Enterprise task 1

Who are they?

Retail
Publishing
Education
Government
Health 
Banking
Fashion
Beauty
Music
Greetings Cards & Gifting
Art
Theatre 
Technology
Sports
Online 
Food and drink
Hospitality
Environment
Charity
Art Galleries/Exhibitions


Who am I?

Fashion and beauty is an industry that I am really interested in. In terms of graphic design. I have a huge interest and passion for the industry. My main advantage in terms of understanding it is that I'm a consumer of it as well. My skills include fashion and beauty illustration, a fascination with illustrated and contemporary typography. I have a good knowledge of the software required to achieve and manipulate image and layout. I have an extremely creative mind that constantly seeks to achieve beauty, style and sophistication through design whilst in keeping with social and cultural trends. This is essentially my product. 

 Other than the skills I have just mentioned, from my research I have found that the skills required to make myself truly attractive to the industry are a completely up to date knowledge of a wide range of digital software; at this moment in time there is a lot I need to learn in order to become a top level designer in this industry. I have also discovered that in the fashion and beauty world networking is essential; this is something I have done very little of in this area.

 As a designer my professional and creative aims are to create beautiful yet perhaps vaguely controversial design that ultimately makes people think. My interests outside of this industry specifically include culture, ethical issues, awareness of the environment and social analysis as well as a dark sense of humor. I want the atmosphere of my product to incorporate this. I want to bring elements of this into my design, as I already do through my illustrations. I think that these aims relate to the client group in the way that a lot of better quality fashion based publications also contain a lot of other themes often relating the contemporary fashions and trends to current social and cultural issues, such as Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Elle, The telegraph magazine, Stylist, wonderland and many more. These are the kind of publications I want to work for, this being my 'place'.

 My research into price have reached a variety of conclusions. I have based these assumptions on working specifically as a fashion/beauty illustrator. My research is primarily internet based as well as talking to a couple of designers. If working independently or freelance, it is more difficult to determine a price as this would depend upon the status of the publication, the size of the image, what it is for and how good my reputation was at this point as an illustrator/designer. If working freelance but with an agent, an agent would take a cut of your commission. If working for a publication, fashion house, fashion manufacturer or advertising company, an in house illustrator has the potential to earn anything up to a six figure yearly sum! If working for a book the illustrator would gain a percentage of the profits that would probably be something around 30%.

 As part of my research into promotion I read a few articles from the book 'How to be an illustrator' by Darrell Rees and Nicholas Blechman. It is an incredibly informative book that contains a huge amount of extremely useful advice about becoming an illustrator. What I like about it is that one of the writers studied graphic design and therefore paths out the road to marketing yourself as an illustrator from this background. His advice on promotion includes one idea that I particularly like which is promoting yourself by way of postcard, say each month sending out a new design/illustration to a number of publications that you think would be interested in your work. Publications rarely have the time to look through entire portfolios when looking for new illustrators, and often offer work to them after seeing only one piece of their work. I think that this is a really productive way of getting yourself out there.