The Chase - London

My final portfolio visit in London was at The Chase, an opportunity that came about from my tutor Guy putting me in contact with Chris. I was extremely nervous about going to the chase, due to its stature as a design agency and was pleased i'd had a few visits under my belt to give me abit of practice and confidence before i went. When i arrived we had a brief talk about the corse at Stockport, how it was run and how it compares to other corses. He asked me how i had arrived at the want to do design and where my interests stemmed from.

Going through my portfolio he let me talk through each brief whilst he asked me questions then at the end gave me his overall opinion. He really liked the editorial double page spread using Helvetica Neue, although he said he didn't consider himself an expert on typography he understood good use of layout and structure. We talked alot about the inclusion of the Howies t-shirts, Chris felt they were a weak feature of the portfolio and should be removed. This was quite interesting as i have had relatively positive feedback about the t-shirts however there isn't much to say about them, which sometimes is okay when the idea sells itself. Chris suggested to only include t-shirt designs if the idea was really amazing. Chris really liked the idea behind the photography brief and the title 'Unfolding' he said the wall behind is unnecessary as he understand how the poster would exist. He definitely said the typeface lets the piece down so after many people saying the same thing its something i intent to change.

He seemed quite interested in the Door(way) project and really liked how we came to the decision of cutting down the door, he did however feel as a designer it was a personal project so almost unable to comment on it. He thought it was good to have in the portfolio as i spoke very enthusiastically about the project and suggested having one page with just the open cube and the second page with a blow up of the inside of the cube to show the detail.

When i showed him the typeface i created, again he pointed out his lack of typography knowledge but really liked the design, the idea behind it and things i had been looking at to get inspiration, he then talked about a similar project he did at uni and how to further develop the idea onto a product. My final project was the Water brief, he thought the brief was a little unrealistic to what you would expect in industry but thought the way i chose to communicate my research was great. He asked me lots of questions about how i reached the outcome and my decisions along the way and what i would change etc. Again he highlighted it as quite a personal project yet the story behind it is nice.

After we had looked through all my work we had a chat about the portfolio as a whole and he suggested to have 5 key areas such as layout, advertising, idea based etc and said that he would have rather seen more slides of certain projects over things like the t-shirt brief which was interesting. e.g he suggested to spread the editorial and front cover over two pages instead of just the one.

Considering they were very busy chris spent over an hour talking with me which i was really appreciative of, and was the perfect end to a great few days in London.