themselves and how advertising changes and creates the foundation for different brands. Understanding consumer behaviour and how as humans we are so easily influenced. Which really makes us question whether it is irrational to believe humans are intrinsically rational? Therefore, I thought while I’m based in Manchester during my first DPS term I would like to work in a Marketing or Advertising Agency. I spent September applying for jobs as I didn’t want to start my year without any structure, and I knew I would feel a lot more at ease if I had a job straight away. Fortunately, I was able to quite easily find a job that I liked within a month. I particularly like how the agency focuses on digital marketing for start-ups and SMES. Over the past months I have learnt so much, one area of study I also have never previously heard of was the role of heat mapping as a marketing tool. Add People has a digital approach that favours strategy over creative, over 100 digital marketing professionals are employed who deliver targeted online traffic to more than 3500 clients around the globe. So far, I have really enjoyed working in an agency that is extremely strategy focused. When I initially started working it took me a while to separate the strategy and the design process. The experience of working in an agency that favours strategy has made me come to the understanding that post graduation I would like to work in an Agency that is more strategically focused however also incorporates more of a creative response with in the marketing process. 
 
 
PART TWO: UNDERSTANDING ADVERTISING (A CRITICAL APPROACH)

ADVERTISING..

1. A form of psychological manipulation.
2. An essential contributor towards economic growth and development.
3. The portrayal of an ideal yet unachievable lifestyle.

Over the past decade advertising has increasingly become an “inescapable” force of nature (Williamson 1978 pg. 11). You could say it’s distorting our perception of the real world. According to Anne Bray (2010 pg. 143), we are subconsciously exposed to as many as five thousand advertisements on a daily basis. Advertisements are now perceived as essential cultural influences which are here to “reflect” life. Williamson (1978 pg. 13) continues to develop this concept by acknowledging that adverts are not just attempting to sell “consumer goods” but in fact they are selling a lifestyle with a side of “false materiality”. Likewise, Bray (2010 pg. 142) believes adverts are being used to “unconsciously manipulate" society! She continues to explain that this can be achieved by using visual language to show potential customers ‘who they are ‘verse ‘what they could be’! Bray (2010 pg. 143) highlights how consumers are told that they have potential to be great if they buy (product X), however without (product x) they are made to feel “ugly”, “stupid” and “lazy”. This concept is known as “the false dichotomy”.

Conversely, Dyck (2014 pg. 1) believes that advertising is a vitality in todays “modern consumer society”, due to its “substantial” contribution towards economic growth and development within most countries worldwide. Within Van Dyck’s (2014 pg. 1) book “Advertising Transformed”, he explores a case study from Deloitte which reveals “for every £1 spent on advertising, £6 is generated for the UK economy”. Likewise, Bray tells us that the advertising industry makes 300 billion dollars a year, out of which 7 billion is on outdoor advertisements.

At this point onwards, I began to question how advertisers create such compelling adverts which persuade the average consumer to buy product x, which can lead to mass consumerism and economic growth. Dyck (2014 pg. 2) begins to answer this question by stressing the importance of “brand symbolism" and how it creates value to the everyday consumer. Let’s look at Apple as a brand. Throughout the last decade Apples product portfolio has rapidly expanded. It has begun to sell a lifestyle rather than a product by itself (Duprey 2017). The theory that Apple is choosing to sell a lifestyle rather than a product shows how Dyck’s idea of “brand symbolism” is true as consumers are now buying in to the brand itself. As a result of this brands are able to use advertising to manipulate consumers.  This links to the fact that as human beings we have cognitive limitations in our mind’s which effects consumer behaviour. Therefore, sometimes we can make decisions irrationally. Ariely (2009 pg.240) recognizes humans have “deficiencies” and acknowledges our mistakes, he believes that it is foolish to assume all humans act rationally to maxims utility like the Homo economicus model. Firstly, consumer behaviour is anchored meaning the decisions we make are already predetermined based on previous knowledge of a brand or company. This imperfect information that the consumer has about a brand leads to irrational decisions and meaning monopolies are able to take advantage of us as consumers. If we look at apple again, consumer buy products with low specifications at extremely high retail prices in comparison to what these products are truly worth. Wilkinson and Klaes (2012 pg.8) continued to explain that “perceived self-interest” is a much stronger concept as consumers generally misjudge their self-interest which can lead to bad decision making.

