How to become a junior creative: Aaron's story

Aaron Blythe - Junior creative

The days here are mostly atypical in the way that they work. If I’m working on a running project, I’ll come in and just continue working on it but there might be days where I’m getting several briefs from several different people whether that’s Client Services or my creative director and that could be anything from how the campaign actually looks to correctly supplying the artwork to a printer or a screen.

After school I went to design college, CCAD in Middlesbrough, which was an Illustration and Graphic Design course. All while I was there, I was started doing freelance work for friends’ bands. From there, went to MMU, The Manchester School of Art, to study graphic design now. Second year of MMU, I got an internship at Topman in London, so I went down there and worked on a design team on international campaigns.

After graduation, I was looking for work and knew I wanted to stay in the city of Manchester, started sending my portfolio out to different studios and I got an interview here. I came in on an internship, worked here for a couple months and then I was offered a full-time position as a junior creative.

I think the most important skill is creativity but really you need to be able to communicate that through the technology as well. You’ve got to understand the client, primarily and sort of figure out what world they’re in, visually, and then also what’s currently on trend and sort of figure out, what’s right in the middle of all that in the research phase and just start experimenting and just get stuff down. I think a lot of people here don’t stop working when they go home because they love it so much that they’re working on personal projects or freelance work.

So my advice for anyone’s who interested in getting into this job would be there’s so much great resources out there that you can get into at the moment, there’s loads of stuff online, loads of stuff in books, the software’s really accessible if you can get your hands on it and just start experimenting with it and see what parts of it you do like, what parts of it you don’t like, it’s a very wide variety of stuff to do.

Creative job satisfaction is a very unique thing because ultimately it always results in an end product, because you can say ‘I made that’ and I think graphic design because it’s art for commercial application, you often see it out in the real world, you see how people respond to it, see how it makes people feel, actual… the results of what you’re doing and that’s great as well.