08 Jun BWD Marketing Podcast – Gugulethu & Phila
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7vTzcKg05E
Overall Look & Feel: We decided to revise our BWD Marketing Podcast’s look & feel with a fresh modern design. We chose to keep it out of the box with our stunning 3D intro and then keeping it clean with our choice of minimalist lower thirds. We also took the opportunity to keep our viewers up to date with whats happening at bwd by dropping interesting links throughout the video.
Description: We interview our super talented design specialist Gugulethu Ndzimbomvu to find out what she does at BWD.
Credits
Video Editor: Shivesh Boodhram
Director Of Photography: Sibusiso Radebe
Camera Men: Venus Bambisa, Sibusiso Radebe
Video Transcript
Phila: Good day everybody, and welcome BWD’s marketing podcast. My name is Phila, and today we are joined by Gugu who will be telling us a bit about what she does. Hi, Gugu, how are you doing?
Gugu: Hi, Phila. I’m good and you?
Phila: I’m good, thanks. So tell us a bit about yourself?
Gugu: I’m a young creative. I work at BWD as a designer. I’m fun. I love to laugh, take selfies. Young person, so I’m hip with the squad.
Phila: Okay. So you mentioned that you work at BWD. Could you tell us what it is that you do at BWD?
Gugu: Well, I’m a designer at BWD. So my main focus is around web design and other designs as well. I do CI, corporate identities, web design. I do branding as well, and all other designs which are needed.
Phila: Okay, so what does a typical day entail for you?
Gugu: Typical day is quite interesting. It’s fun. I get up very early. I’m not really a morning person, but you’ll find when you’re early… Typical day, I first look at my emails, get down to business once I’ve responded to a lot of the emails. I just start doing design work. I love listening to music while I work, so it keeps me concentrated on what I’m doing, yeah.
Phila: Okay, that’s great. And just your process from starting a campaign or project to executing it. How do you go about that?
Gugu: First, the most important thing would be having a brief. So we usually get a brief from the client, which tells us what the client wants, and what they need, and everything, yeah. So from there, I do some research, get some images. Then just do a design basically. From there, we get the client to approve…well, we approve it internally and make sure that all the work is fantastic, obviously. And then we give it to the client for review.
Phila: Okay, and then what happens after the review?
Gugu: The internal review or the…
Phila: The client review, sorry.
Gugu: The client review, afterwards, it depends on whether…they usually most of the time like it. So…
Phila: Great, that’s great.
Gugu: It comes back to us and then we end up doing majority, bulk of the work would be the rest of the information that’s needed. So the first part is just creating the look and feel, and how this website or something would look.
And then the second part after they’ve approved the look and feel is just content loading and all of the stuff, the rest of the stuff that the client needs.
Phila: Okay, so you talk about look and feel. Just explain to everybody what that is.
Gugu: Look and feel is how your website would look. So it’s like just creating the look, the colors, using your logo as well, and the feel of the website. If you want a corporate website, we create a more corporatey, you just see it more corporate. And then, yeah, then we send it to you to see if you like how it looks before we carry on with the website.
Phila: Okay, it sounds, wow. It sounds really, really hectic.
So what has been the biggest project or campaign that you’ve ever worked on to date?
Gugu: Biggest project I’ve worked on would be [inaudible 00:04:06]. They, it was a long ongoing project. So they would come with changes and all of that because it’s a conference, so the conference website needed to be on for that long period of time for people to register on the conference and all that. So we basically do content loading. Every week something new would come up. There are new speakers and all of that so we’d load some stuff there, fix things if there were anything to be fixed, and all of that.
Phila: And how long does that usually take, from the research up until the end product?
Gugu: Depends on the company and the client themselves. So some projects take a while because they are very complex. So if you need like an e-commerce site, which is more complex, it takes longer than an average site which needs just information of the company, pictures, and all of that. So the shortest I’ve worked on one website would probably be around one, two weeks. Obviously, the longest one was an ongoing, so it was a few months, yeah.
Phila: So have you ever worked with any difficult or impossible clients?
Gugu: Yeah, yeah, I have worked with some difficult clients. Usually, the difficulty comes in when people don’t know what they want exactly, so usually the brief would tell us exactly what they want. But sometimes, it doesn’t work that way. Once they’ve seen what they wanted, they kind of change their minds and say, “No, it’s not really what we wanted.” But I wouldn’t say it’s been that hectic, so yeah.
Phila: And where would you have to go and study to actually be a designer?
Gugu: You can go to a lot of universities, colleges. From my experience, I went to a college so it was more close and smaller. So they concentrate on design. It’s a college for design. So yeah, I basically did that. But you can also do it at universities as well. It’s just bigger, bigger space.
Phila: And how long does that take? How long should you study for to be qualified to be a designer?
Gugu: I would say three or four years. It depends on the university. Some curriculums extend it to four years. The curriculum I did was three years, but I studied for four because I took an extra year to just learn more about design before I actually went into it.
Phila: And any challenges that you’ve come across while on your journey to being a designer?
Gugu: Yeah, yeah, there are challenges, and while you have to climb a few ladders and stuff, but the challenge mainly for me was figuring out where exactly I would go into. Because I was interested in everything. I looked at it like a bowl of sweets. I wanted it all. So eventually I went into design, and just that was very interesting. I want to do that. It’s challenging, comes with a challenge, so challenges are always good. You learn things.
Phila: And what advice do you have for someone who wants to get into the industry?
Gugu: Work hard, research. I’d say if you are not sure, but you think you’re creative, you think you want to get into it, be sure about your research. You don’t want to get into something that you might not enjoy. So you research everything fully. You research what goes into being a designer, what goes into being a creative. If you see that is your field, from my experience, I did a whole lot of research. I went to a lot of universities and colleges, and I did courses. It wasn’t necessarily a course. Each college has a week course where they just show you what happens in the college. So I did about three or four before I realized, okay, this is what I want to do.
So for those weeks where I learned what goes into being creative, you kind of learn that with all the stress and pressure that happens, will you be able to handle the working industry?
Phila: How do you, I know in the industry, it’s very important to have a portfolio. How do you go about creating that portfolio?
Gugu: I would say when you create your portfolio, you start off in college, or when you are studying. In order for you to get a proper portfolio, you would need to do some internships of a few companies while you’re studying. It doesn’t have to be the whole year. You can choose three months out of the year to do this internship. You could sacrifice your holidays to do it just to learn more things. Just to learn more things and just build your portfolio, and to build your experience because experience is basically what your portfolio is showing. It’s showing all the work you’ve done, what you can do, and what you’re capable of.
Phila: How competitive is this line of work?
Gugu: It’s pretty competitive. I mean, you’re competing against a whole lot of other creatives, because this generation now is more…everyone’s becoming more creative. Creativity is like the in thing I would say, you know. So you’re competing against a lot of people who are just like you. Obviously someone who’s obviously better than you, someone else isn’t. But in my mind, you work hard to be the best.
Phila: Well, there you have it. Work hard to be the best. Advice given from Gugu, a young creative working at BWD. Thank you so much for catching this podcast. We’ll see you guys later.