A Unique Opportunity

Much thanks to Steve and all at The Design Mechanics for giving me (and I'm sure the rest of the group) an opportunity to go to The Design Mechanics studio to see them at work. It was a fantastic experience.

Firstly, a quick apology to all of my peers who I am sure are all eager to hear about my experience at The Design Mechanics studio. I like to think that perhaps this late blog has increased the suspense somewhat. But before all that, there have been other things happening this week. Quite a lot in fact.

First of all, this week was the week that I got my feedback from Steve about the last two assignments. I was quite nervous about this feedback as my goal from the previous feedback was to improve on my grades, and I was worried that perhaps I would not have done and that this may affect my motivation on the course. This was amplified from the previous week of receiving our results with those dreaded words of ‘See Steve’.

When I went into Steve’s office I sat down and was shown my feedback. I was quite amazed with the fact that I had not only improved on my previous website planning assignment by ticking one merit box, but I had actually ticked two of the merit boxes. As well as this I had also ticked a merit box on the Image Manipulation assignment.

The worst thing about the feedback meeting was perhaps Steve telling me that he was disappointed with my lack of development work, as this was something he had picked up on in my previous feedback meeting. Although I felt I could have done more development work myself, it is always worse hearing it from the person who is marking your work, and next time I will do a lot more to achieve this target.

Also this week I have been using Dreamweaver for the first time. I am not finding it as difficult to use as I first imagined, but I am learning quite a few of the restrictions of Dreamweaver which I am hoping to remember for my next website so that I don’t have to make as many changes to my designs.

Now, the Design Mechanics.

As most of you were probably aware, myself, Craig and Ben weren’t in the classroom much on Thursday morning due to us preparing for our ‘presentation’ to Dave Panell. I’m quite glad that Steve gave us this chance to prepare as without it I feel that we would have just sat there in silence and not been able to participate as much. It was also in this time that we came up with some questions for Dave.

When we arrived I was firstly quite amazed as to how quiet it was in the agency. Where as Steve had told us that everyone is usually plugged into their ipods just getting on with their work, in reality no one had any music on what so ever and everyone was just getting on quietly with what they were doing. This may have been partially down to 7 complete strangers turning up and they were trying to impress us, or it may have been every day ways of working, I’m not entirely sure.

Once inside, we were taking to a room and were told about the company and the way it works. Once the talk was over it was time for us to ask questions, and I think everyone was quite nervous and thinking ‘I don’t want to be the first to ask’. Luckily however, Craig asked the first question and the rest of us soon followed.

Once this was over, Dave brought in Gemma and Oliver (from last years HND course) and we got to show them our work. Again there was a slight uneasy tension in the room with no one going up, but again everyone soon got into the swing of things. Everyone in the room seemed quite impressed with everyone’s work and luckily everyone got to show their work off (something which Steve had said there may not be time for).

Once we had all shown our work, it was once again question time for Gemma and Oliver. It was interesting to ask them questions about how they were finding the work, and the differences between it and the course etc. Overall, they seemed quite happy with the work they were doing and the only real major disagreement between themselves and Dave was over the use of Microsoft FrontPage for use of web design.

Perhaps the best part of the day was spending time with our ‘own’ designer. This was our chance to speak to the designers about their work and how they were finding it, what sort of projects they were doing at the time and what they had done etc. It was interesting to learn in this time that Dave had leant ‘my’ designer (also called Dave) a book on the graffiti artist Banksy (as can be seen on my ‘inspirational work page’) and I was unsure whether having the same interests as Dave (Panell) was a good thing or a bad thing. Steve later reassured me that this was most likely a good thing.

There is so much that I could go into on this blog about the events of Thursday afternoon. But if I were to go into everything then by the time you had finished reading this, the next meeting would have taken place. For this reason I am attempted to keep it relatively brief and all will be explained relatively soon in class with the help of Craig, Ben and Drew.

Once again however, I would just like to thank Steve, and all at The Design Mechanics for the unique opportunity of visiting the agency. Much appreciated.