James West
Graphic DesignerWhat have you been up to since leaving UAL?
I worked at Lippa Pearce and moved with them to Pentagram where I was offered a full time position. After a bit of thinking I followed my gut reaction and decided not to take up the offer and try to establish my own business further instead. This was a pretty tough choice as Pentagram is undoubtedly a desirable place to be for a graduate, but I had this feeling (rational or otherwise) that I would inevitably end up producing work that pleased the designers there and potentially lose my own style. I know this sounds a bit egotistical but it's something that I was quite concerned about. Even if my own work ended up being trash, I would have preferred this to always thinking 'what if...'. So I left there, did a placement at a studio I admired - but even that finally convinced me that I did not want to work for somebody else - and since then have been working full time for myself. I have just finished sitting in a cupboard for four days operating a site-specific installation for an exhibition at the RCA organised by the YCN [Young Creatives Network].
What has the transition from your studies into your current life been like? What expectations, if any, did you have?
I have always been producing self-employed work since about the age of 15 alongside my studies. The transition problem for me was that I loved the conceptual and progressive approach of the course I was studying (GMD Typo/Graphics at LCC), and found it hard to feed this back into an existing bunch of corporate clients. This led to me taking the drastic step of deciding not to work for some clients anymore as I felt there was no way that I could do anything 'interesting' for them. You always hear that you can always do something good for any client if you approach it right – but with some clients you just can't. It has also been quite hard, when dealing with new projects, for me to actively approach it with my new 'creative' mindset rather than slipping back into the slightly more 'business' mindset that I would have used before. Ultimately it's been very useful to have had lots of previous work experience, but sometimes I just wish that I had just started when I left Uni so that my framework for approaching projects was more intrinsically based in the way I had learnt there. With regards to expectations, I had this massive determination to somehow only produce conceptual graphic design work. Good luck! I think maybe you can become warped slightly into thinking that now you have a degree it might be easier, but you have to remember that unless something is completely right for the client, then you're not doing your job properly. This is pretty hard to overcome sometimes.
Did you feel prepared when you graduated? If not, was there anything else you wish you'd done, any opportunities you wish you'd seized?
The course definitely did not feel very vocational, and lots of friends felt unprepared because of this. However, I felt that this was only to our advantage. Lots of other graphic design courses that I have seen all promote the fact that they teach all the software and business practise; this seems to me the dullest possible way to spend your time. You can find out absolutely everything you need about software and business from books and friends, and doing 'real work' outside Uni. It was much better to spend every second of the three years developing creative thought processes.
With hindsight you always wish that you had taken up more bolt-on options and made more use of the free facilities, but at the time it's not always easy or practical to do this. However I now definitely have the mentality of 'if there's an opportunity, take it'. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. For example, I answered an ad on Creative Opportunities to design a website for a fashion designer. The pay was really low, but it gave me something great for my portfolio, has helped to land me more jobs since, and also provided the link for a guest lecturing spot – so you never know where things are going to lead.
If there's one thing you would tell a current student to do right now that would help them when they leave UAL, what would it be?
At the risk of repeating myself: Take every opportunity. Obviously don't do something if it feels wrong, but otherwise go for it. Unless you are the immediate superstar that you always hope you are going to be, you will have to work on crap jobs and low pay in order to build up your portfolio. You can always say to the next client when showing your portfolio that a job like this would cost about £2000' when you actually did it for £100. It's all about perceived value.
Don't underestimate yourself, you have a skill that obviously comes naturally to you, but it is a service that other people should pay for so if the website or book looked like it could have cost ten times as much then why not say it did?
Also, and this might be a bit of a niche piece of advice for the kind of course that I was on, but work has to look amazingly stunning as well as being conceptually solid. I spend months refining detailed conceptual theories about my work, but when you are showing a photo of a block of lard to a client, they aren't normally too impressed with hearing how it forces a modern society to re-assess their relationship with everyday materials.
