For my placement this year I spent two weeks at Holy Cow, a branding agency in Suffolk. I chose to work with Holy Cow as I love the work they produce and the consistent authenticity to their outcomes. They are a small agency with only about 6 people working in one studio, so this has given me an insight into another working environment.
One of the first things that struck me and I was pleased about was the amount of responsibility I was given, immediately being trusted with live logo designs and promotional materials that the studio was working on right before I arrived. I was told that the two weeks I was there were some of their busiest of the year, and because of this I felt that I was really needed in the studio, which made me immediately feel like part of the team.
I found that the environment of the studio was perfect for the way I work. People in the studio quietly got on with work while listening to music, and I find that I can get my most done at my best standard with this atmosphere of 'getting on with it'. Fortunately I also found that the quick turnaround on the briefs I was set ensured that I was working my hardest to get them right first time. The logo designs I was set on my first few days each had deadlines of later the same day, meaning that there was little room for error, and with this in mind I found my errors infrequent, as I knew I didn't have the safety net of trying again and again until it was right. It also came to my attention that every brief both myself and the rest of the team were doing were never perfect first time, and required a lot of adjustments after being shown to the client. I knew from doing live briefs previously that it is much more difficult to visualise someone else's idea than my own, and so I found myself paying much more attention to the specifics of each brief.
Holy Cow does a lot of branding of food items, so I was working on branding a line of vegetarian sausages and another line of chutneys for the first week. I found that a lot of Holy Cow's clients were very loyal to them and had very strong working relationships with the designers, and that showed me the importance of having a client trust you, and trust your decisions, as the designer I shadowed in a couple of meetings, Francoise Dietrich, worked very closely with her clients and appeared to have formed friendships with most of them.
On the second week I was working on a series of promotional fliers for a seaside cottage rental company, one which uses Holy Cow for all their graphic design needs. I felt a lot of pressure to do a good job on this brief because these were long standing loyal clients, so I felt the need to make sure I produced something as good as the other designers had previously done for them. However, after spending some time going through all the other promotional materials that had been produced for the company, I had come up with some clear ideas which I ran by the other designers before started working on with their approval.
An element that I found vastly different to the work I do in college was the lower level on conceptually driven design ideas, something which I have previously found vital when creating a successful brand design. However, I learnt here that with such a short timeframe in which to complete a design and send it to a client, there is little time to think of a strong concept, and some of the time, the clients are far too specific on what they want for there to be an wiggle room conceptually anyway.
Much like the way I try to work, the designers at Holy Cow strive to make sure everything they produce looks completely different to everything else, which was refreshing given the amount of identical design being churned out today. Above all I felt very welcome in this environment and I really enjoyed being treated like a member of their studio as oppose to a fleeting intern, and I would be more than happy to be working in a place similar to this in the future.
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