Industry Placement

Introduction

This semester we had to undergo an 80-hour industry placement to help us gain experience of working in the industry. In order for us to complete our placement, we were given three options. The first option was to choose a placement provided by the University of Winchester work placement support team. Towards the end of last semester, we were given access to the placement portal provided by the support team where we can submit applications to placements that they have approved. Our second option was to choose a client brief similar to our second year. The last option and the option that I decided to choose was to find a placement on our own. I chose this option as I wanted to gain the full experience of working in the industry starting with finding, applying and accepting a job. To find my placement, I used a job board called JobTeaser. Through JobTeaser, I was able to find a job listing for a digital volunteer at the Adjutant General’s Corps (AGC) Museum in Winchester. I decided to apply for this role as it would give me industry experience of working as a designer for a company and I have an interest in military history so I would be able to be more passionate about my work.

 

Once I had applied for the role, I visited the museum to talk to Bianca Taubert-Brayley who is the curator about the work that I would carry out during my placement. After the initial visit, I started my placement the following week. Another choice we were given at the end of last semester was that we could either complete our placement throughout this semester or during the summer before this semester started. As I was able to visit the museum one week after we had finished the last semester, I decided to complete my placement during the summer before leaving Winchester as it meant that I was able to focus on my placement without the distraction of other work.

 

After completing my placement at the museum, I decided to continue volunteering at the museum as a designer to gain more experience and to improve my CV.

 

Placement Overview

Since starting at the museum on the 26th of May 2024, I have completed a range of projects such as designing a text board, web design, producing a virtual tour, designing flyers for seasonal craft events, designing a flyer for Winchester Military Museums Education (WMM Education), producing an audio tour app for the AGC HQ in Worthy Down and creating an animation of the AGC Lion entering the AGC Museum. At the start of the placement, I was only given the virtual tour, text board and web page projects to complete however, as my time at the museum progressed, I was given more projects and creative freedom.

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Aims, Objectives and Goals

My main aim for this placement is to work on projects that are out of my comfort zone to enhance my skills as a designer. Before this placement, the main projects that I was comfortable with completing were web design, print design and graphic design projects such as logo designs. By having the opportunity to complete projects that I would usually avoid, I will be able to improve my design skills allowing me to comfortably work on different projects in the future.

 

Another aim for this placement is improve my current set of design skills. One of my main design skills is web design. Previously, the websites/ web pages that I have designed have been for university work without a set of brand guidelines to follow which means that I have had full creative control on the design. This placement will be able to help me improve my web design skills as I will need to follow the brand guidelines in order for the web page to match the layout and other elements within the website.

 

One more aim of this placement is to build connections and contacts who I can work with after university. By actively building and nurturing professional connections, designers can expand their opportunities, find potential clients, and grow both personally and professionally (Choichnia, 2023). As a part of this placement, I will be working the AGC as well as the AGC Museum which means that, if I am able to complete the audio tour project to their standard, there may be an opportunity to work with them again in the future. As well as this, by working with the AGC Museum, they will be able to refer me to the other museums in the area.

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SWOT

One strength of my placement at the AGC Museum is being able to gain experience of working as a designer for a company. Although I am able to work on client projects throughout my university studies, it is not able to provide me with the experience of designing in a work environment. A part of the work experience is working on projects with short deadlines and communicating with clients/ your employer to complete briefs to the highest standard. Whether digital or printed, there are many types of design projects, all of which require different amounts of time. Most single digital collaterals take from 1 to 6 days to complete. Most print collaterals take from 6 to 12 days to complete (Belle, n.d.). As projects in university are a part of modules, every project has a timeframe of around four months which is unrealistic in a work environment so being able to work on projects with short deadlines, it allows me to gain the experience I need for when I start my career after university so I will not be overwhelmed by the pressure of deadlines.

 

Another strength of my placement is having an interest in the museum and the history that it tells. By having an interest in military history, I am able to be passionate about the work that I am producing. Being able to learn about the history of the corps as I progress through my placement also allows me to improve my work as I am able to use the history to influence my work through the way I design certain assets or certain aspects of the project.

