Internship at Rufus Lennard

Alexander Robertson

I spent the month of March 2018 interning at Rufus Lennard in Farringdon. I was the first student to be chosen to take part in their new intern scheme named Raw Academy. Rufus is a fairly large agency with a team of around 150 people all working in various areas of a converted military armoury base just round the corner from Hatton Garden, their clients include the likes of British Gas, the BBC, Macmillan, BBC, British Gas, O2, Lloyds TSB, John Lewis to name a few. I spent the month with a fellow recent graduate of LCC GMD Henry, we met in the lobby before being introduced to everyone in the office and instantly got along. Which made settling into the job easier and having a lunch buddy is always a bonus.
I started off working with the strategy and user experience team on a project for Macmillan Cancer support which they had been working on for the past 6months. Over the month I mainly worked on this project, producing and printing 7 individual books, each with it’s own logo which represents an affective ‘device’ which enables the people who work with or use Macmillan’s services. Using these devices I  also designed 9 different persona user journey diagrams mapping out various journeys with Macmillan, highlighting the area of application for each device as it goes. Due to confidentiality I’m unable to show you any visual examples of the work I produced. On the Friday before the first presentation to the client, I was a hit with a mad rush due to last minute additional words and diagrams to the books. I ended up having to stay in the office with the team until midnight to ensure that everything was finished. It was incredibly stressful, but I honestly enjoyed the rush of things to get everything done, and it being Friday we were partial to a beer while we worked which was definitely a bonus! Between working on this project for Macmillan I was asked by one of the creative directors to help on put on a pitch for a project with intentional cosmetics company Reckitt Benckiser. Again, I’m unable to elaborate too much on what the project entails presently due to confidentiality but I will say that it was incredibly interesting to be able to be a part of a creative team working on a creative brief like that in the Rufus environment, and have my voice heard in the idea and presentation process by some important people is defiantly one of the things I feel I got the most out of and most rewarding.
Henry and myself were asked to take on a brief in our spear time. We were asked to re-brand and re-think how London’s Black Cabs function in a digital age. Rufus had written this brief for my peers from Graphic Branding & Identity as a project to do as part of their second term. But thought it would be interesting to see what Henry and myself could come up with, so we worked together in the evenings and lunchtimes to produce a concept seen below:









From the beginning we agreed that we didn’t think that re-designing an app like Uber for Black Cabs was the right way to go about this as it’s really not the problem. And after researching we found that became more clear; there isn’t a specific place for the Taxi drivers to have their voices heard and connect with each other and the people of London. Because we both had different skills as designers I mainly worked on the copy and brand story side of things when Henry worked on the graphical aesthetics. So we came up with 3 devices which deliver to the needs of the drivers under one visual identity. On my last day we had to present our idea to the board of creative directors and designers of Rufus, and it surprisingly went incredibly well, we received some great feedback and considering how long we actually spent on it I was incredibly surprised, especially one of the copy writers suggesting that I should maybe think about taking up writing as the work I had done for this project was outstanding, which really blew me away.
Overall interning at Rufus was a great experience for my professional development. From the start to finish I was welcomed with open arms from everyone in the office. I got pleasure out of the work I did there and was incredibly beneficial and interesting. Rufus is most defiantly somewhere I would love to work in the future.