We create ideas that start profitable conversations. Weapon7 is an integrated agency of 40 enthusiastic people from a wide variety of backgrounds. We believe that digital and new media has completely changed the way people behave. Understanding how and utilising this insight is at the centre of what we do.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to the confidentiality agreement made between Weapon 7 and their clients I was unfortunately unable to make copies of any of the client work produced during my placement.
Monday15th February On my first day I arrived at 10am, as asked, at which time I met again with Ian, who had previously interviewed me. Ian is the Head of Art, and he was my mentor for the duration of the placement. I was then shown round the office and introduced to pretty much everyone of the 40 people who worked there. After settling in for a short period I was given my first task, which was to make some simple text changes to various artworks. Next I was asked to mock up a selection of images for the agency’s Sony client for use with a Facebook group. The idea was to Photoshop headphones onto a number of historical figures (like Abraham Lincoln – below) for which I used the Photoshop magic wand, lasso, and eraser tools. I was then asked to recreate, from a screen-grab, a new piece of electronic artwork for a 2D Mercedes poster for which the original art-work could no longer be found. This was fun to do.
Tuesday 16th February My second day at weapon 7. I talked through the work I had done on the Mercedes poster the previous day with one of the designers and we agreed I should experiment some more with alternative text and typefaces – which I did. Later I was asked to package several Indesign files, then compress them and arrange them in a single folder, before using FTP to upload them for printing. The rest of the day was taken up with a few final tweaks to the Mercedes poster before this was signed off for dispatch to the Client, plus starting work on a new brief to create a selection of alternative lay-outs and formats for a new Mercedes newsletter.
Wednesday 17th February The day started with me being asked to make some final amendments to several different documents, and then packaging them up and FTPing them (this is when you zip the packaged file and upload it onto the company’s ftp site, from which Clients can easily download files via an identifying link). The main task of the day was to source a large selection of images, for use in creating a new promotional brochure (for Mercedes again) which was to be inserted in a national newspaper. I was briefed on how to file the images I sourced in a particular way, which would make it easy for designers to access and review them, when needed. Finally, I finished off the design of the chosen newsletter format with Ian, the senior designer. I think it looked really good - I think I may be getting the hang of laying out in Photoshop! I also learnt a useful new shortcut ( to hold ctrl, click on an object, select if from a list, and then do what you want with it). Carried on sourcing images until quite late (7:30ish)
Thursday 18th February Finished sourcing all of the required images from online databases and a wide selection of categorised source disks. I then filed all the images into new user-friendly categories and a made a contact sheet for each one. In the afternoon the retouching guy came in and I sat in as he was briefed to retouch about thirty of the selected images. I used the images as placeholders for the Indesign files so that they could be dropped in when retouched
Friday 19th February Finished placing sourced images into Indesign document and checked the various print-outs I had produced. I then added new text to the document –which took a lot longer than I thought it would. It was quite complicated. There were a few more minor changes required to the Mercedes newsletter and I did further development work on the preferred lay-outs for the Mercedes insert, which went through three different stages of development and review before eventual sign-off for presentation to the Client. Briefed at the end of the day on development work required for a new web-site the agency was creating for a client.
HECTIC DAY Monday 22nd February A very hectic day. Came in with hardly anything to do. Then it gradually piled up, higher and higher. Most of the day was taken up with me making final amendments to a large brochure in Indesign. Only to find, at the end of a very long and time-consuming process, that some of the images and text I had been asked to incorporate were incorrect, and that different, more recent changes had been agreed with the Client. I needed to stay on late to continue making the corrections.
