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After 31 months of working for Blue Solutions a leading software distribution company in Wokingham I am leaving for a new job working for a digital agency in Basingstoke. I felt the time was right for a new challenge and my iPod was running out of tracks. We only learn by challenging ourselves and I felt the challenge had stopped.

I started working there straight out of college in 2007 as a junior graphic designer with limited web knowledge and I’m leaving as a confident designer for both web and print. I wouldn’t say it was the easiest job at times especially when the senior designer was made redundant in March 2008 leaving me to do his work as well as learn the ins and outs of the Blue Solutions branding myself, however it gave me the chance to experience all types of design for web and print. If I didn’t know it I had to learn it. I found Google was my best friend, always had the answer. I seemed to be spending a lot of my spare cash on books to help me learn(I don’t think I read this much during my whole time at school!) as well as late nights in front of my computer doing tutorials.

Once I had a solid knowledge I really enjoyed my time with the people around me. I found myself chatting a lot with the guys next to me who all had a great sense of humour, I also gained inspiration from them, one guy said things like “can you create a HTML Bridge div table thing” but as we got on so well I knew what he meant! During this time I was working on a few great campaigns which I had a lot of collateral to theme which kept me busy.

Towards the end of my time there my role was constantly changing due to marketing budgets being slashed and people moving jobs we all needed to take on extra responsibilities, one task I was given from a data admin role was keeping the manufacture portal pages up to date, seeing as I had no product knowledge (other than adobe) I relied on .pdf datasheets and ctrl + C and ctrl + V, this really got very tedious and was taking me away from design and learning. As other people were taking on more jobs there were more and more unrealistic deadlines which lead to me rushing the work, as most designers would know this is a horrible way to work and I knew I could do better. I never felt like there was a project to get my teeth into, on average the turnaround time for most things was just a few hours.

I was curious to see how much I had actually produced for Blue while I was there

• Ecommerce site redesign and building front end
• Roughly 1700 banners
• 964 generic images
• 490+ emails
• 30 PC Retail Magazine adverts
• 11 microscope Magazine adverts
• 8 CRN Magazine adverts
• 8 double Sided flyers
• Datasheets

On many occasions I found myself working for alternative companies, some of which I really enjoyed others not so much as I was put in difficult positions. When you are employed by one company and they are paying you, their work comes first, no one else’s. I was working on projects for A1gifts, PurelyWebstores, CATS-i, Eclipse Cars and flyer designs for letting out the building I was working in.

PurelyWebstores was a Retail site so I could use a bit of flair make it really stand out, as I couldn’t get a copy of Flash I started looking towards Jquery to add a dynamic touch and I loved it, I was then able to carry it through to the CATS-i website (never finished) to create a great feature on the home page. Since then I knew I wanted to become more of a web designer then a print designer. You can see my jquery tutorials here.