Studying the Creative and Cultural Industries at Kingston University.

Hi! I am a second year student at Kingston University, studying Art Direction after originally studying Design Marketing in the first year.

As I joined Kingston, I was a design marketing student really interested in marketing but had always been creative so wanted the combination of arty and business. First year was a generic year for all Creative and Cultural Industry students where we learnt a variety of skills, heavily focusing on adobe software. We were tasked with numerous briefs throughout the year such as creating our own advert for the IMAX brand and making a colouring book for adults in London that would be a social detox activity. I throughly enjoyed all these tasks as I learnt loads of new skills that I definitely did not have before. I also got to learn about the industry from the lecturers and guest lectures. I got to grow my confidence by pitching my ideas to the class and lecturers which I found really useful. Through these skills I learnt, I got to use them to apply for a summer internship role at Virgin Atlantic which I was successful in and had an amazing time seeing how my course can be used in the industry.

When starting back for the second year, I made the decision to swap from Design Marketing to Art Direction. This was due to the fact that since working along side the marketing team in an amazing company, I decided I wanted to go down the advertisement and campaign route and to be creating these ideas rather than learning skills to design them. Design Marketing seemed more digital than what I am comfortable with. I am throughly enjoying Art Direction where we are working with lots of brands to generate campaign ideas and learning all the techniques to use for this. In our other module, customer mindfulness, we are learning also about this and the focus on the customer that a brand needs to have. The two modules pair perfectly together. At the moment in customer mindfulness, we are creating a customer research report on the ice cream Twister. While working in a pair of our choice, we get to learn from others and create a piece of work we are really proud of.

These modules will come in really handy for after Christmas where we start a live brief module where we work directly with businesses to create ideas and campaigns which we present to them. This is an amazing way to see how the industry works first hand and to network with employers.

The Creative and Cultural industry course is relatively new and unheard of by others, however I would defiantly recommend it. It is coursework based compared to other University’s that have essay based courses on these topics. I believe that coursework helps build your portfolio and is better practice for going into the industry than writing essays is- and it is more fun!

If you have any questions about the course, I would be more than happy to answer them.

-Yasmin (Kingston rep)

Reply 1

Mo_k

Hi!
I’ve gotten on offer for the art direction course at Kingston, which I’m very happy about! I was wondering how many contact hours you get a week, and how often do you have to attend uni, is it quite independent? Also do you get lecturers and industry professionals come in?
Any insight would be great thanks!

Kingston University

Kingston upon Thames

Reply 2

Kingston Reps

Official Rep

Original post by Mo_k

Hi @Mo_k

Congratulations!! I am really enjoying the course so far so I hope you will too :smile:

For the first year, it was a general year with all the creative and cultural industries courses learning together and these lessons were 2 full days a week. We used to have lectures in the morning, seminars later on and then workshops and other lessons. With the 2 days a week of uni, each day would be for each module. The days tended to be 10-5. I really enjoyed having lessons like this as the other days I could carry on working on briefs for these lessons and I only had to head into uni for 2 days and make it worth while instead of random hours here and there. This year (second year), we are again only in for 2 days a week. As the course is so new, the lecturers are learning with us what works and really listen to our feedback so these lesson days may change but I doubt it.

With the days that we are in uni, we get lots of useful feedback from tutors on ongoing briefs and also time in our day to work on briefs. It can be independent work when we have lots of briefs going on (work pace picks up in second year) but saying that we do lots of group work to learn from each other and feel confident with pitching so you would be working alone and with others when you are not at uni.

The amazing thing about this course is that we had lots of guest lecturers in the first year to network with and learn more about the industry, and now in second year we are working with lots of companies for each brief. For example, on of our second year modules is live briefs which consists of 5 companies to work with in the term. It has been super fun to create campaigns for companies that we can pitch to at the end.

Studying Art Direction specifically, as the first year is general- we are learning the grips of the industry and skills we need. Second year started off with our separate courses learning our different course. I studied the Art Direction course in the first term along with a general course called customer mindfulness. In the second term we are now following two modules (live briefs and creative project management). I have really enjoyed these modules and find them super useful and that I am growing in skill each time.

I really would recommend this course and hope you feel more at ease and have more knowledge about it now.

Please let me know if you have any other questions! :smile:

-Yasmin (Kingston Rep)