Wednesday 16 April 2014

Fieldwork : Studio Visit

The studio

The studio visit to Fieldwork was a great success. They are based on Lever Street, which appears to be the creative haven of central Manchester as Music, Modern Designers an Mark are all on that street. The studio itself was light and airy, full of books, design sheets and a wonderful wall moral. I was invited to sit and talk to Loz for an hour, who I can my portfolio through with.

He was kind enough to call over people in the studio to look at my work, especially pieces he really liked. He came across as a sound genuine guy who basically confirmed that I was going to be ok. He  offered me a two month paid internship starting the 30th of June. However he made it clear that he was unable to hirer me afterwards due to them being a small studio. Despite this he said he would help me find a job and introduce me to a few people and get me involved in a few side projects of theirs.






Gifts!

Loz was also kind enough to give me a copy of Volumes 1 : A guide to Making Things that they collaborated with Hey Studio with. I was over the moon to receive one of these after seeing them everywhere all over design blogs.








Fieldwork visit : Portfolio

This is a PDF of my Portfolio that I took to Fieldwork the week after Easter. I presented it in separate sheets and laid them out on the table in front of me instead of putting them in plastic sleeves.

Running order

Nada : Nada is my strongest project due to the shear amount of work that went into it. For example it ranges from branding, custom typefaces, applied pattern and packaging.

Feedback : Loz was really positive about Nada. He was impressed at my photography and branding skills. He even called one of the junior designers over to look at my work.


Pronto : Pronto is second in the running order. It is quite a corporate project in comparison to my other work due to the subject matter, typography, iconography, web and applied branding. I put this second as everywhere I have gone to visit / do a placement I have always been shown / set to work on icons. Also everyone I have talked to feel the same. I wanted to include iconography as a strength of mine there I highlighted it big on one of my boards. Fieldwork also do a lot of web design, so I included a couple of web mock up show that I am aware of web design and responsive devices.

Feedback: Pronto was also give positive feedback as like I said above, iconography is a good skill set to have. He told me that they do a lot of it at Fieldwork as clients love it. The web element of my project that I slipped in at the end also confirmed that I have basic web skills. He expressed that he was worried that I was entirely print based and maybe a bit on the 'trendy' / 'cool' side. To help my portfolio grow, this is one thing I have to take into consideration. I am glad that I tailored my portfolio to what the studio does / likes to see.



Feast : I put Feast in the middle of the portfolio as I feel it is my weakest portfolio piece due to it being second year work. It has a great concept therefore when I talked through it I made it my aim to identify my ideas behind the project. There is also a lot of print processes involved, again another skill set I wanted to show off.

Feedback : I don't seem to recall much feedback regarding Feast apart from them expressing that they also love print processes and sometimes they get clients who want fancy stationary. Those projects always help break the digital side of their work up.



Spring : Spring is another packaging project. Again a little more concept lead however it is very similar to Nada so I had to push it past Feast. I think the branding and applied pattern and colours are the strongest part of this project as well as the art directed shoot I organised. I think packaging proves that you can make stuff with your hands so again I thought it was important to include it.

Feedback: Again I don't recall much feedback apart from some praise over my pattern work and colour choices that applied to the project.



Dialogue: Finally I wanted to end on Dialogue, a personal self-initiated project of mine that shows off my passion for exhibition and space curation, as well as my love for screen printing. The photos of the opening night make the project look legit, which proves that I can be trusted to organise something.

Feedback: I was praised to end on Dialogue as it showed I can organise and curate an event. He also said he had heard about it and seen it before online. This was great news as it was an aim of Nathan and myself to get noticed.


Presentation feedback:

I thought I would be brave and not put my portfolio in any sleeves as I wanted to spread out and present my work in the form of design sheets. It also went down well the fact that I didn't include any text on the boards as it was nice to see me speak confidently about their work.

Fieldwork


I had been meaning to send an email / self promo to Fieldwork all year since I saw their Volume 1 : A guide to making things project which they collaborated with Hey Studio with.

During Christmas time I attempted to contact them however I never received a message. However I didn't give up there, during Easter I updated my portfolio and sent them a PDF of my work with a message titled. 

THE MANCHESTER ADVENTURE.

it read...

Dear Loz and Andy

I am Eve, a Leeds based graphic design student soon to graduate in June.

Manchester seems to be a really exciting place at the moment due to the likes of the recent BCNMCR event and Design Manchester that I attended late last year. Great stuff like this has confirmed to me that staying up north is the best next option.

I really admire the work you create at Fieldwork therefore I am contacting you to ask about possible placements and internships. You can find samples of my work in the PDF attached.


I got a reply!

