Creative learners have designs on agency success

Alex Traska, creative director of Makermet, based in Nottingham’s city centre, visited classes to highlight the range of clients they work with across a broad selection of industries including publishing, tourism, education, economic development, luxury consumer goods and life sciences.

Together with Molly Waring-Moore, digital marketing executive, Alex spoke to students on Tuesday (5 December) about the creative processes applied within a design agency, describing the collaborator timeline and how colleagues combine their experience and ideas on projects, enabling them to learn new things, challenge ideas and bring excitement to a job.

Alex encouraged students to have confidence to share ideas in their own work, listen to others’ ideas and use criticism to improve, which is all part of a collaborative approach.

After the seminar about life within a design agency, Alex set the HND Interactive Media class a marketing project. The brief is to manage a project being developed by Nottingham City Libraries, called Storysmash - aimed at getting people aged 11-25 years active with creative writing, reading and digital games.

The task is for students to research and propose a marketing campaign that will encourage young people to follow Storysmash on social media, visit the website and sign-up to the masterclass events and workshops.

They will use their research skills, develop a promotional campaign using physical print or digital outputs, and design an advertisement campaign all within a £2,000 mock budget and will present their final projects to Alex in the new year.

Alex said: “The proposed and in-progress concepts we saw at the college were fantastic; they used smart-phone and VR technology to excite and grab people's attention.

“The students had clearly thought about how to use that technology to create shareable outputs that could be used on Storysmash social media channels to encourage even more people to consider signing up.”