Landor 5 week placement 2010

21 global offices755 talented peopleOne Landor

Landor believes that branding is one of the vital conversations of our time.

“The Klamath became our international symbol of creativity and innovation” - Walter Landor

Squeeze

In 1960s San Francisco, Walter Landor was finding that success comes with its own problems. The profession he had helped pioneer was suddenly crowded, and so were his headquarters. His branding agency had given rise to imitators – some good, some awful – and to more new hires than he could fit under his roof. Ironically, these were the same questions clients asked him every day: how to manage a crowd, and how to stand apart from one. He was determined to find his own solutions for both.

He also knew what was expected of him – and this was yet another constriction of success. Inexplicably, the higher his company rose, the narrower his choices seemed to become. People loved the story of how he and his wife, Josephine, had started a branding powerhouse on their living room table. But instead of encouraging an equally unexpected solution this time around, everyone told him that there was just one option: He had to spend a couple of million designing a showcase office and join the other big shots on “Agency Row.” Instead, Walter spent $12,000 – at a bankruptcy auction.

Source: http://www.landor.com/index.cfm?do=aboutus.klamath

Week One

Tuesday 13/1/2010My first day at Landor (though not exactly, as I had worked there on placement for a few weeks last year as well).

After a rapid (re)familiarisation tour around the office, and an introduction to Justin (the designer who was to be my mentor for my time at the company) I was shown to the desk I would be using and briefed on my first project for the day, which was to do some internet research for a new client pitch.

A few hours later Justin and I reviewed the material I had collected and discussed how we were going to continue with the brief. I had to take images into Photoshop in different layers and save them as high quality jpegs to be used in a short compilation of adverts. In order to do this I had to learn – very quickly – some new Photoshop skills. Which was really good, as Photoshop is probably the program I most need to improve my knowledge of I want to get a job in a design agency some day (which I do). Having done this, I was then introduced to Final Cut Pro for the first time. Though I was, obviously, quite unsure about what I was doing at first, I really enjoyed experimenting with the program and discovering what it had to offer. After a relatively short time familiarizing myself with what it could do (plus some useful tuition from Justin) I managed to use the program to cut sections out of the selected TV adverts and re-edit them together, before adding music, for an internal presentation to the account team later that day.

PLEASE NOTE:Due to the confidentiality agreement made between Landor and their clients I was unfortunately unable to make copies of any of the client work produced during my placement.

Wednesday 14/1/2010 Arrived at the office at 9:15. I like to either be dead on time or slightly early. Being late freaks me out.

The first task of the day was to return to creating another video using Final Cut Pro. This time I took the finished item just a little bit further, by learning how to fade between scenes.

Next on the agenda was a rather different, and not particularly creative, hands-on task. I had the surprisingly time consuming job, of stuffing a variety of plastic packaging with bubble wrap in order to prepare it to be photographed - which took around two hours. Well, I guess someone had to do it!

The rest of the day was taken up by re-editing the original Quick Time video in Final Cut Pro as some of the original elements needed to be removed and new material placed into it. Then at 5:00pm I produced a new mock-up of all of the clips with a music track attached.

By now, I felt like I was really getting the hang of the program, though obviously still on a pretty basic level. Nevertheless, it was definitely a very useful program to be reasonably familiar with, as though I had never been asked to use it for anything before now, I know it is something that is used all the time these days in advertising and design agencies. Then at 5:00pm I produced a mock up of the clip with a music track attached.

Thursday 15/1/2010Spent the morning making final changes to the Quick Time movie which was needed for a client presentation the next day. I tried to show the team the final edit on a bigger screen using a linked projector, as that was how it was going to be presented to the client, but unfortunately the connection from the Mac to the wide screen TV refused to work. Though it didn’t really matter here, this was another valuable lesson learned – always check that the technology works before trying to make a presentation, particularly to a client!

After lunch I helped to photograph the packaging I had packed with bubble wrap the previous day, which was needed for another presentation. We selected the shots we thought worked best and then I was left to crop, re-size and play with their contrast/brightness levels. Unfortunately, even after I had finished all the processing they just didn’t look good enough. We decided that the best thing would be to reshoot the packaging first thing in the morning and redo the process from scratch. Thankfully, we had enough time to have a second go.

Friday 16/1/2010 Arrived in the office early.

Lauren, a member of the Visual Research team and I went to the in-house photography studio and reshot the packaging. I downloaded the new photographs, this time to a much higher dpi. I then cropped them all and increased their brightness and contrast. This time, they came out looking great.