 

One weakness of my placement is the industry that I will be working in. As the placement is in the museum/ tourism industry, the projects that I will be working on may be different to the type of projects that I would work on if I was working at a design agency. By working at a design agency, I would be working on larger projects such as complete websites or print projects including magazines and brochures. Due to the content provided by museums, I will not be working on many large projects as the main aspect of a museum is for the public to visit the site and view their content in person so there is not a need for products such as magazines and as The AGC Museum already has a website, I will only be working on specific web pages rather than producing a complete website.

 

Text Board

The first project that I worked on at the museum was creating a text board which would be placed in the museum to tell visitors about the current jobs that the AGC do in the army. Before starting the design for the text board, I was given a folder of images and information that Bianca wanted me to use for the design. This helped me to create some initial designs before starting my design process. My first step in creating the text board was to research into other text boards around the museum to find out the type of style I needed for my design. I was also asked to modernise the design as the text board will be placed in the museum after their redevelopment which they are hoping to start in 2025. After conducting the research, I then decided on the colour palette for the design which I chose to use the colours that make up the AGC flag to link the design to the corps. Once the colour palette was chosen, I then began creating my initial design using Adobe InDesign. With my initial design completed, I then made copies of the design in order to make various changes and to show my process. The changes that I made were small changes such as changing the shape of the logo, the size of the banner at the top of the board and changing the placement of the images and text.

 

Current Corps Web Page

Once the main aspects of the text board were completed, the next small project to work on was the web page that would be linked to the text board. As the AGC Museum website is hosted through WordPress, the first step was to gain access to the developer page for the website. After getting the login details for the website, my next step was to research into the other pages on the website and to receive the assets which will be a part of the web page to gain a better understanding of the website design including the general layout, elements such as fonts, font size, colour scheme and image size. The next stage of my design process was to create a wireframe of the web page. To create the wireframe, I used an app called Marvel which is a prototyping software mainly for wireframing websites and apps. Before I created the main layout for the web page, I recreated the header and footer of the page to ensure that the design still fit with the overall design and aesthetic of the website. Now the header and footer of the design had been recreated, I was then able to start designing the main layout. As the web page will be linked to the text board through a QR code, I decided to choose a similar design of the web page to keep a sense of continuity and familiarity. The design that I chose was the alternating order of an image and the related text as it makes it easier for viewers to differentiate each piece of information and it makes the overall layout of the page look less text heavy.

 

The last steps in the design process were to get feedback from the curator on the design and once the design was approved, add the final design to the web page on WordPress. Fortunately, the curator of the museum liked and approved the design, so I did not need to make any adaptations. Finally, with the design approved, I then created the final design in WordPress.

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Virtual Tour

My third project that I have worked on since starting at the museum was producing a virtual tour of the current layout of the museum. This would then be placed on their website so visitors can look at how the museum looks currently before the redevelopment is completed. The virtual tour also allows people who would otherwise miss out on being able to visit the museum in person to be able to still view the museum virtually from the website. To produce the virtual tour, I first needed to create a 3D scan/3D model of the inside of the museum. The software that I used to scan the museum is called Matterport who specialise in virtual tours for the museum industry. One famous museum that have used Matterport for their virtual tour is the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. They used the software to create a virtual tour of their history of public transport exhibition which includes the bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat (Matterport Galleries, 2023). The hardware that I used to capture images which would be ‘stitched’ together to create the full 3D scan was an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I was able to use my phone to complete the scan they have a built-in LiDAR sensor which allowed me to gain an accurate to-scale model of the museum. When scanning the building, I had to face my phone towards a series of points in a circle to make sure that every detail can be captured and then I had to repeat those points at a higher angle to make sure that I also captured the ceiling of the museum. Then I would have to take one step forward and repeat the process again until the entire museum had been captured. Overall, the scanning process took around 1 hour to complete before processing the scan and uploading the scan to the website to allow me to then add the information points which took around 14 hours to complete.

