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)