The next thing to get fixed was the link to the projector for the Quick Time compilation in the main meeting room. I got the in-house facilities guy to check all the equipment over, which revealed a few minor issues, but these were very quickly sorted and, after making a few more minor changes to the edit, I uploaded the video onto a DVD for the Creative Director to use in the presentation later that day. Another job done.

My final assignment for the day was to hotfoot it down to a large supermarket nearby to collect a whole variety of fresh food packaging to be used as stimulus material for some consumer research we were going to be doing next week.

Week Two

Monday 18/1/2010 Arrived in the office at 9 am and was briefed on my first project for the day. Which was to change the type and layouts for some existing logo designs which were to be shown to a client later that day as alternative options. This took pretty much all the morning to complete.

When that was done. I was asked to source some competitive logos and lay them out for printing to A5 size for use at a client conference. I had to recreate one of the logos from scratch as I couldn’t find a good enough quality copy online. This took a hell of a long time to do, as you might imagine. However, I was pretty pleased with the result in the end. Not that anyone would have known, of course, all the trouble I had to go to get it! At the end of the day, I got a brief for another project which I needed to start into first thing in the morning. It was an information design project, and needed to be ready for tomorrow afternoon. Almost everything we do here seems to be on a very tight deadline, with very little room for things to go wrong – which can be rather scary at times, particularly when you are not entirely sure of how best to go about something.

Tuesday 19/1/2010Started work on the new project, which was to help with a new business pitch to a well known airline. The main thing I had to do was to design a large format table showing which other airlines the agency had done work for in the past, the details of the brief they had received and a selection of the work they had produced. This turned out to be quite a complicated task which really stretched my lay-out skills, during which I had to learn some new techniques and short-cuts in Indesign to get the look I wanted (and to get it done in time). I think they will be really useful for my work in the future.

Once I had finished this (phew) I was asked to do some photocopying, cutting and pasting, to help produce loads of large format foamex boards for the same pitch. I think I made an OK job of it, but it really brought home to me that I need to improve my scalpel and ruler skills. Some of the guys very kindly gave me a few pointers – which were useful – but in the end I just need to keep practicing. I will crack it soon.

Friday 22/1/2010On to another project. This time I was asked to create a layout of logos, and a composite lay-out of various images for another client presentation. Followed by some random Photoshop jobs for an internal article that was going to be posted on the company blog. Cut a clip from YouTube for another account team and finished it off for dropping in to a presentation in Final Cut Pro. I’ve become rather a dab hand at this kind of simple stuff now. When I’ve got a bit more time, I must play around with the program some more to see what other, more complicated things, it can be used for as well.

In the afternoon, I was sent off to M&S to buy clothes for a forthcoming shoot for a client.

Week Three

Monday 25/1/2010The first morning of Week 3 started with an interesting brief from the company’s Visual Research Dept, who asked me to help them put together a presentation describing what they do within the company. This was to be shown at a company meeting in May. They already had a clear idea about what they wanted to say, but they wanted my help, and that of the several other interns who were working at the company at the same time as me, to try and make the thing more visually interesting.

I sketched out a number of possible design ideas and routes before plumping on using simple vector illustrations to help bring their words alive. I drew a few examples of what I had in mind and showed them to the VR team, who seemed to really like them. I need to wait now to see if they would like me to take them any further (assuming they get on to that stage whilst I am still doing my placement). In the afternoon, it was back to “proper” client work, which involved yet more searching for some source images for use in a number of forthcoming client presentations. At one point I found myself struggling with where to look for suitable images for a particular brief, but I asked another designer for help and he quickly pointed me in a number of useful directions. One quality I do like about myself, is that I’m always prepared to ask someone quickly for help if I don’t know how to do something, I learn so much that way, and I always find that people are happy to help if you ask nicely (even if they are busy – which they nearly always are). However, where necessary, I also have the ability to use my own initiative and work my way through problems too. Sometimes it’s good to learn by trial and error. I find that that is particularly useful when you are trying to get more familiar with a new design program.

Tuesday 26/1/2010Was in first thing to get briefed on a new project to create a whole set of stimulus material for a creative workshop that the company will be holding for a new Italian client, Unicredit. Though the main account is handled through Landor’s Italian office, this part of the presentation was going to be held here in London.

