If you’ve followed our journey over the last few years, you’ll know that Melissa and Dan founded Beanie Media when they were both 18. In line with our young routes, we are thrilled that our team can support students with purposeful work experience opportunities.
This week, we’ve been joined by Holmfirth High school student Milo Billinge. He’s kindly jotted down an overview of his week and what he’s learned:
I spent my work experience week at Beanie Media because they are a creative agency with a dedicated graphic designer, and I wanted to understand graphic design better. Jack, Beanie Media’s graphic designer, was my mentor for the week and I learned a lot from him.
During my week at Beanie, I was shown how a branding project is completed from start to finish. Throughout the week, I went on to create a brand identity of my own.
The week started with Jack introducing me to different design concepts and theories. I found this interesting as I know more about how emotion is portrayed in design and how different styles are used depending on the end user.
Putting my new knowledge to practice, I then brainstormed ideas to translate into my personal brand. By creating a mind map of my interests, favourite colours and words to describe myself, I began visualising how I could create a meaningful logo.
I was then shown how Beanie Media create graphics for their client’s social media posts; I observed Jack as he designed a voucher for Inflata Nation to promote a deal they are running this summer. I found this insightful as I got to see how an agency communicates with clients and how one company has many different graphic design needs.
In the middle of the week, Jack showed me the basics of Adobe Illustrator, which I’ve already had a little bit of experience with. I created a variety of logo designs and developed the different ideas I’d had in my planning phase. I designed and tested different colour ways to see what looked the best. As I came to the end of my work experience week, I chose my favourite three designs and used photoshop mock-ups to put them into a presentation.
Creating the structure of the presentation was a key learning for me, and i got to use the exact format that Beanie Media sent to clients when working on a rebrand project.
Over the week, I have been able to learn key skills such as:
- Setting up a file on illustrator
- Using a clipping mask
- Making a letter 3D
- How to align objects
- Pathfinder
- How to make mock-ups of various items
- How to quickly send objects to the back
- Adobe short cuts.
This week I have been able to use software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Google chrome.
Having my time at Beanie Media has given me a real insight into what I want to do when I’m older. From this week, I know I would like to go down the route of graphic design.
I have loved my time at Beanie Media and am so thankful for this experience and for making me feel at home straight from the start. I would like to thank Jack for teaching me all these new cool skills in graphic design and making me a better graphic designer.