A career in design: advice from industry experts

‘What to do with a degree in design studies?’ was the question posed by The Guardian’s Career Blog today. Among the industry panellists answering the question were Will Nice of Goosebumps Brand Consultancy, Simon Manchipp of SomeOne, Robin Levien, and Rob Ball and Greg Quinton of The Partners. On the education side, Paul Luna was joined by Stephen Westland from Leeds, Nicola Francis from Nottingham Trent, Helen McCarron from Lincoln, Andy Edwards from Leeds Metropolitan, and Jamie Dobson from Surrey. Rhiannon James gave the D&AD point of view.

Topics covered included getting the best from an internship, getting a job in a different field from your degree, and the benefits of taking an MA. The panellists also gave advice on networking, portfolio building, presenting yourself to potential employers, how to overcome nerves in stressful situations, and how to cope with the current state of the job market.

Wednesday seminar: Max Gadney

Max Gadney will give a talk ‘Working in Information Design’  on Wednesday, 26 October.

Max is an information designer who describes his brief as ‘making useful data products’. He led the Design Team at BBC News Online for several years and now works as a consultant with clients including The Guardian, Channel 4 and Manchester City. He runs the Design of Understanding conference.

The talk, open to all, will be at 4.30 in Typography, E1.

Whether the weather

Weather workings

Sue Walker sums up the day

Pictures from our latest AHRC-funded LUCID postgraduate workshop, Designing the Weather. Designers, meteorologists and psychologists worked together to consider how the design of weather forecasts could be improved to increase public understanding, in particular how forecasts could be designed to show the differing probabilities of forecast events.

Click here for a video account of the workshop and its outcomes, and read more on the LUCID Ning and CIDR web site.

More from Buenos Aires

Here’s the team of jurors from the Letter.2 event: (from left) Rubén Fontana, visiting graphic designer Miguel Catopodis, Gerry Leonidas, Patricio Gatti (in whose workshop the judging took place), Fiona Ross, John Hudson, Lucie Lacava, Peter Bil’ak, Akira Kobayashi, and chairman José Scaglione. For a video of Gerry in action, see here.

Picturing social facts: Neurath workshop proceedings published

During the Isotype Revisited project, Christopher Burke and Eric Kindel contributed to a workshop, ‘Picturing social facts: on Neurath’s visual language’, delivering papers alongside Friedrich Stadler, Elisabeth Nemeth, Sybilla Nikolow, Sophie Hochhäusl, Hadwig Kraeutler, Karl H. Müller & Armin Reautschnig, and Bart Lootsma. This was part of the 33rd International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, held in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 2010.

The second volume of the symposium Proceedings have now been published, containing the workshop papers, as well as a series of papers on the theory and history of diagrams. Christopher Burke’s paper is titled ‘The linguistic status of Isotype’, and Eric Kindel’s ‘Reaching the people: Isotype beyond the West’. The volume, edited Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler and David Wagner, can be previewed and purchased here.

Reading to host New Baxter Society agm

The Department is pleased to be hosting the New Baxter Society’s annual general meeting on Saturday 29 October. This members-only event will commence at 1.30pm with an opportunity to look at the display of Baxter material, followed by talks by Professor Michael Twyman and Martin Andrews. The meeting itself follows at 4pm.

¶ The Baxter process for colour printing by letterpress, patented by George Baxter in 1835, involved an initial metal keyplate and up to 20 wood or metal blocks to apply each individual colour.

Morning session at the UBA

Poster for GL, FR visit to the UBA

After a full two days of judging the Letter 2 competition, three of the judges spent the morning at the University of Buenos-Aires, the most prestigious institution in the country. We attended a presentation by recent graduates of the typeface design postgraduate course (which runs twice a week over eighteen months) and had the opportunity to address the students and staff of the course. We saw some excellent work – truly impressive, especially considering that this was the first cohort to graduate.

The UBA is a massive institution, operating very differently from UK universities: tuition is free, and admissions are in practice controlled by the limits to class sizes imposed at the level of the module (which is a larger unit that the UK module – something closer to a semester’s work). Professors employ a system of paid and voluntary assistants to manage the large group sizes, and most teachers are part-time. As during a previous visit to Argentina, both students and staff made us feel extremely appreciated for our contribution.

Henrique Nardi was busy snapping away, and posted some good images of the session on Flickr. Ruben Fontana, Pablo Cosgaya, Catherine Dixon, Marina Chaccur, and our alumnus José Scaglione (and local organiser of Letter 2), amongst others, are there.