As part of this, I was sent off to Oxford Circus during the day to buy some examples of folders that could be used by the participants during the meeting. I was briefed to look for relatively cheap alternatives, as the client’s budget for the workshop was quite tight. I thought the best and most stylish ones for the price were some I found in Muji. I went through the various alternatives with the account team and they agreed this was the best route.

Wednesday 27/1/2010Continued with pulling together the stimulus and presentation material for the upcoming Unicredit workshop. I was allowed to have a bit of creative input and design some slides myself rather than just making adjustments to someone else’s work (which is the usual lot of an intern).

Later, I was sent to a nearby large supermarket to pick up some more packaging examples for the fresh food packaging project we were working on for Morrisons.

Resumed my work for the Unicredit meeting. I needed to match some of the colours in the chart to those from the client’s corporate design guidelines. I used the function (to the right) in Indesign to do this. Strangely it was the first time I had used it properly. It’s a small thing, but nevertheless a useful skill to have under my belt.

Week Four

Monday 1/2/2010

More work creating presentation material for the Unicredit Bank conference. This involved designing a new, more visually interesting template, into which to drop a variety of information about the bank’s trading objectives and performance. I came up with the idea of incorporating the “speech bubble” device (on the right) and the distinctive style of photography from their existing advertising and marketing material into the new template, which everyone agreed worked well.

Tuesday 2/2/2010Spent most of the day uploading and printing out a huge quantity of the presentation charts needed for the conference, and then mounting them on to foamex. I also designed and printed out a number of large, low res 900mm x 3000mm banners to decorate the meeting room.

Wednesday 3/2/2010Another internal project. I was asked to create some new pages and to amend existing pages for a booklet outlining the company’s maternity leave policy.

When I came to print the document later in the day, I had trouble printing it double sided on the studio printers, however this was finally cracked, with some help from the facilities team.

Finished the day by making some last minute changes to the weight of type and Pantone refs on a few charts for a member of the Strategy Team.

Week Five

Monday 8/2/2010Sat in on a strategic meeting, which lasted most of the day, between the London and Italian offices to discuss the new branding work, for Unicredit, that both offices were working on. Having been involved in preparing all the presentation material for the London conference it was really interesting to see how all the material we had produced fitted into the wider picture of the brand’s objectives and various strategies

At the end of the day, whilst I was finishing off a few small studio jobs, a member of the Strategy Team came to me with a designed Excel file which they wanted printed out as a banner for use the next day. Nightmare! – as you can’t print straight from Excel to a banner format on Plotter. I had to print it in a tiled format on A3 sheets instead and then join them all together with double-sided tape and masking tape on back to make sure it all stayed together! Finished off the day by printing out a Powerpoint presentation and sticking it onto A3 foam board for an upcoming internal presentation.

Unfortunately for the next four days (the last days of my placement) I was bed bound with a horrible virus, and couldn’t make it into the office. However, I suggested that I should come back in for four days during the Easter holidays to make up the lost time, which the company very kindly agreed that I could do.

Tuesday 6/3/2010Back at Landor for four days, to make up for the time that I missed from my placement due to being sick. An interesting brief for my first day back. I was asked to produce a poster for an upcoming internal Studio meeting, to provide a backdrop for a presentation that one of the Studio members would be giving about the time he lived in Japan. The idea was to use the poster to try and represent Japanese consumerism and innovation.

I started out by collecting a load of reference images and then selected what I thought would make the best base image, which I combined with some Japanese calligraphy from another source. I then used Photoshop to play around with the image using half tone and black and white. I also experimented with image contrast and different colours for different elements within the design. Lastly, I tried tiling the image, which worked really well. I showed it to the guy who was to make the presentation and he really liked it.

Wednesday 7/3/2010Finished off the final touches to the studio meeting poster, then posted them around the two studio levels in readiness for the presentation.

After which I and the other interns were briefed on a design challenge that had been set to help with our training and development. Which was to explore the difficulties and the potential for combining two distinct company logos (in this case a commercial organization and a museum or art gallery, part of the activities of which they sponsored), within a very restricted space (a lapel badge or lapel pin) whilst sticking in both cases to corporate design. Quite a difficult ask!

We were also set a separate technical challenge at the same time. Which was to find a way to make changes to a particular PDF, the Indesign file for which we were told had been lost. In the end, only one of the interns (sadly, not me) knew how to get this done, which was to drag the file into Illustrator and turn the pages that needed to be changed into an Illustrator EPS. As an additional challenge there was a reccurring element on most pages that also needed to be removed. Luckily a designer on my pod gave us the inside track on how to crack this by using Adobe acrobat – another new fix learned!

