www.de-construct.com
After hearing about our trip to London, I was speaking to my cousin who lives there and she told me her friend worked at De-Construct and gave me his email address. I emailed Leigh Hibell who is a a designer at the company about a possible portfolio crit and he was very helpful and agreed to this. (See Above)
De-Construct are a digital creative agency who have created work for Adidas, BBC Radio 1, Panasonic Europe, Debenhams and Amstel. They specialize in web design, branded content creation and online brand development.
On the day of the visit, I rang Leigh to check it was still ok to come and visit and he said that anytime after half 1 would be great for him. The company were situated in Hackney so I made sure I got there in enough time. Once arriving at the place, Leigh greeted me at the door and he seemed liked a young guy not much older than myself. The company was set out over two large and spacious rooms and he invited me into one of the offices.
Leigh explained that he had only been at De-Construct for 3 years and that he got the job through work experience whilst still at university in Leicester. He described the job as being great fun and that most of the work is done in teams to generate more ideas and techniques. He also said that the experience of having working their for a week whilst still at university helped him gain an understanding of what a working environment is all about.
The conversation was very informal and we discussed both our interests in design. I explained I was creating a motion graphics piece for my final major project and he gave me some websites to look at which was very helpful of him. He then shown me their most recent website which is for Adidas Football. I asked if they had to pitch the idea but he explained that they teamed up with Adidas on many occasions and they went straight back to them with the brief they wanted. He mentioned that when creating websites, many issues are raised such as language and screen size. These issues had to be resolved and the website was created so that all the text boxes and images sized would work with different languages in them. Leigh then showed us one of their pitches that they have won on in the past, this was a great experience because I hadn't seen a pitch before and was curious of how it was presented and what was shown. He explained that for each pitch there will be a powerpoint and will start of with the companies logo and a little about themselves. It then goes into the brief and the ideas they had and they would also show storyboards and mock ups that were created in photoshop. I found very interesting and reminded me of when we had to pitch our idea in then second year when we took three ideas to mock up level.
As De-Construct are mainly a web design company, I shown Leigh my Online Portfolio and my New York City Museum website I created in my second year of the degree. After the feedback from my other crit with Seven Communications, I decided to delete the opening page so that the audience can go straight into the website and also deleted the sound I had on each button. I told him about this and he agreed with what they had told me. He said that he liked both the website because they used lots of white space and it was easy to navigate around each website. He said he would maybe change the typography on the New York website because it was hard to read in parts and choose a darker shade pink on my Online Portfolio to draw the audience in.
I found the whole experience of visiting the company very enjoyable and educational. Leigh helped me out with some pointers about my websites and I learned some very interesting things about how a company is run and how the pitching side is done. Leigh is very keen to see my final major project and I will send him a link to my work once I have completed it.
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