Design studios/agency in Las Palmas

Since I'm going home for Christmas, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to get in touch with local studios and agencies, as I would like to be able to work here.

I made a list of studios that I consider that can benefit from someone like me and where I can learn the business as well. These stuios are Muum Design, Help, Publexcan, Minima, Eureka, Avatara, Cúrcuma, Atlantis, Mr. Wolf, La Escalera de Fumío, Promedia, Claud, Grupo Creat1vo and Elástica.

I wrote an e-mail to all of them saying that I am visiting from England and I wanted to know more about what they do. About 5 or 6 of them replied me and some of them have scheduled a meeting with me. I called the others and I even got a job interview out of it!

Met with them and they told me very interesting things about the way they work and what they do, how much they usually charge, their goals and also their insights about the market.

These companies were Muum Design, Publexcan, Eurek and La Escalera de Fumío.

Business Cards

One of the things that were pending to be designed were business cards for the personal brand that was created a year ago. I wanted to create something that wasn't particularly striking in terms of production to avoid confusion in what I do, but I wanted something that left an impression.

I decided to design flat business cards on a thick stock with coloured edges of the same colour as the red used for the rest of the card. Two versions were needed: in Spanish and English. I also wanted to include a quote that summarised my way of looking for solutions when approaching problems, because I strongly believe that design solve problems and in marketing strategies it's succesful the one that does the opposite than what the common sense says.











After trying out different designs that followed the personal brand of the website, this was the design that was sent out to the company Moo, since they offer a very high quality business cards with edge colouring.

#businesscards ready! #personalbrand #graphicdesign #typography #logotype #red #colourededges #moo #minimalist #modernist #elegant

Una publicación compartida de Alex Zorita (@alejandrozorita) el 30 de Nov de 2017 a la(s) 4:11 PST

Handing dissertations to references

The dissertation I'm writing for COP is about brand strategies studios carry out nowadays. I contacted several studios for research, did a course with Saffron in Madrid and Blind in LA amongst others. One of the things I want to do once I finish the dissertation is to hand it to these studios and people that have directly or indirectly helped me as they are part of my work. I think that if I hand it when meeting them it's going to cause a good first impression and also a great degree of interest in what they care about.

Designer's Creed

I'm part of different communities of designers on internet. In one of them, a member gave the idea to the administrators of creating a Discord chat. I thought this was a great idea, since it's a free platform and it offers flexibility and clarity in organising different conversations in topics and members in roles. More or less like a forum, but with a live chat instead.

It also allows to create voice chat rooms that can be attached to a text chat room, and it can be used for crits as the chat also allows to share images and other files.

The administrators didn't want to carry out this idea, but we thought it was such a pity that we decided to run it by ourselves. Me and Anna, a Russian designer living in Hungary, created Designer's creed.

It doesn't have many members at the moment, and we've just created because we thought it's a good idea and want to see where it goes. For now, we'd like to have a quality community instead of a big absent group of individuals.

It's working out pretty well so far and it's good to see the participants inviting their friends over.

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Website Feedback

I've built my website about a year ago and I've always been looking for feedback to keep improving it. Alec gave us that opportunity, so it was important for me to get feedback from him.

There were different suggestions that I will take into account.

1.- Split graphics and films in two different sections. I think this would be counter-productive, because I would be perceive as an individual that does graphics and film, when in reality I want to be perceived as a graphic designer that has experience and understanding in film.

Although, a very good suggestion was to use more gifs or frames from the best moments of these videos to make the navigation through the projects a more interesting experience. This would be a good opportunity to be visually greedy.

2.- Take care of the negative space in the images that compress the different projects in the "work" section and keep it consistent. By situating the projects in such way that there's a perception of variety in colours, there should be a continuity without a sense of repetition.

3.- If a project has similar images (like "Musics") use a gif that show them all for a more impactful presentation.

Follow a structure similar to Espamundi's and apply them to the rest of projects. Create a set of rules that the audience can understand when going from one project to another.

