Cover Letter, Curriculum Vitae and Online Portfolio

So as part of the Digital Me project we had to create our own online portfolio, cover letter, cv and online presence (if possible). With both the cover letter and cv I struggled initially as we were told that they had to sound original and not like standard run of the mill examples. I took a long time to decide upon who to write my cover letter for but then decided as I had seen the Bluegg talk, that this would be useful in helping me to write it. My first draft was, as expected, too standard and didn’t show enough personality but I feel now that it is much improved. However, I still feel as though I could improve it and just tweak it with something that says a little bit more about who I am as a person and how Bluegg and I could relate to each other. My cv went through the same process as this but I didn’t find doing this as difficult as the cover letter. I feel that next year I would like to create a cv that is a little more expressive, as I saw a fellow student doing hers in the style of a recipe, which I thought was a novel idea and told us something specific about her. I’m quite happy with my online portfolio as it is professional and easy to navigate yet I would like to experiment further with using a different portfolio sites that are more adaptable to change and making it your own. I decided to create an Instagram account as part of my online presence, which I feel was a good move to take and think that I will continue updating it over the course of next year!

Work Experience

In my own time over Easter I decided it was a good time to do work experience. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity with the design studio of Exeter University as part of the communication and marketing services. I have never done graphic design work experience before so my first day was a little nerve-racking and I wasn’t entirely sure of what to expect. In hindsight I didn’t really need to be that nervous as everyone was really friendly and it was a nice relaxed yet professional office environment. For the duration, I mostly worked on one project with other little projects here and there which were given to me. The main brief that I worked on was for the careers magazine of Exeter University whereby I had to design the front cover and a double page spread. I brainstormed a variety of different ideas and was given a couple of slogans to work with in regards to making the visuals work with them. I was quite apprehensive to initially show my sketches to Tom who I was working with as I didn’t want him to hate everything that i’d come up with. Of course there were some ideas that were ruled out straight away but that’s how the industry works and it was a good lesson for me, to make me hardened to this way of working. With the remaining sketches I then had to work them up a bit more and then start working them up digitally. After mocking up two outcomes, Tom sent off the ideas to the client and we had to wait for feedback. I was really pleased to hear that the client liked the one that I had spent most of my time on, the one which was hand rendered. The other was purely digital and I did it pretty quickly. However I must remember that it could have gone the other way and so I need to accustom myself not to get too disappointed even after putting in hours of work and for it not to get chosen. So with the feedback, I made the necessary changes and improved it and then went onto create a double paged spread. Here are the further worked up but not finalised outcomes:

I also did another little job for another person in the office whereby I had to create a little A5 piece called ‘I spy’ for people to fill out around the university if they found a fault or damage. Although I only did this for part of a day I really enjoyed it. As I did this towards the end of my work experience, I completed these drafts quite quickly as I felt a lot more confident than at the start of the week. Here are the outcome drafts:

Overall I feel that my work experience has benefitted me immensely. At the start of the week I struggled a bit with using the various softwares and needed quite a bit of guidance however over the two weeks I improved my software skills quite largely and gained confidence. One of the biggest reasons that I am happy that I did it, is because when I came around to improving my projects for the final hand in I was much more competent with using InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. I really enjoyed working in a relaxed and friendly environment with a small team and this has led me to want to work in a similar environment in the future.