Talent Works is a project collaboration from UAL Academic Enterprise and London College of Communications. Now in its third year they have expanded the project across Southwark, inviting Camberwell College of Arts students to take part. The aim was to offer free web design to South London Social Enterprises who didn’t have a website and pair them with students to design their sites. Students benefited from learning how to create a website, work to a live brief and were paid £500 for their services.
We’ve asked Camberwell students Celine Rae Franklin and Eleanor Redfern to give us a glimpse of their experience from working for this project.
Celine: FdA Graphic Design
Initially I found out about LCC Talent Works through one of my friends who studies there, after she told me about it I thought it would be a great experience for personal and professional development, as well as being able to work alongside a friend.
I gained so many new skills and used programmes that I had never even heard of all in short space of 6 weeks.
The experience gave me insight into what I’d want to do career wise. As being a graphic design student, this project made me realise web and design is something that I want to get in to. The skills that I have gained have even been applied to my upcoming final project. Since finishing this project I have continued to use the programmes and even gone on to continue building websites with friends.
For the design process, there was one main rule we gave ourselves, to keep it simple and effective, as our client had so much content already we didn’t want the website to be confusing. It was all about being cohesive and consistent throughout the whole process because at the end of the day we wanted the website to be easy to navigate and to communicate what the organisation is.
Celine design process
Once we built the foundation of the colour scheme and the visual hierarchy per page everything pretty much fell into place. But don’t get me wrong it was quite a stressful process as well, we literally started from scratch, making a database, connecting it to the server and even playing about with some coding. So, my partner and I were really involved with the front and back end of things.
So, it been about two weeks since the website has gone live, and it looks amazing, but quite a lot has been changed since but I think it’s because the client has added more content for the upcoming events.
Eleanor: BA 3D Design
I found out about the Talent Works project through an email that was sent to students about the opportunity to take part in website design training at LCC and then being able to put that training into practice by working with a local community group. I worked next to BA Graphic design student Hope Roalfe, a Camberwell student also selected for this project. The website we made was for Crawford Estate Tenants and Residents Association in Camberwell, who needed a website to promote the activities that they host for residents of the estate.
Hope and I both had little previous knowledge of web design so it was really insightful to learn about the process of designing a website for a client and being able to apply what we learnt to help members of the local community was a rewarding experience.
It was also good to spend time working on something completely different from what I normally do on my course at Camberwell and take advantage of the experience to learn about working with clients in the real world.
Crawford TRA had no previous online presence and since we were starting from scratch we thought it would be difficult to collect photographs of all the different activities that the committee wanted to promote. Hope and I have backgrounds in graphic design and illustration so we used our skills in these practices to combat the issue of not having photographs of the activities by creating illustrations that showed what was on instead.
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