PRESSURISED DAY Tuesday 23rd February Came into the office to find that the file I had been working on till late the previous night had been passed onto a senior designer to finish, which was sad in a way, but also something of a relief, as it was a lot of pressure purely on me to get the job finished in time for a scheduled meeting. I then sat twiddling my fingers for a while, until I was assigned to do some complicated amendments to some POS, which was then routed (sent round the office to be signed of by the copyrighter and designers concerned). Once it had been approved, I packaged it up ready for dispatch to the Client. However, just before it was due to be sent off, one of the designers said he thought some of the elements in it weren’t properly aligned. So, in a mad rush, I did several checks on the art-work’s alignments, such as converting Indesign pages into jpegs then layering them on top of each other, before conducting two final checks in Indesign itself. Thankfully, as I thought, it was correctly aligned after all (though it was, of course, definitely worth checking. Better to be safe than sorry before you send something off to be printed in the hundreds of thousands). This was probably the first job I had been asked to do all by myself from initial brief to sign-off - which was a very nice feeling, though also slightly daunting. It involved presenting and agreeing the work all the way through with two senior designers. Amongst other things, the brief required me to use motion blur in Photoshop, which I hadn’t used before, but which was reasonably easy to get to grips with after a while. Once the final design was signed-off I had to make a few dimension corrections on templates that I had created during the previous week before FTPing it for presentation to the Client.
BEST DAY YET Wednesday 24th February The day started off slowly, but very soon after it picked up. I made amendments on a poster for Mercedes which had been floating round the office since last week. I was asked to find a couple of images from our image bank that needed to be sent off for retouching asap, as the client had spotted some minor imperfections with them. Truthfully, no one other than them would have noticed, but hey they’re the ones paying! I spent most of the day doing loads of exploration and experimentation for a large scale, multi-sensory poster for Mercedes that will cover three 1.2 metre billboards and will have sound. I got amazing comments from one of the senior designers for my work and the energy I put into it. He also mentioned that he had noticed I had been putting in the same effort in to all the other projects I had been working on too. He said he was impressed. As you might imagine, I was very chuffed! Then to add to my chirpiness, Becky, an account manager, with whom I had been working with lots, told me that I was amazing and should never change, or leave! A very nice compliment indeed! My elation was pretty short-lived however, as pretty much straight after I had a mild panic attack as I thought I hadn’t saved a massive file that I had been working on all day. Thankfully, I soon found it elsewhere. But it taught me a valuable lesson about how important it is to be very disciplined in your approach to regularly saving and neatly filing your work as you go along. At the end of the day I couldn’t help but notice that I now had a massive pile of documents on my desk, not unlike a lot of people who had been there for years! It was great to feel like, maybe, I was fitting into the team and actually making a useful contribution to the company and their clients. It amused me to think that before starting with Weapon7 I thought that the company would probably not be a great fit for me, mainly because it is so digitally based. However the reality was the complete opposite. So far, this has definitely been the most enjoyable and interesting placement I have had. Perhaps because of that (or maybe the other way round) I think I am producing some of my best work Got in at 9 and left at 6.30 ish.
Thursday 25th February Spent most of day perfecting the layout of another newsletter (for Mercedes) in Photoshop. For this brief, rather than working as an adjunct to the account team, which I had done for most of the other work I had been doing to that point, I worked all the way through alongside a copywriter, client manager and senior designer. I produced endless different versions and talked them through with the team, making constant modifications until it was just right. It was my first experience at the company of working in a collaborative way with a full account team, and I really loved it. At one point I was simultaneously working on the newsletter, and two new pieces of POS for different projects and different clients. Up till then I’d usually been asked to concentrate on doing one particular thing at a time. Now, I suppose, I was getting my first real taste of a real life working environment, in which you have to work on several things
all at the same time, juggling lots of different ideas, tasks and priorities throughout the day. I have to say it gave me a real buzz. Let’s hope I keep on feeling the same way! I also started to appreciate how much time and effort (and constant tries and retries) it takes to perfect a good piece of design. I spent a long time towards the end of the afternoon trying to perfect a more dynamic layout for a newsletter I was working on for Mercedes, but in the end decided to go with a simpler, more classical grid structure, which seemed to work better and was, anyway, more in keeping with most of the other spreads we had already done for the same newsletter. There was a company meeting at the end of the day at which everyone talked for a minute on something that inspired them. The inspirations ranged from someone’s mum to Stewy from family guy! I talked about my love for Italy.