 

The main challenge I faced when producing the virtual tour was finding the software to allow me to both scan and upload the scan of the museum. Most software that I could find needed to use specialised equipment such as high-quality 360o camera or a LiDAR scanner so I was fortunate to find a software that would allow me to use my phone to scan the building.

 

Craft Event Flyers

Every year, the AGC Museum arrange kids craft events for each season which they advertise during half terms. In preparation for autumn and winter, one of my projects was to create a set of flyers to be used as advertisement material for the craft events. The assets that I was given for these flyers were images of the crafts that children would be making and information about the events such as dates, times and location. To design these flyers, I used Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. I used Adobe InDesign for this project as it is the best software in the Adobe Creative Suite for print based designs. By using Adobe InDesign, I was able to use the column feature to align the text to match common design techniques. I used Adobe Illustrator to design assets which I could use in the flyers using its text-to-image generator. This allowed me to use specific assets with a cartoon theme to appeal to the events’ target audience which is children.

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WMM Flyer

An important job that the Winchester military museums have is to educate people on the history of their corps. To help educate people, they offer experience to schools, colleges and universities under Winchester Military Museums Education (WMM Education) where they can learn about each corps and get a chance to visit each museum and take part in activities to help them understand what each corps does and their role in the British army throughout history. They offer a range of experiences to aid school curriculums and college and university courses from experiences about WW1 and WW2 to the Crimean and Boer Wars. In order to advertise these experiences, they have flyers in each of the museums as well as an education section on their websites. One of my smaller projects as part of the placement was to create an updated version of this flyer to match the branding of WMM Education. To create the flyer, I used Adobe InDesign as it specialises in print-based media. The design process for the WMM Flyer was similar to the design process of the craft event flyers as I was provided with the images and a rough brief for the layout.

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AGC HQ Audio Tour App

 

One of the potential projects that was discussed when I had my initial visit to the museum was an audio tour of the AGC HQ in Worthy Down. As this project was not guaranteed at the start of the placement, I was not able to start the project until towards the end of the placement.

 

Before starting the project, I began researching into the different formats of audio tours. The main two formats of audio tours are conventional audio tours and digital audio tours. A conventional, device-bound audio guide is an audio tour that is provided through the use of a special physical device. This type of audio guide gives visitors access to recorded content about the sights and points of interest they are passing (SmartGuide, 2023). In contrast to this, a digital audio tour does not require a special device as they can be accessed through a personal device such as a smartphone or tablet. These can be in the form of a website link, a tour on an audio tour app or a specific app dedicated to the one tour. The target audience for this audio tour are current soldiers who are stationed at the base and veterans who are visiting the base for events or to learn about the history of the site. My initial idea was to use a third-party website which specialises in geolocation audio tours. Geolocation audio tours use the GPS built into the phone to ‘unlock’ sections of the audio tour when the user is close to a certain location or set of coordinates.

 

One issue with this idea is security. As the audio tour will be used on an active military base, using a location-based medium would require providing specific information about the exact location of certain areas of the base that are not accessible to the public which can become a security risk. The next idea I had for the audio tour was to create a dedicated app that users can download through a link before visiting the site. By using a direct link rather than uploading the app to an app library such as Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store, it reduces the risk of a security issue. This audio tour app would include a map of the site which users can follow with marked points of interests. Each point of interest would correspond to a page where the user can then view an image and listen to the audio information on the particular point of interest. On each information page, there will be a button to start the audio recording along with a word-for-word text copy under the button as an accessibility feature. The only page that will not require the user to press a button to start the audio recording is the ‘Welcome’ page as the beginning of the audio tour will be at the start of the road leading up to the site. Similar to this, the audio recordings related to various pieces of information about the general history of the site do not have their own pages as the majority of people who are taking the tour will be driving to the site, so it is important to prevent the driver from being distracted by having to look at their phone. After asking The AGC which medium they would prefer, they chose the dedicated app idea.

