From design student to design professional: how I have polished my skills at Grain

I am a designer at Grain and just finished my BA (Hons) in Graphic Design at the University of East London. I’d like to share my views on what it’s like to work in the design industry and how Grain is helping me build up my skills and experience in the profession.

What may have been the quickest three years of my life have now passed and I have successfully earned my graphic design degree with honours. So now begins the transition into being a professional designer. And where better to aid that transition than where I am right now!

I have been with the team at Grain for over a year now, so working in a professional environment is not entirely new to me. I started here as a second year design student, and am now a graduate, so the feeling of being a student is still fresh to me. There are certainly distinctions to the methods and modes of being a designer that comes with the shift from student to professional and my experience in Grain’s working professional environment has helped guide me through this transition.

As a student, you have pretty much infinite freedom with your work, and you remain the decision maker. Grain’s client-focused mentality is proof that sometimes to make design successful, you often need to loosen the reins on the ownership of your work. After all, we’re not the client!

What you don’t get insight into as a student is the amount of work that goes into a project besides the actual design, and the number of roles and tasks that are required for a successful project. Providing a client with an honest, well-strategised and visually beautiful name, identity or website is no easy task. Get it wrong and it could be costly. The sheer quality of the brands Grain creates and develops goes to show that all the hard work, research, meetings, correspondence, designs, revisions, and then more designs and more revisions will pay off!

My favourite projects I’ve worked on at Grain so far have been New Bondway, the Bickerdike Allen Partners website (launching soon!) and the Amersham & Wycombe College prospectuses. With all three projects we have worked closely with the clients, in the case of New Bondway from scratch including naming, and made a big impact on their brands and strategic goals.