STORMY DAY Friday 26th February I felt like my head was going to explode at one point! I think the company was starting to have faith in my abilities. They handed over a single project for me to work on for the entirety of the day, which was to make a whole series of finishing touches to a massive Indesign brochure (for Mercedes). I have to say, the pressure of having to organize and prioritise everything that needed doing, and get it done, completely right and to a deadline, did get to me a bit, but it also felt really good when I had finished and the work was liked and signed off. As part of the project I had to replace existing photos with retouched images (having checked that all the right photographs that had been sent out had been sent back with the right alterations), crop them in some cases and then drop them into specific sized Indesign pages, before exporting them into very high res jpegs. I also had to rename all the images. If I made any errors the printer would not be able to print them. Pressure! It was all very detailed and quite complicated work, but I surprised myself in how much I enjoyed the challenge of pulling all the various strands together, whilst checking all the time that everything was right as I went along. It was a bit like three dimensional chess. I was also surprised to learn that I seem to do my best work when there is a certain degree of pressure involved. As pressure is clearly part and parcel of the everyday working environment in a design agency, I suppose this is actually a good thing! I’d been at weapon7 for two weeks now, though it felt like it had been a lot longer. I felt like I was part of the company (if only temporarily) and playing my part in the team.
Monday 1st March I can’t believe it. I turned up at the office slightly late to see everyone gathered listening to Steven, the CEO, who was telling them that the place had been burgalled over the weekend. Lots of the agency’s Macbook Pros and Apple desktops and towers, plus loads of USBs, had been stolen (as well as, rather randomly, a bag of clothes that one of the girls in the office had just bought from Topshop)! The day was filled with those who’s computers had been taken, trying to doing anything they could do without one. Which included me. To try and make some practical use of my time I was briefed, for part of the day, to do a bit of design work to decorate a couple of columns in the studio. I used a light box and photocopier to try out different versions of my illustrations. Unfortunately I had kept a few of the large files I had been working on for some of the agency’s clients on my desktop and hadn’t got round to transferring them onto the server. So they were lost. One folder full of development for a particular POS project had gone, so one of the designers and I worked together for part of the day and recreated it in Photoshop, He was on the Mac while I was telling him how I created the original file. I have uncoventional Photoshop skills, so it was good to watch how he did things differently than I would. I resolved to go away and practice what I saw, as much of how he used the software was better than the way I had used it up till now.
Tuesday 2nd March There still was not a computer on my desk when I arrived in the morning, so I did some more work on my “column” project until midday, by which time I was back online. Spent the afternoon catching up on the various artwork amendments I had been working on for various clients, redoing work that was lost.
Wednesday 3rd March I finished my lay-out for another client company newsletter, checked it (I thought) for typing errors and checked that all the copy was up to date. I had got it signed off by the designer and client manager on the account but the copywriter, thankfully, spotted some spacing issues and literals, which I fixed. I am rapidly learning how fantastically important it is to check things really carefully before passing them on for approval. It’s so easy, when you have been working on something for hours on end, to miss mistakes when you come to check things at the end. Which is why, I guess, it’s a good idea that more than one person looks through everything before it is released. I finished off a postcard design for (Mercedes) in the morning, and routed it myself (ie got it signed off by everyone on the team), which was a first. I spent the rest of the day making amendments to a couple of web-pages on the Mercedes site. I made two different versions for the client to choose from.
Thursday 4th March Assessments at University all day.
Friday 5th March A bits and pieces kind of day. Mainly made up of lots of small changes to lots of different artworks. Most particularly some Photoshop files for (Mercedes’s) web-site and experimenting with different fonts for a postcard design (which I had already amended several times before). I think I’m getting the feel now of the rhythm of creation, recreation, refinement and amendment that seems to be the pulse of what goes on in the daily life of a design agency. I was also asked to make an amendment to another client’s corporate newsletter, which consisted me of lengthening one word! Spent the rest of my time refining the illustration I was working on for the pillars, discussing what I had done so far with the two head designers and agreeing new things to experiment with.
