Ryan Stanfield – Guest speaker
Design director at kaizen
Kaizen is a design creative studio consisting of a team of 12 designers, creating top level and high-quality branding. The demand of customers dictated that the studio had to increase in size and explore new avenues for the company to create and produce. He describes the studio as having to develop new branches such as animation and photography to keep up with the need of new and existing customers.
With an interest in the underground scene such as skateboarding street art he in the beginning of his career his moto was to say yes to anything landing on his desk, he wanted to broaden his experience and skills, so taking on any opportunity handed to him was a great way to do so. Each opportunity was varied and very different, ranging from channel 4 to working in a bin factory as a graphic designer. Pushing on after these experiences he went into agency work and branding, taking his early experience and applying his knowledge with new gained skills to help successfully build a career in branding.
He speaks of work in portfolios, that displaying as many skills are possible, showing that even if you’re not comply proud of some of your projects due to its subject or your client, enviably you should try and display as much experience as possible. A key line of advice he had given me was that with a portfolio “you should always start off with your best work and end with your best work” showing that you can keep up a high-level quality of work throughout.
In the final part of his talk, he spoke of how important it is to understand type, within the meaning, perception, style and layout. Being able to create logos, identity and brands from type, having an understanding of type lets us see and acknowledge that type is the backbone of design.
