Friday, 17 March 2017

Interviewing Professionals

Planning for the interview

In preparation for an interview I have organised for next Monday, I have done a bit of research into possible questions I can ask. I tried to find examples of questions that have received interesting replies. I will also make sure that the answers to the chosen questions will benefit my practice and my experiences in Graphic Design.

I found some examples of questions that employers could ask in job interviews as I discovered these questions would also benefit me if I were to ask them.




Inspired by questions that I found online that received successful responses, I produced a list of my own that I considered to be beneficial to my practice. The questions are written out below.


Interviews:
Jane Bates

I first interviewed a woman called Jane Bates who has had a rich and successful career in the Graphic Design world, working her way up to senior designer at Pentagram before starting up her own business and working from home. She has a keen interest in fashion and textiles and this is evidenced in the type of briefs she takes on and how she approaches them. She also specialises in signage and way-finding and has been a part of a number of high profile projects such as the signage for the Warsaw Museum of Art at the start of the millennium.

As Jane runs her business not too far from where I live at home, I decided it would be beneficial to interview her in her home studio. This had a really positive effect on the success of the interview and the responses I got which I will evidence in my creative report. I decided to record the whole interview on my phone so that I could concentrate on listening to her responses as opposed to trying to write things down. I then listened to it afterwards and made notes. The interview went extremely well and was very insightful. The fact that we did in person meant that she could elaborate on her answers and we would make a conversation out of it.

James Greenfield

The other professional I interviewed was James Greenfield who works at Studio Koto, an extremely successful and high profile graphic studio that have had clients as big as Airbnb. I decided to interview him over email as this would give me the opportunity to compare the two interview methods as well as compare their responses. I asked James the same questions that I asked Jane so that I could compare and contrast their responses. They are both very different designers who have different skills and interests. James and Studio Koto specialise in branding and identities.

The method of interview proved to be far less beneficial as his responses were brief and to the point with no elaboration. I received come good answers that I could use for the project, however it was clear that it would have been more successful had I done it in person. Despite this, both interviews were extremely beneficial and gave me plenty of material to work with when it came to producing a report.

The next stage was to decide how I would use the information and produced an informed creative report that suitably utilises the information.



No comments:

Post a Comment