I was later that week pleased to get a reply offering me a possible placement during the summer. They also invited me to their to studio to show my portfolio. I was so pleased as they do some great work, plus they are a brand new studio so they are fresh and excited to do good work.























About Fieldwork

We love making things, collaborating, identifying interesting problems and figuring out what we can build to help solve them. Above all, we like to keep it simple and do it well.

If you were to visit our studio right now, you’d probably find us tinkering away with something, making things with pixels, wires or paper. This is what we love doing, and we pour that energy and excitement into every project we undertake.

Fieldwork was founded in 2012 by Loz Ives and Andy Gott, a pair of experienced makers, drawn together by a mutual desire to produce things that help organisations further their work.



Our Approach

We build things with you, collaboratively, to support and enhance the work that you do. Combining your knowledge of your organisation and its work, with our experience and design process, we produce things that have real impact.

The best way to explore possibilities and generate new ideas, is to get started. Less talking, more doing. We start sketching and prototyping at the very beginning.



Things we’re good at

We’re a focused team of makers and do-ers who specialise in crafting engaging experiences across digital, web and brand.

With a strong network of talented collaborators from a range of disciplines, we can adapt according to specific requirements for a wide variety of projects.

Whether it’s a big, intricate digital platform for a large organisation, or a simple project for a small start-up, we have the experience and network to do it well.





Project of interest




_________________________


Volume 1 : A Guide to Making Things

Collaboration with Hey Studio
You can see the web version here : http://volumes.madebyfieldwork.com/making/




1. Keep it simple, do it well

There’s nothing more satisfying than making something well, and in a world filling up with stuff, attention to detail matters more than ever. By keeping it simple we can make room to breathe, step back, and focus on the quality of the things we produce.









2. Be better, not bigger

There’s an incredible breadth and depth of value in the things that people do, immeasurable in terms of money, attention, likes or followers. This is why we love what we do. Focus on being better, and work with people who value their craft.








3. Always be tinkering

Be interested in the way things work, intrigued by the world around us, and unafraid to play with new technologies. Tinkering seeds new ideas and inspires exciting projects. Make something. Anything. Or take something apart to find out what’s inside.






4. Be adventurous

We’re lucky. We spend our time making stuff, which gives us the same thrill we had as children, cutting things out, sticking things together, and making circuit boards with switches and lightbulbs. Part of that feeling comes from learning new things and experimenting. Let’s keep pushing.







5. Be open, share ideas and resources

Build communities of makers for greater impact. Share ideas, contribute resources, publish our learnings, have conversations and inspire others. There’s a lot of making to be done. Support our fellow makers.






6. Make friends and collaborate

Two brains are better than one. Three brains are better still. We make better things by working with talented people who reinterpret our ideas in ways we could never have imagined. Make some new friends, or look up some old ones, and dream up a collaborative project.




















Iterate

Nothing is perfect, so let’s accept that and make version one. And then version two. Each iteration is an experiment — prod, poke, and learn. Start at the beginning, not at the end.






Make stuff to change the world (even just a little bit)

Imagine if every child finished school inspired to go out into the world and make something to improve our situation. It doesn’t have to be big, just moving a tiny part of the world a tiny part of the way is enough, if we’re all inspired to do it. This starts with us. Let’s get to work. Let’s excite and inspire.






Fieldwork Branding

We love our client work, but our in-house projects are also an important part of what we do. We developed our own identity with an eye on both sides of Fieldwork.


























Tilt


TILT design enabling spaces, creating inspiring atmospheres that transform the way people interact with each other. They de-mystify architecture and design to make refreshing spaces that complement the purpose and personality of the people that use them.


























Camp Nothing

In September 2013 Camp Nothing brought together 50 people from 15 cities across the UK to kickstart new Good for Nothing chapters, spreading the social-innovation bug far and wide.























Carbon Co-op

Carbon Co-op are a groundbreaking group of residents and housing experts who are pioneering a new model for making homes in Greater Manchester more energy efficient.























Tuesday 15 April 2014

Rabbit Hole : Two Day Placement

I was interviewed by Rabbit Hole a few months ago for a junior designer position down at their studio at Duke Studios. However it took months for them to get back to me. I am not quite sure the reasons behind this but it was great to be given the opportunity to work in the studio for a couple of days after Easter.

In my initial interview I mentioned that I enjoyed the monthly The City Talking newspaper that Rabbit Hole design. During the first week of Easter during the Dialogue exhibition I ran into one of the designers. We talked about how they were still looking for a junior and would I be interested in helping out with the newspaper. I took up the offer and arranged some dates. 