Thursday 8/3/2010Started off day with a really interesting Studio meeting, which involved a talk by one of the guys about the 15 years he lived in Japan, for which I had produced the poster to “set the scene.” One highlight of which was that, according to him, the Japanese have more that 160 different flavours of Kit Kats!

Then returned to my “lapel badge/twinned logos” design challenge, as part of which I did a lot of experimentation with images in Photoshop, then placing them in Illustrator to trace them. By the end of the day I had a set of alternative badge designs, some of which I think worked quite well.

Friday 9/3/2010Arrived at 9:00 am with an assortment of double chocolate cookies and other goodies to thank the members of my studio floor, plus the studio manager and my mentor, Justin. I bought Justin a large large bar of Cadburys chocolate for Justin the guy that mentored me throughout my time at Landor, as that is the chocolate he loves but won’t now buy for himself as he won’t buy Kraft owned products on a point of principle (since they took Cadbury’s over)!

During the day I carried on with the “badges” brief. As a final touch I tried different filtering techniques in Photoshop to give them a distinct and interesting look. I think the work was progressing nicely but, unfortunately, the project was an ongoing one, and I was leaving that day, so I had to leave my involvement with it at that stage.

As I left, I was given a gift certificate for £15 for the design shop Magma, on which everyone from the studio had written thank you notes on the back. Which was a lovely. I had a really great time at Landor, and I certainly learned a lot about studio life at a large design consultancy.

Another really interesting part of the placement was the outside speakers that came into the company most weeks, either to talk about their personal experience within the design sector, or about what the business they worked for did. The one I enjoyed the most was by the head of the London office of the brand consultancy, Brand Union.

Whilst I was at the company, there were also a number of interns around the office at the same time, which was nice, as I had other people to talk to who were in pretty much the same position as I was. It was good to be able to swap stories of our different experiences. One of the guys had interned at Pentagram (a company that I’ve always particularly admired) so I was really interested to hear about his experience there. It was unfortunate that I was ill for the last four days of my “official” placement. However, it was great that they allowed me to come in for another four days during the Easter holidays instead.

Given the time limitations of a placement, I obviously didn’t have a lot of opportunity to get involved in many long running projects , but I did get the chance to play a small part in the company’s work for lots of different clients across lots of different business sectors.

I really enjoyed my time there and I’d like to think that I gave them plenty of useful work in payment for the very valuable experience they gave me.

Overall I learnt a lot from my time there and, if at all possible I would love to go back in the near future, as I really like the companies they work for and the range of different design projects they get involved with.

Placement SummaryIt was so nice to be allowed to return to Landor for a second, and longer placement. This time, however, I was placed within a different team, the CI team (Corporate Identity). So I got to experience a different design floor and a lot of people I had only interacted with personally last time, rather than in work mode. It was nice to be recognised, and I quickly felt part of the company again. The CI team were all lovely and very welcoming.

I got given live client work to do quite quickly after I arrived, which is always good. I was thrown right into the deep end from the very start, with a variety of jobs for which I had to use Photoshop, which was good (though slightly daunting) as it was the program I needed the most help with. Early on in my placement I was introduced to a new program, Final Cut Pro, which I really enjoyed and, I think, I managed to get the hang of the basics reasonably quickly. I really liked that the company trusted me with several client projects very early on in my placement, and luckily I never let them down. I also got the chance to do a number of group projects, such as providing all the material for a new business presentation, which included finding ways of illustrating all the stages of the design process from beginning to end (which was instructive for me as well as the client)! I was also asked to contribute my ideas and designs to product development and internal presentations on several occasions. Additional tasks ranged from excursions to supermarkets, preparing boards for meetings, plus amending old documents that need to be brought up to date.

Most of the time I was kept very busy but, because much of my work required me to be briefed by other permanent members of the team, who were extremely busy themselves for most of the time, there were occasions when I was not fully occupied. However, this did provide me with the opportunity to play around with Photoshop in order to get more familiar with all the amazing things it can do. I have to say that, as my first extended placement, I wasn’t quite into the swing of remembering to keep a detailed diary of what I did every day either. Which is why there are various gaps in my record of events!

Ally has completed her second placement with Landor, working primarily with the CI team for five weeks. In the projects that she was asked to work on, Ally approached these with enthusiasm and professionalism. She made valuable contributions to the team. I wish her well in the future.

Justin Barker, Designer Landor Associates