I desired a career change and design seemed like a good fit to my current skills and the Sunshine Coast TAFE Graphic Design Diploma, apart from being convenient, had a promising vocational reputation.
As a mature age student I was intent on self employment, the curriculum seemed to be tailor made for just that. Yes, there was a lot of familiarisation in regards to team orientated work environments but importantly much of this centres around expressing ideas and taking them on board, a skill applicable to most productive environments.
Familiarisation with industry standards, self marketing and the chance to learn from design professionals helped developed skills that I use every day.
When I completed my Diploma I opened a small creative studio in Port Douglas selling design services and modern art.
I began to use my design skills to develop jewellery on the side and I now divide my time with a hand full of 'bread and butter' design clients which include restaurants, a winery and several retail outlets, my current passion is designing, producing and marketing wholesale jewellery which is stocked Australia wide.
Typical Day
- Check Emails
- Usually some tweaking to do on clients websites eg. Update menus, products, promo dates, produce Web GFX.
- Try to do the design jobs I put off from yesterday - A4 poster layouts or DL's, do a few rough versions and get it out to client... it's coming back regardless
- I design and produce over 140 different types of jewellery - There's constant design tweaks with the jewellery, the packaging and the marketing... we have 25 retail outlets nationwide to keep stocked with product, packaging & POS marketing.
- Currently I'm developing more flat pack packaging to work with some new ranges that are being launched at our next trade show.
- I tweak the packaging design in between jewellery production, send them to the Die Cutter - test them... and tweak again whilst researching stock that might impact the final fit our annoy the consumer.
- Usually, just as I'm on a packaging roll ( I love designing packaging... thank you Lyndal!) I get the changes for the A4 layouts or DL's so I drop everything, tweak the changes and get them back ASAP so the client loves me and will give me more work tomorrow.
- If I'm lucky a sale will come through from a reseller or our online store so we need to package & dispatch, update the website which means photograph additional product to replace the sold items, tweak the images & upload.
- Back to jewellery design & production.
- Do it all again the next day - currently 6/7 days a week.