Tigerprint Placement Summary

On Friday I finished my placements for the summer! After working at Digetex throughout the summer break, I was lucky enough to spend the last two weeks on a placement at Tigerprint Studio's in Bradford. I have always wanted a placement with Tigerprint, from the moment I developed my love for pattern design and making my own cards.

Tigerprint Gift Wrap - www.tigerprint.uk.com

Tigerprint are an exciting, diverse and multi-disciplinary company with a studio that is full of creative energy! They design giftware for Marks and Spencers, and their studio has a lovely bright atmosphere, and something amazing is happening at every desk. From mocking up 3D hot air balloons to painting a cute dog and photographing their latest products, there is never a dull moment. The designers are divided into different teams that come from a variety of backgrounds such as Illustration, Annimation, 3D design, Packaging Design and Textile design. The wide variety of skills within the studio mean that fantastic, diverse products can be produced, combining lots of design elements together.

Christmas cards produced by Tigerprint for M&S - www.charlymouse.com

Whilst I was on my placement I was given the brief of 'Fathers Day' to play around with. I spent the first few days drawing and getting used to my surroundings. I loved being surrounded by creative people and also being restricted to working at a desk 9 - 5. When I am doing university work, if I am stuck for inspiration, I give up and leave it for the day. But actually I found that being forced to push through that block generated ideas and made me think more openly about my brief.

Also in the first week, I was invited to take part in a Tokyo Workshop which was so much fun! For a whole day we were given small tasks based on inspiration that one of the designers had brought back from Tokyo. There was so much to look at from painterly post cards to typographic cards and small illustrations of animals. The idea was to push us out of our comfort zone with drawing, and make us think about using other styles apart from our own. For the second day of the workshop we then had to take our favourite drawing from the day before and develop the style and spend a whole day drawing in that style. I chose Typography for this task as I haven't done it before and I linked this back to fathers day to create a selection of designs for fathers day cards. 

I spent the second week of the placement refining my ideas from the first week. I created a collection of male pattern for wraps and a collection of card designs based on my illustrations and typography. I also got used to all of the techniques and machinery that the designers use to mock up cards and product ideas. They had foiling machines, embossing tools, a gorgeous haberdashery and a large selection of glitter. I loved being able to foil some of my gift wrap designs and properly mock up cards using embossing, appliqué, glitter and foil. I was also able to make gift tags to compliment my wraps. Having learnt these skills I am looking forward to using them next year in my collections to enhance my work.

During the second week of my placement I also took part in an Innovation work shop which was designed to help us think of new ideas for projects. It consisted of thinking of a random letter, and then thinking of a random word starting with this letter. Then we had to brainstorm everything we could think of to do with this word, and when this was completed we linked as much as we could back to the project at hand. The task is supposed to generate ideas that you wouldn't have thought of before to help widen ideas for the project you are tackling. The word we chose was Jam and the theme was Party, so some of the ideas that we came up with were putting cocktails in Jam Jars to create a vintage party feel, or a humour idea of raising a toast (I.e. jam and toast), as well as musically 'jamming'. For this task we had to produce a board at the end of the day as a team of 3 designers. It was great to work in a team, as we all had different ideas that the others wouldn't have thought of. Both this and the Tokyo workshop thought me new techniques and transferable team work skills that I look forward to using in the following year and in future jobs.

Tigerprint Stationery - www.tigerprint.uk.com

Overall, I loved my placement at Tigerprint, and I definitely want to work there in the future. At the end of the week I had to put together boards of the most refined outcomes from the two weeks. I created a gift wrap board and a greetings card board. At the start of the two weeks I was pretty nervous about working towards products for a male market as all of my work is very feminine. However I am really glad that I did because it really pushed me and proved that I can work towards different markets.