 

At the start of the design process, I began to create a wireframe of the design using the Marvel: Prototyping app which allowed me to create a wireframe with functioning buttons. By using this software that allows me to create wireframes with functioning buttons, I am able to design the app while being able to see how each element interaction works with the rest of the design. Once the wireframe was created, I got the design approved by The AGC so I could begin to design each element for the app.

 

When designing the elements for the app, I first needed to think about the main colour scheme which would then help me to choose the best colour scheme for the elements. To associate the app with the AGC, I chose the colours of the AGC flag which are specific shades of red and blue as the main colour scheme of the app and as the background of the start page, I used the AGC flag design. With the main colour scheme chosen, I then decided to use white as the main colour for the elements with black as an outline colour as they stand out the most against the red and the blue. During the designing of the elements, I chose to use rounded corners for the buttons. The centre of our vision, called the fovea, is best at focusing on circular details. We use this part of our eyes for any task where seeing fine details matters, like reading or driving. Rounded shapes let our vision take the path of least resistance. The fovea can glide smoothly over them without having to pause on hard edges. This makes rounded corners faster and less tiring for our brain to process. When we look at a sharp corner, our brain needs to work harder to process what we see. So in design, curved edges give our vision a break compared to shapes with sharp corners and straight lines. Our eyes appreciate and embrace the softness of a subtle curve (Amadine, 2024).

 

After the elements had been designed, I moved on to designing the prototype for the app which I used Adobe XD to create the working prototype. Adobe XD was the best software to create the prototype as I am able to use extensions/ add-ons which allow me to use a wide range of functions and create various effects in the prototype. For each of the information pages, I used the same layout to make sure the app was easy to use without involving too many functions or designs.

 

Once the main app design was produced in Adobe XD, the next stage was recording the pieces of audio for the tour. The software that I used for the audio aspects of the project was Adobe Audition as I have used Audition previously, so I know how the software works and it provides me with a wide range of tools to edit the audio. Fortunately, as I was using a microphone to record the audio, I did not need to edit the audio files much as the hardware that I used was able to remove any background noise as I was recording. The only editing that I needed to do to the audio recordings was to cut and rerecord certain segments due to mispronunciations or stutters. With all of the audio recordings completed, I attached each file to the corresponding buttons in the prototype which then meant that the prototype was completed.

 

The final stage of the Audio Tour app project was to produce the code for the app and export the code in order for users to download it to their devices. As I do not have experience in coding apps, I was able to use an extension in Adobe XD which generates the code to make the development stage quicker. Due to Android and Apple products using different operating systems, the code needed to be exported into different packages. Android products use APKs (Android Package Kits) which meant that I had to use VSCode to make the app downloadable onto android products. Iphones and other Apple products use IPAs (IOS App Store Package) but as Apple aim to keep all of their products and software as authentic as possible, the only way to create IPAs is through Xcode which is Apple’s developer software so I had to create two sets of code for the app. Currently the code for the app has been completed and the final product will be presented to the AGC in 2025.

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AGC Lion Animation

Another project that I have worked on during my time at the AGC Museum is an animation of the AGC Lion walking into the museum. One change that the AGC Museum will be making when they have their redevelopment is placing an AGC Mural in the museum which used to be displayed at the AGC HQ which includes a lion. To help promote the museum, the curator wanted me to create an animation of the lion jumping of the wall and walking into the museum. The software that I used to create the animation was Adobe Animate.

 

The first stage of this project was to create a 3D model of the mural which I would then animate. As the mural was created in sections, I had to measure each section separately in order for me to create an accurate model. Once the 3D model had been created, I then needed to import the model into Adobe Animate but when I went to import the model, I found out that you cannot import 3D models into Animate which meant that I then had to design a 2D version of the Lion which could be added to the animation.

 

After the model was placed in the animation with an image of the outside of the museum as the background, I began to rig the lion to allow me to animate the lion. To make sure that the lion moved as fluidly as possible, I had to make sure that each joint was marked otherwise the lion would not be able to move realistically and it would be more challenging to animate the lion. In order to allow the lion to walk behind certain elements of the background, I had to use photoshop to cut out sections of the image and then place each section over the matching part of the main background.

Time Management​​​