Within the final section of this blog I want to explore the importance of Light buyers for advertisers. Dyck (2014 pg. 17) explained how advertising can only be “successful” if it reaches the right target audience. To him it is the “light buyer”. He (2014 pg. 27) uses the Nike campaign “Find your Greatness” to explain this. Firstly, we need to understand the difference between a light and a heavy buyer.  A heavy buyer is someone who purchases products from the brand regularly (on a weekly basis), whereas a light buyer is someone who buys the brand a few times a year! Initially you may question why you would aim to advertise to a “light buyer” over a “heavy buyer” when they hardly consume the product, unexpectedly however light buyers make up nearly 80% of the brand buyers. Advertising is most effective when it is aimed at light buyers as it is effective in the long run whereas heavy buyers are more effective in the short run and aren’t really persuaded by advertisement yet instead price promotions.  As stated previously, Dyck (2014 pg. 27) used the “light buyer”, to show its effect Nike aimed to inspire the everyday person e.g.  “light buyers” to start “moving”. This campaign happened during the London Olympics in 2012 which encourage regular people to become more active and embrace sport! These advertisements were so successful they created $506 million in revenue growth and its increased Nike+ membership by 55%.

Jessica Mumby-Price
GMD

I got back from my trip to India at the end of January. I interned at LOCAL design studio in Mumbai for two months and travelled around for a month whilst working on my SIP. I had an incredible, eye-opening time in India and I’m very grateful for the opportunity I had to go. I fully embraced Indian culture and learned so much about the current social and political challenges. Before I went to India, my expectation was that I would have lots of free time on my hands whist there to apply for my next internship. I hoped to have something in place before I returned to the UK. As it turned out, my working week was pretty full on so I didn’t have much spare time to apply for placements. The hours at my internship were supposed to be 10am - 6pm but we actually left the office between 7:30 - 8:30pm so I was getting home every day around 9pm. The working culture in Mumbai is pretty intense and there is less respect for work life balance than in the UK. I also had quite a strange accommodation situation which made working at home in the evenings and on weekends difficult. Long story cut short, I came back from India without my next internship sorted.

To bide me some time whilst looking for my next placement, I decided to work on one of the competition briefs for YCN. I chose the Dishoom brief (to design a new loyalty program) because Dishoom is not only my favourite restaurant, but it is modelled off the Irani cafe culture in Mumbai which I had recently experienced first-hand. It sounded like the perfect brief for me! But when I actually sat down to work out my concept ideas, nothing seemed to really work or match the requirements of the brief. I think I was putting so much pressure on myself because I was excited about this particular brief, that I was getting frustrated when my ideas weren’t working. I also really struggled with not having someone else to talk to, to bounce ideas off and check if they made sense. It made me consider how isolating freelance work could be and whether that is suited to my working style. I finally came up with a concept that I was happy to move forward with, but only at the very end of the two weeks which I had put aside for this project.

As the deadline for the Dishoom project is at the end of March, I have decided to put this project on hold for now so that I can fully focus on finding my next internship. I’m hoping to start a new placement at the beginning of March and would love to be based somewhere in Europe. I’ve been reaching out to companies through a mixture of cold emailing and applying for available positions but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I was lucky at the beginning of DPS that I only reached out to 3 studios before getting the internship at LOCAL. Now I am experiencing the challenge of contacting studios and not receiving a reply. I know that it is a numbers game though so I just need to keep sending out applications and I’m sure I will hear something positive soon.
​
Apart from keeping busy applying for stuff, I’ve been feeling a bit uncertain lately about my position and skills as a designer. I’m going through a period of doubt. Perhaps this is because I haven’t heard anything back from studios I have contacted, but I’ve been questioning what I’m good at and what I can say is “my thing”. I don’t feel like I’ve found my groove as a designer yet. I know that it will come, in time, and that this is what DPS is for, trying new things and figuring it out, but I can’t help but feel a bit lost at the moment. Another reason for feeling this way is that I have so many interests within design. One day I’m committed to improving my illustration practice and the next day I’ve decided I want to learn to code. My mind jumps from one idea to the next so quickly that I’m struggling to stay focused on one thing long enough to make progress. I’ve realised that this is my main personal challenge I would like to overcome before returning to LCC in September: building and retaining habits so that I can make visible progress.