Mike Rigby Vs Container plus

At Stockport college we are very lucky in the respect that we have a lot of practitioners come into college to give lectures and speak to us about their experiences within the industry and give us advice and useful tips for when we come to enter the industry ourselves. However as well as giving us knowledge of their personal experiences we also get to compare how the different agencies work. It is good to hear different designers thoughts and perspective on working within the creative industry. Some of the talks are not too interesting, whether it be because they are not very good at presenting or they just have nothing interesting to tell us. However we do have some really interesting talks which grab our attention and which we gain a lot from.

Two very different practitioners who stood out when they came to talk to us were Mike Rigby who is a graphic design and has worked at some big agencies such as Pentagram, The Chase, Landor and True North and Louise who is a illustrator and one of the directors of Container Plus. Both these talks were well presented and kept me interested and were quite different. Mike talked to us in our graphics room, which is only small so we were all sat around him at the front and it was quite a close and friendly kind of presentation, whereas Louise spoke in the lecture theatre which felt much more formal, however both presented well and grabbed my attention.

Mike came in to talk more about his personal experiences rather than a certain agency, he started by talking of how after working in Manchester for four years he decided to take some time out and go travelling to some amazing places, some which led to work out there. This was really interesting, instead of just showing various pictures of his work he was showing us pictures from his travels and talking about his great experiences. Mike said that it’s a good idea to go travelling, but if you do, go after uni rather than half way through your career, he said this way, when you go for job interviews, employers can see that you have already been travelling, therefore you are not likely to leave after a year to go explore. It was really different to hear a practitioner talk about their experiences and journey from education to ‘the real word’. Mike also talked openly about the positives and negatives of working within the graphic design industry, which is useful for us to hear because we need to know that its not all roses and butterflies we need to know that there is a balance of work and play.

When Louise came in to talk to us, it was very different from Mike and the one big difference was collaboration. Container Plus is a collaborative agency who work with others to create collaborations, they sell the whole package so it is important for them to work this way. Therefore Louise's talk was very much about the agency and about collaboration and her experiences within working in different collaborations. Also we do not seem to have many female graphic designers coming in to talk to us, so it was nice to see how things different and if she has any problems along the way. I know a lot of students found this talk fairly boring, but for some reason it really kept me interested. I think because it was something different to what we are use to I was interested to hear how things work, I do like to try new things and try different ways of working and I also like to be able to do a lot myself, as well as graphic design I’d like to illustrate and dabble in photography, therefore Louise’s talk really interested me. There were a few points that really stood out to me from this talk, one was that Container Plus keeps work and home two totally separate things. Unlike Mike and many graphic designers who after a long, hard days work like to go to the pub for a quick beer, Louise and her collogues do not spend time with each other beyond work at all. Also Mike has worked at lots of different agencies, gaining lots of experience but as a graphic designer, he works as one of the graphic designers of that agency, whereas Container Plus do everything, they don’t just do the illustration, they then take the photography and make a website etc, which I find is really good because sometime people just want to get everything from one place and with Container Plus you can. Louise told us of past collaborations which didn’t work for some reason or another and gave us some key points which she personally finds make Container Plus work,

which were: -

-Have people around the same age

-People who have the same level of commitment

-People who have the same level of experience

-People who lead separate lives outside of work

-People who don’t have big egos

I think these few ‘rules’ really do make sense and I can see how it is possible for Container Plus to work with these in place.

When it came to Mike and Louise showing some of their work, I can see the different ways in which they work, and you can see their own strengths coming through in the work.

You can see looking at Mike’s work (above) that he is a graphic designer, the way the space has been thought about and the care over the typography, as well as the idea coming through. Mike said when he starts a new brief he keeps two things in mind, who the brief is for and what is it trying to communicate, that’s how he comes up with his lovely ideas, just like this carpet and flooring packaging.

And from looking at work which Louise has worked on (above), we can see it is very much more illustrative and quirky. Mike tends to create something with a concept behind it, and something which will or can go into mass production, whereas Container Plus seem to create work which looks pretty and eye catching, and gives the feel of being loving crafted and special limited edition, ‘one offs’. The work which Louise showed had been worked on for weeks and was so intricate and delicate, whereas Mike's work is more quick to produce once he has the idea. Getting that concept is the hard, time consuming part.

It was really good to see the differences between Mike and Louise, these two talks were two of the ones which really stood out in my mind, because they were both different to all the ones we have seen before, and I came away from both gaining something about the industry.