Place Stamp Here
Monday 8th March Attended the company meeting, which takes place every Monday morning at 9.30, to be briefed on the work that will be coming through the agency during the week and on any new developments within the company. I was briefed to some on-line research for a new client, as a first step towards helping them to update their presence on the web. The site has a very specific target audience, and I spent most of the day looking at what was happening on sites with what I imagined to be a similar user profile, recording stuff that might be of interest to the project team. Finished the day being briefed by another account team on work that was required for a new pitch, all of which was still at a very early stage.
Tuesday 9th March A relatively quiet day. I still had plenty to do, but not many things that had to be done there and then. I did a whole raft of minor client amendments to various artworks – clients rarely seem to be satisfied (or am I going native already)! Worked with a design team on the early stages of a new pitch, coming up with ideas for the various things we could do and directions we could go in to meet the client’s brief. Started to put together some of the basic material and information which they’ll need for the eventual presentation, including a diagram showing all the members of the pitch team from the CEO downwards. I must say, I really like being involved in the pitch process. Its great being involved in building a design response from scratch and I particularly like the collaborative approach to the process, with everyone chucking in their ideas and thoughts and reviewing and developing everyone else’s. There’s a real sense of urgency and excitement to the whole thing too, particularly, I would imagine, when you get to the latter stages and everyone’s rushing to get everything finished on time.
Wednesday 10th March Got in early this morning to help with the final stages of a pitch that was due for 7.00 am the next day. The day started with a team Crit meeting, in which all the work done to date was reviewed and assessed and the senior members of the pitch team briefed the rest of the team on what changes needed to be made to the work and to the pitch presentation, plus what additional work needed to be done. I was drafted in to help put some of the finishing touches to the presentation, which included putting together a large format design schedule for the project which was printed out onto a board for use during the pitch. I also mocked up information – using Photoshop - about the campaign for use on different devices and channels, such as a smart phone, Facebook and the potential client’s own website. Worked late till 7.30pm.
Thursday 11th March When I arrived in the place was unusually quiet, particularly in comparison to the mad house that I had left late the night before. The pitch was taking place somewhere other than the office and lots of people from the agency had gone to take part in it. During the day, I got briefed to produce a poster and an invitation for a company party that was due to take place in a week’s time (the night before the last day of my placement in fact). The theme was the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and the basic idea was that everyone had to come wearing an “interesting” hat. Cocktails were going to be poured out of teapots etc! Amazing – and what a great way to celebrate the end of my time at the company. I went to the local Waterstones and bought two illustrated Alice in Wonderland books to use as source material. I found one particular illustration of the actual tea party that seemed perfect as the template for a poster publicizing the event, which I scanned it in at 600 dpi, in order to be able blow it up for eventual use as an A1 poster.
Left around 6ish. Leaving round that time people joke you have only done a half day.
Friday 12th March Carried on with my design for the Tea Party poster, which involved lots of cutting and pasting in photoshop. My basic idea (not the most original in the world, but I think it worked well) was to cut out the actual faces of the Alice characters from the illustration and replace them with photos of people from the office. It was a real fun thing to do. But I couldn’t spend all day just having fun. Quite a lot of my time was taken up as well with a painstaking job that required me to resize a whole load of images to make them suitable for use with different website functions for Mercedes It was pretty tricky at first to get all the proportions right. I also had to work with an awkward pixel ratio: 230 x 60. Some of the images were rather square and didn’t work well so I had to find alternate images to do the job instead – a right pain! I pretty much finished my poster design by the end of the day. The only thing I wasn’t sure about still was the type - mainly where to put it in the composition without obscuring or spoiling the rest of he visual. I played around with various alternatives before hitting on a workable solution. God, as they say, is in the detail. Particularly when it comes to designing something.
