Placement at The Open Consultancy! And other exciting things...

I've been a bit quiet in the blogging front these days... this is because I've been soo busy these past few weeks! Ever since New Blood, I haven't really stopped, due to a number of various things:

I moved into a new house with some friends and there was much room swappage, it took me about 2 weeks to finally unpack and get my room into MY room because I was back and forth to London and such places so much. Anyway I've finally got my posters up and I bought a new clock so that's nice.

I started a new job the week before New Blood, it's a monday to friday admin thing and work really takes the hours out of your day! Amazing, really. Actual employment. So all internet/creativity/posting/stuff takes place after 4pm now.

When I got back from New Blood (literally the day after) I was invited for an interview at The Open Consultancy, in Worcester. I had applied for a 2 month placement there and was soo excited to get an interview! We were set 2 briefs to complete and present at the group interview, which was about 4 days later. Argh. So every day after work I trekked over to Uni (it's dead quiet there in the studios now) and stayed until they kicked me out until I got the work done. That's when real life hits you really, none of this 12 week deadline nonsense with uni work, in the real world you've got 4 day deadlines AND a proper job to go to. Lot of red bull and chocolate was consumed. It was fun though, I love a bit of pressure, me.

One of the briefs was to create a 'thunkstick', which basically are like physical 'what are you thinking' Twitter style mailings. And they're awesome. I like anything like this, they're basically stickers on grey board with awesome shiny bits (mmm shiny) with a really simple, striking ideas that get sent out to people in the creative industries, as a sort of 'bumper sticker for your desk'. This was mine:
It came from the feeling that I keep getting recently that I'm glued to technology... either at work staring at a screen or at uni on Photoshop or at home trawling the internet or facebook or twitter or blogs or anything... or listening to my ipod, or texting my friends, and I just want to unplug! Go for a walk, read a book, draw something random, all things that I love doing and don't do enough. Do you ever feel like that? Technology is immense and helps me in all sorts of places but sometimes I feel like I'm turning into binary.

It went through many incarnations, but one of my favourite things that I didn't use was this:

Loved doing this though, to have a brief which is so open in many ways; 'design a thought' but so constricted in terms of sizing is a real treat. It was so nice to be actually designing something again, I really really need to get some new illustrations done, haven't done anything significant since finishing uni and it's making me restless.

So the interview went great and this monday I was offered the placement!! Which made me do a silly chair bouncy dance lol. I was so happy! I didn't blog about any of this until now because I didn't want to jinx it lol, but now that I actually got offered it I thought it was time to talk about what I've been doing! I can't wait, I've got just over a week left at my current job and then I start at Open on the 27th July. It's going to be so exciting working there. I will definitely update on it all when I start!

The weather is horrible today, I think it's going to be worse tomorrow. Time for a cider and a film I think.

Oh that reminds me, I saw Public Enemies last night, great film! The way it's shot is really interesting, feels almost documentary style, I dunno, the quality was strange. In a good way. And very lacking in music. Also in a good way. And full of Depp and Bale. In a very good way.