Guest Speaker | Soapbox

Soapbox is a communications agency based in London. Their team of designers and developers work hard to bring alive the ideas of non-conglomerate businesses such as research based NGOs and academic institutions - offering services for the web, print and imagery. The focus of this talk was on their services within web development, and a brief outline of their placement scheme. 

As an employer and Production manager, Farina Broadley-pederson expressed her concern for creative students who are enthusiastic about their chosen art forms, but do not have any evidence or work outside of their course requirements to validate this.  Her view really spoke volumes for me and put into perspective the critical thinking of industry professionals. Applying for internship roles are one thing but impressing potential employers and making your work memorable is the real challenge. 

The projects Soapbox has been involved in during recent years have ranged from online summaries for The International rescue committee, to branding for Lankelly Chase. The visual design for UNICEF's 'Education Equality now!' campaign by Soapbox really is the definition for good design, it it is efficient in delivering the necessary content and is aesthetically pleasing. Not only do I love what the campaign stands for but the visual communication is presented in a way that will maintain the attention of the intended audience.

Stuart Brockwell was a great case study of a student who underwent a successful placement at the company and who now after graduating has started his career in the very place that helped to lay the foundation. I managed to draw a lot of relevance from this talk to apply to my own understanding of finding the right placement and about where it could take me in the future. Stuart expressed that the skills he had learnt during his placement year were invaluable and were in some respects more advantageous/relevant to the teachings during his time in university. The practicality and efficiency of learning on the job enables students to apply their structured or conditioned learnings to real life situations; developing our expertise to industry standard.