Monday 15th March I sent off the origination for the poster in the morning and it arrived back, printed, later in the afternoon. All the colours on the poster had been reproduced just as vividly as they were on the screen, and the whole thing looked great in large format. I felt really proud to see it stuck up on one of the office walls. As well as the usual routine of making amendments to artworks and creating new elements for various client web-pages, I spent the rest of the day creating a menu for the party on Thursday night, whilst doodling a few ideas for the hat I wanted to make for the event.
Tuesday 16th March Got in early to find a note on my desk from one of the account mangers asking me to see him straight away as he needed me to do produce various things for him to be used in a client presentation that was taking place the next day. When I started my placement, all the work I was asked to do was always briefed to me by a designer rather than directly by a member of the account team. Though only a small thing, it was good to know that people in the company now felt relaxed about coming straight to me to ask for work to be done, rather than thinking they needed to brief it into one of the designers first. It was a more than usually hectic day, with lots of stuff needed at the last minute for the presentation, plus lots of tweaks and changes needed to various elements of the design proposals. I stayed until late in the evening helping organize all the material that needed to be sent out for printing that night. It felt really good that, four weeks in to my time with the company, I needed less assistance now in getting my work done and that more and more people were coming to me to find out what the status was on stuff, rather than the other way round. It’s small beginnings I know, but I did feel pretty accomplished already in making client amendments for all sorts of different formats, and in originating new material too in a way that was consistent with any given client’s existing design style. I was surprised really at how quickly you can get into the mind set of each particular client in terms of what kinds of things they will like and what they won’t, when it is worth trying to present them with something slightly alternative as a solution and when it is best just to stick to more of the same. I finished the day by redesigning some of the Power Point slides to be used in the next day’s presentation to make them more attractive and more consistent with the existing look and feel of the client’s brand.
Wednesday 17th March Started the day with a very important task – making final amendments to the cocktail menu for the next night’s party, before sending them off to the printer. Ideally, I would have had them printed on both sides but, because of the tricky shape of the menu, I thought it might be too risky (as we had so little time to get them right) so I decided to have them printed on one side only and that I would cut and stick the two sides together myself. Most of the rest of the day spent finishing off another client newsletter, changing images, checking copy and checking alignments.
Thursday 18th March I came into the office early to check the printed menus for the party that night. Thankfully, everything was good. The rest of the morning was then taken up with me cutting them out to shape and attaching the two sides together – a very detailed and painstaking job. Other vital tasks for the day included making a badge for the competition we were having at the party for the maker of the best hat (which, ironically, I was making for myself, as I got the prize). The party kicked off at the end of the afternoon with a fantastic, rousing speech by the CEO about how well the company was doing. He had made no effort at all with making a hat but nevertheless went some of the way by donning a pink cowboy hat and feather boa for his speech. The party was a storm.
Company group photo before we went out. The CEO is the one wearing the pink cowboy hat and boa. He was made to wear this as a booby prize as he had made no effort.
Me wearing “The Maddest Hatter Of Them All” award winning hat!
Jason, me and Ian, my mentor
The Creative Director, Jeremy’s very tall hat!
Steven, CEO, making his speech in pink cowboy hat and boa!
The company being told about the night’s proceedings, and also a glimpse into the studio, behind everyone.
Yelena and Cat posing with one of my menus!
Friday 19th March The last day of my placement. I was taken out to lunch by the senior designer - which was very nice - and he paid! The day even ended with cakes and a speech by him all about my time at the company. He joked that I now knew more than he and another designers did about the company, and they’d been there for years! I was given a notebook that most people had written in, which was so lovely, as well as receiving a great design book. The CEO told me that I was welcome to come back whenever I wanted and finished the presentation off by unveiling one of my illustrations for the columns. To cap it all, I was then sung a song by one of the designer (Gareth) - “If you leave me now Ally you’ll take away the greatest part of me.” I had a great time at weapon7. I also learned a massive amount too. There’s really no substitute for experience gained in a real working environment.
