First taste of industry practice

During the few months prior to the summer holiday, I decided that I wanted to get some industry experience over the summer period, therefore started looking into different design agencies and individual designers whose work appealed to me the most.

After spending days researching and finding out about different agency's and there design methods, I decided to get in contact with a few places. As there are so many different agencies around, I focused mainly on ones that worked mainly for print and editorial design which is an area that I wanted to go into for my 2nd year. Ideally I was also looking for more independent studios, rather than in house places as this would hopefully offer a more personal learning opportunity. Another thing I had to take into consideration was the location, I focused my research into Leeds, London and Hong Kong based agencies.

Some of the agencies contacted via email include:

A Practice for Everyday
A2/SW/HK
HK Magazine
Stereo
B&W
SEA
etc etc....

Thankfully, majority of the places did get back in touch, with most cases, as they're quite small independent studios with limited people, it was a bad time to recruit any interns at the time. Both HK Magazine and Stereo got back with more positive news I guess, with HK magazine offering an interview with a potential 3 weeks internship in their Hong Kong office. Whereas I was also in talk about another internship with London based Stereo, but never did get the time to visit their studio to arrange something further unfortunately.

The process was rather frustrating really, I probably took about a month just researching and getting in contact with all these places, with only a handful of places replying with slightly more positive news. However, I'll take this as experience for this year hopefully. Quite a few places, did like my work but were not in a position to offer an internship at the time, so they will be the ones that i'll be contacting again in a few months time!

Work and my experience working as a graphic design intern at HK Magazine can be viewed here