I spent two days at Rabbit Hole working on the May issue of The City Talking. It was a fun experience as everyone was super friendly. Tim, the head designer at the end of the couple of days, offered me a paid internship after my degree which could possibly lead on to a job. However he made it clear that the ball was now in my court and it was up to me to come back to them. 

Here is the latest issue of The City Talking that I worked on.



  

















Duke Studios

Here are a few quick snaps of Duke Studios, where Rabbit Hole are based. Each studio is made out of cardboard, which gives it an open and shared environment. You can also rent a bench and work on the bean bags in the decking and fake grass area. 





















Thursday 10 April 2014

Self Promotion : My website

My personal website

Over Easter I designed and built my website. I selected my best work that would be in my printed portfolio and placed them in a simple grid of images. The grid was made up of two small images and one large image. The large being a statement project like Dialogue or Nada. The same grid is repeated below, so all together I have decided to put 6 of my best projects up online.

Martin O'dea helped out with the coding and we managed to make the title of each project hover over the images when you scroll passed them. A subtle and nice effect.


You can find my website at www.evewarren.com 







































The navigational side of my website includes an About Page, a link to my personal design blog, Vimeo, Behance page, Instagram and Twitter and a link to my email.







I chose to have a less series photograph of myself on my about page. It shows a photo of myself sat on a huge duck. I wanted my site to be memorable so this is the route I went for, to give some personality and fun to the site.












Tuesday 8 April 2014

Dialogue exhibition : Promotion & Press


Video Diaries

As part of the promotion for the exhibition, we put together some video diaries, these initially were predominately for us to evidence the time spent in the print room and to document the process of printing the artwork. But as we created them, we thought they would be a good tool for promotion and show the audience what we have been up to / how things were coming along for the exhibition opening night. As we were printing for two weeks, we did 2 videos, one at the end of each week. The videos documented the time that week spent in the print rooms and the showed the prints we had been doing along with other things to advertise the exhibition.

Week one:
www.vimeo.com/89241898

Week two:
www.vimeo.com/89784740


TV & Film Students

These were the two which we had put together ourselves for promotion, but as it came closer to the opening night, we were approached by two TV & Film students from Leeds Trinity. They asked us if they could make a feature film / interview on the opening night as part of their work for uni. As the exhibition is all about bringing creatives together, we were more than happy to let them do this and it was also something good for us to have afterwards too.

One the opening night, they came down with all their equipment, we didn't realise it was going to be so professional, they interviewed both me and Nathan within the space and we were wired up with microphones and everything. Again it was great to have these involved in the opening night, it made it look more professional and we knew the final outcome of it would be good. It also brought more attention to the space whilst it was being conducted.


Nathan & myself being interviewed











































Local Leeds Blog / Magazine


We were also approached by a girl from a new magazine / online blog which is soon to be launched in Leeds, she wanted to conduct an interview with us which would be part of the new launch. This was just your standard interview, but again it was great to talk about the whole process of the project and the final exhibition that there on the night. Putting things out there just shows what uni students can achieve and hopefully it will inspire future students on the course to so something like this.

(article yet to be released)


Creative Review

The final bit of promotion and really the main thing that were hoping for throughout the whole time of doing the exhibition was that it would get blogged on an industry recognised blog. We really hoped this would happen, as we thought the project was worth it and was to the standard to be shown online within something like that. On the day we were setting up the exhibition, we were contacted by Creative Review, they wanted to write a piece about the exhibition and put it up on the blog that day! We were really happy with this and got straight onto providing images and information about the exhibition. An hour later and it was live on the blog, the best thing about it was that the article read really well and they had quoted us throughout it. We mentioned the college, leeds print festival and other local printers, to show that it is much more than just a student project. We were later contacted by them again, asking for us to provide them with photos of the opening night and they would feature the exhibition in the next iPad edition. Again we really couldn't believe it, it made us feel like we had created something which was of a really high standard - its hard to evaluate it because we were so close to the project and involved in it, to us it didn't seem that extraordinary because we knew what we had to produce for it and how we were going to do it, but getting things like this happen, just proves that the standard of the event and work must have been high and people were really impressed with what we had produced - the recognition for the exhibition was great.


____________________________________

You can read the article below


















http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/march/a-conversation-piece



A conversational piece

Antonia Wilson, 27 March 2014

Creative duo Yoke bring a week-long, non-profit screen-print exhibition to the Corn Exchange in Leeds from tonight, with an aim to create an exhibition space that spurs a dialogue between creatives through a blind collaboration...


Yoke, made up of designers Eve Warren and Nathan Bolton, asked a variety of creatives and studios to submit work that would be used in a collaborative way, to be showcased in a final exhibition called Dialogue. Each designer consented to this, with the understanding they would not be able to choose their creative partners. "The contributors had to be open to their submissions being manipulated through the use of print and the matchmaking process that paired two submissions together, in order to make a series of screen-printed artworks," says Warren.


