ASOS (As Seen On Screen) is the UK’s largest online-only fashion and beauty retailer. They offer products for both men and women and are said to be a competitor to all other fashion retailers in the country. I can’t be sure but I’m sure the same can be said in the other countries ASOS is available in; including Germany, Spain, UK and Australia.
I worked as a freelance designer at ASOS for just over 2 months, where I was part of menswear web team. I was a designer/artworker so I worked closely with the inhouse designers to create international (translated) assets as well as design the UK newsletters (approx. 3 a week). I also made assets for ASOS’ social network pages such as Facebook graphics. ASOS is surely the biggest company I have worked for so far; it was great to experiencea company of such size and see how campaigns were organised.
By The Scruff is a digital agency based in East London. They specialise in all kinds of digital design and I learned a lot during my short time there.
My clients included publishing companies Haymarket (magazines Stuff, What Car? What Hi-Fi?) Bauer (magazines Classic Car Weekly, Classic Cars, Practical Fishkeeping) and influential media company Gorkana.
My main duties included designing microsites, but mainly emails. I would design, code and update emails; both regular and responsive. By The Scruff prides themselves on being cutting edge and I learned responsive coding and about parallax*.
*Something I am definitely looking forward to experimenting with
According to their website: “JOY is fashion’s best kept secret; a one-stop destination for truly unique women’s and men’s clothing, accessories and stylish and tongue-in-cheek gifts. Discover a tempting range of lovingly handpicked brands including JOY’s principal label Louche, designed-by women, for women to indulge fashion fantasies with exclusive style and vintage flair.”
JOY is a long standing Bristish fashion label which has exsisted for over a decade. I am currently the webdesigner for this company which means I am responsible for the aethetics of joythestore.com as well as every email newsletter that get sent out approx. 3 times a week. Sign up for the JOY newsletter; everything you receive will have been designed by myself.
VICE (vice.com) is a magazine. It was started over a decade ago in Canada, then moved onto the US, but now has offices in over 20 different countries around the world, including the thriving London office at which I am interning.
Every month a glossy magazine is produced which contains articles discussing things of trendy ‘youth interest’ (e.g. politics, world news, drugs, fashion, underground music scenes, clubs, internet humour etc.) whilst always erring to the side of being as controversial/disgusting/shocking as possible. This is widely available all over UK for free at any American Apparel store. I love it and have been a reader for many years.
As an intern it was my job to maintain the online side to the magazine. Whereas the magazine will have long articles and reviews in it, the website contains much shorter tid bits of information (blog entries, image galleries, videos) that are constantly being uploaded. I made sure these were all to standard. Also I helped by creating the weekly email newsletters and did photoshop magic for some magazine graphics.
Buballs is a novelty gift company based in Hong Kong. For their first product venture they produced ‘Teabagz’ which are novelty teabags which contain prosthetic testicles (teabagz being a crude play on words). These are currently on sale in the US and Canada.
I was asked to design the branding behind their second product ‘Buballs’ which are along a similar line to Teabagz except the gift is meant to be more about the metaphor about ‘having balls’ (courage) as opposed to literally ‘having testicles’. These are going to be aimed at the UK and Hong Kong market, so the product image was intended to be far less crude.
The Buballs product is already in production whereas the packaging is still in development, so this project is currently ongoing.
TV Print Factory is an international company specialising in advertising and television media. They are based in Munich, but include team members in London, UK and Vukovar, Croatia.
They have done video and animation for online advertising, TV shorts as well as full-length TV shows. They were expanding, their team was growing, they wanted a website as a showcase their work to gain more clients.
twentysix London is a digital design and marketing agency based in London, UK. I did a very short work placement with them whilst still studying at university.
They are affiliated with Universal Records so whilst I was there I was responsible for taking idea/sketches which had been OKed in meetings with the clients (I didn’t get the chance to meet any famous people, shame!) and then take those points and then actually design all the webpages they needed. As well as web designing, I made some flash animations and graphics which were used in other site projects.
This was the first professional environment I had been in before and working was my first realisation of working with clients, more specifically companies, and how specific branding aesthetics can be. There can still be creativity within corporate guidelines, as just as I have worked hard to design, they have worked hard to hone their design specifications.
Don’t Panic (dontpaniconline.com) is a online publication. Every month there is a ‘theme’, a number of articles posted, as well as a number of sponsorship-based competitions. So on the virtual side there is the magazine and competitions, whereas on the physical side the company is also recognised for distributing (music, clubbing, events, fashion) promotional envelope ‘packs’ around trendy indie bars and nightclubs.
These packs also include a collectable A2 poster that featured a winning design from the monthly poster design competition. The prize (10k of your designed posters being distributed all over the UK in the packs) is highly sought after by young creatives.
There was an ongoing project to completely revamp dontpaniconline.com the frontpage and all the subpages (including the layout of the magazine, the CMS user control panel, the online shop and a new feature coming to the website; a user portfolio/profile page) and I was brought in to redesign the lot. During my 10 month internship, I was constantly redesigning pages as well as creating flash banner advertising, eflyers and other website graphics for sponsors and competitions.
Linea Pelle is a multi-million dollar LA based company that produce belts, handbags and other leather good accessories. Their own-brand belts are sold in luxury department stores all over the world, including Harrods in London. They are also outsourced by high street brands to design and produce accessories for them.
When I was invited on a month long holiday with a friend and I decided to try to get a work placement whilst I was there to compare the work environment to that of London, (where I am still currently based) plus 4 weeks is a long time to just shop and sip smoothies on venice beach.
I applied for a web intern role but when I arrived I was told that I was to be an all round designer, which was still interesting. My responsibilities included photographing merch for stock .pdfs and coming up with belt designs.