Leeds Light Night

In August I've got an opportunity from Lumen Arts to do internships with them designing a leaflet that hasn't been finished yet. That experience will be posted once the leaflet is done.

The second day of working with them, they offered me to work on another project for Leeds Light Night on Tuesday the 3rd of October. The Leeds City Council contacted them to do a projection on the Portland Building (Leeds Beckett University) and they offered me to design what was going to be projected.

The council wanted to project a series of phrases that represented the personality and slang of Leeds. They sent the 13 phrases through and they can be found in the brief of this project.

The work consisted in:

1.- Choosing a typography

The project officer from the Council wanted a neon effect for the text. For that, it was needed the right typography. After looking through different websites for open licensed fonts and downloaded 7 of them they were shortlisted to 4 and sent to the client mocked up so she could choose. She eventually chose the 4th after my recommendation based on legibility and clarity.









2.- Text layout

After applying a grid and choosing the right size, the 13 phrases were written in such way that they were easy to read and had a pleasant layout.







3.- Neon effect and colour palette

After having the text laid out it was used as reference the layer style of a neon text in a mock up. There were tutorials on youtube and many other similar free mock ups, but this was the chosen one as it is the one that looks more realistic. The colours were chosen to go along with the red-pink from "off to town" to have a playful, youthful and exciting colour palette.





4.- Animation

At the end of the design process, I thought I could take this simple project an extra mile further.

I made a very simple animation with the 13 phrases for James (Lumen), as they were going to be projected one after another. I simply modified the levels on the timeline to give it a more alive look. They were very thankful for saving them time and they told me they will do something else to it, but that basic animation were very useful to work with.



Since I'm working as an intern with them from time to time, I charge them based on time and as a freelance. I sent them the invoice of working 6 hours with them.

I designed a set of #yorkshire #slang phrases to be projected at #lightnightleeds with @lumenaudiovisual . Do you know the meaning of this one? #itllbereet #typography #neon #leeds #leedslightnight #reet #leedsbeckett #projection #building #portlandbuilding #night

A post shared by Alex Zorita (@alejandrozorita) on Oct 7, 2017 at 4:17am PDT

You've got (real) mail!

For this task, I was thinking it would be a good idea to design a small version of what I've got thought for the studio brief. A poster that encapsulates that concept. The front can be a quote and the back can have a small letter.

The objective of this poster is to call their attention and potentially create an opportunity for internships in the future.

It's important to be clear about what I want and to demonstrate to them that I've spent time learning from them.

Tell them that I want to learn more about what they do, and why it fascinates me. It's important to highlight a clear point of guidance and what I expect to get from them.

Ask for a creative recipe.

I like to collect quotes. I also watched this video to get more ideas. These are some I was thinking to use for this poster:

"You're The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With" Jim Rohn

The letter could be along the lines of: "I'm on my 3rd year, I'll go back to Spain soon and I'd like to take some of the knowledge I can potentially get from you with me". Also, "any little bit of time you could spend with me I find it incredibly beneficial for myself to study and get into your process".

Another idea is to say "if you think there's opportunity for me here I'm willing to work to learn as much as I can during my time with you".

Eventually, I decided to design a poster for my favourite studios in Leeds and Manchester. It is my intention to go back to Spain by July, so it'd be a great opportunity to spend some time with them.

The studios are:

Only
Rabbit Hole
Alphabet
Build
Oslo
The Archipelago

I have a very clear request, which is mentoring/internships to learn the most I can from them. Maybe my style or what I do is not exactly in the lines of what they do, but it's important for me to understand their process to grow as a designer.

So I decided to create a poster based on the quote from Jim Rohn that has a letter on the other side.

This is what I've designed. The design is inspired in the work of my favourite designers.






I got some feedback from Alec to improve the text and make sure that the message gets across. I printed them on 280gsm yellowish stock that has a more 'hand-made' feel to it. I bought A3 hard envelopes and mailed it on Thursday night.