My work experience was at Printing.com Guildford (later on to be known as Flourish Creative) in a quaint little town house with big beams and low ceilings.
Flourish specialises in helping companies win more business through their brand and marketing communications. this involved websites, brand identities, logos and others. This means that they can help you create a powerful brand strategy, an engaging and impactful logo and professional business stationery. Also creating inspiring marketing collateral: leaflets, flyers, brochures and websites and developing marketing knowledge through a range of marketing workshops. It’s been called Flourish Creative for work experience because over the next few months Fiona Humberstone the MD of Guildfordprinting.com is breaking away from the Printing.com franchise under a sort of bolt-on company called flourish creative!
The people that are involved in this business were Chloe, Ian, Issy, Georgette, Carloine, Rob and Fiona. out of all these personnel I worked closer to Caroline and Chloe. both being brilliant graphic designers and having a keep eye for typography I had alot to learn not knowing much about typography whilst there (hard lesson!) not realised just how important it was in graphic design, Definitely one of the fundamentals!
It’s the graphic designers job to produce design solutions to communicate their clients’ messages with high visual impact.
Working to a brief agreed with the client or account manager, a graphic designer develops creative ideas and concepts, choosing the appropriate media and style to meet the client’s objectives.
The client base come from all over Surrey mainly, from small companies i.e. Cobham pilates wanting a website and flyers to Guildford Chambers wanting a new logo and Letter headers!
I wasn’t allowed to show some work in progress for certain companies but what I worked on it was agreed could be presented.
The hours every day are 9am till 6pm which are the longest days I think I’ve ever worked but it’s enjoyable!
One of the most challenging aspects I found out rather quickly about working at Flourish which I’m sure goes for any Creative company is trying to keep up to the same speed as the other two Designers in the amount of work that they produce, it’s nothing like the pace of university but that’s what my tutors are making sure we understand now, but I’m assured that that will come in time. I’ve enjoyed my time on work experience and have learnt a hell of a lot, through both good and bad ways. Its given me a brilliant insight as to how printing companies work, from initial concept ideas to the finished piece!

The types of tasks I was set over work experience were many, some days were spent re designing websites because the companies wanted some alterations on the original mock ups which I found quite easy as I had a good knowledge of HTML and if I wasn’t sure of anything a quick search on Google would rectify things.
Flash was an interesting media because no one in Flourish had used it before, one morning the whole of Guildford had a power cut so I spent that time explaining and showing some of them how to use Flash which was quite entertaining! The other half of the day I was given more of a physical side to the studio which I was grateful for as it’s not all hanging around in a funky office with a laptop in one hand and a ping pong paddle in the other, I was in charge of finding the boxes which hadn’t been picked up by the clients yet, looking up their accounts on the internet so I could find their phone numbers then ringing them up and telling them in my best telephone voice that they needed to be picked up soon and to my dismay the first man I spoke to gave me an earful about not being happy with some charge or other….oh well you can’t please them all! Some of the other more time consuming work I was given was to design the Flourish Creative website in preparation for the rebrand, I found this most entertaining as it gave me free range to create however I wanted. Other programs I had to use were programs like InDesign so this was a major pain for me as I never really used it so this was a very steep learning curve, to add to my dismay I made another blunder, I was been told I shouldn’t upload the .IDD files as the work belongs to Fiona so those came down rather quickly.
overall I think I’ve come to the realisation perhaps that I don’t want to work in a printing company as Im a motion graphics kind of guy but it has been a brilliant insight!

** download link below **

http://www.mediafire.com/?0y2ltz2wiwj

having a stomach bug plus the snow means i havent had anymore work experience to do in Guildford but theyve emailed me a few bits to work on.
over all rubbish week for work exp. but AWESOME SNOW!

out of all these personnel I worked closer to Caroline and Chloe. both being brilliant graphic designers and having a keep eye for typography I had alot to learn not knowing much about typography whilst there (hard lesson!) not realised just how important it was in graphic design, Definitely one of the fundamentals!
It’s the graphic designers job to produce design solutions to communicate their clients’ messages with high visual impact. At Flourish Creative they produce a huge variety of products such as websites, books, magazines, posters and flyers among other things as well as corporate communications and corporate identity, e.g. giving organisations a visual ‘brand’.
Working to a brief agreed with the client or account manager, a graphic designer develops creative ideas and concepts, choosing the appropriate media and style to meet the client’s objectives.
The client base come from all over Surrey mainly, from small companies i.e. Cobham pilates wanting a website and flyers to Guildford Chambers wanting a new logo and Letter headers!
I wasn’t allowed to show some work in progress for certain companies but was pointed in the direction of an image on their website which I could use to show some of the clients, so here are but a few…

the base of Operations is Millmead house in Guildford ive posted many pics up previously but here is the main little house. its very “olde worlde” and i loved it.

My own involvement as I’m sure your aware from reading the blog was used at different levels from redesigning a website to creating first designs for a whole new one! then using InDesign to create an eBook for Fiona to put up as a taster for her Exhibit! book.
overall I think i’ve come to the realisation perhaps that I don’t want to work in a printing company as I a motion graphics kind of guy but it has been a brilliant insight!

this is the final image Kaos Theories chose for their CD cover! hopefully ill have an email from him this morning with the band bio and information i asked for….