Placement Summary I learnt so much at weapon7 in a relatively small amount of time. Having done my placement at Landor, and other design consultancies previously, I thought my computer-aided design skills were in reasonably good shape but, unexpectedly, I feel as though I made a really big leap forward at the end of this latest placement, not just in my knowledge, but in my confidence too. Perhaps the two go hand in hand.
The best thing about the experience was the buzz I got out of being part of a fast-moving team. To my surprise, I found that I worked at my best when there was pressure involved, and that my sense of achievement (when things turned out well, which, thankfully, they nearly always did) was heightened as a result. Seeing as pressure seems to be pretty much a given in any successful design environment, I suppose that’s just as well!
I think the thing that made the biggest difference here versus everywhere else I have worked so far was their willingness to pitch me into the live design process from Day 1 of my arrival, giving me responsibility for lots of different elements of client projects at one and the same time. I think they also managed to get the balance just right between making sure that I was adequately briefed, supervised and mentored throughout, whilst not doing this so tightly to remove me from any sense of “ownership” of my work.
I think my time at weapon7 may also have made me realize that I am probably better suited to a smaller rather than a larger company, as it seems to be easier for me to create a sense of identity for myself in this more intimate kind of environment, as well as to build bonds with my work colleagues faster and deeper. Which maybe helped me, in turn, to do better work.
As you would expect, a lot of the work I was given to do was relatively mechanical and process orientated, but nevertheless it often required good computer skills and a reasonable degree of good design sense. Not to mention a good dollop of good organization and timing, plus of course, constant attention to detail (not previously my strong suit). Over the four weeks I think I managed to get, perhaps for the first time so far, a real sense of the rhythm and flow of the design process from start to finish, as well as a real grasp too of the constant need for review and consultation as a design progresses. Being intimately involved with the end processes of the design stage (in terms of making final amendments and preparing work for dispatch to clients, printers or up-loading) also impressed on me, more than at any time before, the absolute importance of constant attention to detail and regular re-checking of everything you do. I think my Adobe program skills have definitely improved, especially in terms of my familiarity with Photoshop. So many of the lay-outs I was asked to design or revise required lots of manipulation of photographs and images in Photoshop, and this daily, hands-on experience took me from an intermediate knowledge of the program when I arrived, to what I’d like to think is now approaching a reasonably advanced one. I got masses of practice in using Indesign and Illustrator too and, as a result, my working knowledge of these programs has also improved considerably.
I certainly feel that I can say that I’m a bit of an expert on Mercedes now (at least in design terms), as this was the client that I worked on the most on whilst at the agency. Towards the end of my time there I even had a member of the company asking me questions about the account to answer things they didn’t know - which was nice. I’d like to think I became the “go to” girl for any final amendment that was needed for the Mercedes client and, in practical terms, that this is probably what the company will miss most about me, as the fact that I was covering the “small stuff” meant that the more senior designers could focus on more important work. It was epecially nice to get lots of (thankfully positive) feed-back and thanks for the work I did during my time there. I think that weapon7 is particularly good at doing this, which is one of the reasons why it is such a good place to work. I can’t think of a better way to leave a placement than for the CEO to say that your time there has been “fantastic” and for him to thank you so nicely for your “energy and enthusiasm.” It’s always good to get a pat on the back, but it is even better, of course, coming from the head of the company!
Alexandra is a true asset to any creative company because she is keen to embrace everything it has to offer. So the regular work gets treated as carefully as the more creative work does and the willingness to do things she has never done before means she is always learning. Nothing beats doing the work and picking up things along the way. Alexandra always offers herself up for things, never shying away and is already very capable of using initiative on things she is not sure about. This is a big asset in an industry that is fast and furious at times. Her creativity comes to the fore when the brief is open and she can turn her hand to many styles and disciplines. Her efficiency and quick thinking means she can be independent whilst also working with a team and providing a can do attitude to everything that comes her way. Fantastic! Ian Patrick Head of Art