Although they had originally planned to keep it local, they decided to through the net wider and ended up with over 150 submissions from creatives and studios around the world. "We're excited to collaborate with studios and agencies ranging from locals The Beautiful Meme, to Two Points studio from Barcelona who will be speaking in Manchester over the next couple of days," Warren says. (Two Points talk as part of graphics event BCNMCR, see more in the April issue of CR and on the CR blog here).


As soon-to-be graphic design graduates from Leeds College of Art, the duo decided to do something ambitious to help foster future opportunities, but the initial idea developed from their mutual love for print.

"When it comes down to being emerging print artists, we are thankful for being on a course that takes print seriously, as there is the argument that print is dead. Print is not dead. For example, we have seen Leeds Print Festival grow every year as well as see local passionate printers like The Print Project produce so many new and innovative ways to interact with print. There is something so nice about getting your hands dirty in comparison to sitting staring at a computer screen all day," says Warren. "The North is an exciting place to be right now, especially Leeds as in the past 18 months so many things have started to pop up and we wanted to be a part of that."

Dialogue exhibition


Would we do this again? HELL YES






















The exhibition and project has been a huge success and one which both Nathan and myself are really proud of. Undertaking something of this size would never have been possible without doing it with Nathan and I think that we have really worked well together.

We both share the same love and understanding of print, along with the same ideas of what we wanted to produce. This helped us push the project further than what we imagined making us deliver a a successful exhibition. I believe that Dialogue proved to the wider community what is possible - not to mention what can be done on a limited student budget. It also proved to ourselves that we are capable of pushing the boat out.

I have really enjoyed the whole process of this project. Curating and screen printing work to be put on display has always been an interest of mine and being able to combine it with other areas of design which I really enjoyed brought together a great project for both Nathan and myself.

For the future we have both agreed that we would love to carry on the project and still work under the name 'Yoke'. The concept which we created for this exhibition, has a great way of developing into a series of exhibitions, as we can run it in the same way but change the theme each time. Now we have done the first one, we know what to do and what not to do next time, also having all the resources and materials from this one will be good to reuse for future ones. I think by doing this, we have created an audience for it and possibly interests from people that could help us further.

We are both planning in staying up North after uni and getting jobs, so this could be something we do outside of our jobs. I think things like this need to be present in the North, especially Leeds as there isn't that much going on in terms of what we did. We have spoke to Amber about being apart of Leeds Print Festival next year, which would be great if that did happen.

I think for the time being we have both agreed that we want to carry on the project and do future projects and exhibitions. At the minute finishing uni is our priority, but after that I think we just take it by ear and see what happens. This has been a great first stepping stone and just the start of something great.

Tuesday 1 April 2014

Dialogue : Opening night

What a success!


The opening night of the exhibition took place on Thursday 27th March. We ran the opening night from 6pm - 9pm.

After spending a lot of time online blogging about the exhibition and drumming up the social media side of the event, we were pretty happy that event was out into the world and that a fair few people knew about it. Having an article on Leeds List and Creative Review also helped this and got the event known more as something within the design industry.

We had support from fellow students on the course and uni across all three years, so we knew at least they would come down and have a look. But on the night we were overwhelmed by the response, we reckon all together there was between 120 - 150 people that turned up throughout the opening of the exhibition.

For us this was amazing, we never thought that it would get such a response that it did, but everyone seemed really impressed with the exhibition and the amount of work we had produced for it. We both discussed and agreed that people initially didn't take us seriously, when we had been planning it out within uni and thought that it was just gonna be some screen-prints up on a wall, but when they all walked in and saw it all together put together, they were taken back and really impressed. The lights we installed were a great success and helped light up the room much more, when it was dark outside it made the room come a light and show off the artwork. The frames with the hanging work got a lot of attention, people were intrigued by the hanging system and how it worked to get the artwork up there, but mainly because it was a different and interesting way to showcase the work, this part of the exhibition made it much better and a highlight of the whole thing.

The whole idea and concept of the exhibition was to create a space in which like - minded creative people could come together and discuss subjects / things within a space which spurs dialogue between them. I think we achieved this tremendously, everyone was looking out for their own artwork within each printed print, when they found their work they would ask us or the people around if they knew who they were paired with. The concept worked perfectly and brought together a big group of people for one night to showcase what you can do as a collaboration and collective.

Throughout the opening night we had a photographer to take images of the full night, there was also someone videoing the night too. This was to take the pressure off us, so we could be the hosts, but also to enjoy the night after all the work we had put into it.

Luke Beever kindly photographed the evening for us, check out the photos below