Roberto is the Creative Director and a partner at Bear, a creative agency working across branding, advertising, design and communication. Bear was founded in 2000 and over the last ten years they have worked for clients including 888, Foxtons, MTV and Nickelodeon, MBNA, Honda & the Lawn Tennis Association. Roberto has over 20 years experience in the creative industries and before founding Bear, he was Design Director at Identica Tango and Senior Designer at SAS.
Roberto has made a massive contribution to the development of the FdA in Graphic Design at Camberwell.
Here is Derek’s account of his conversation with Roberto:
'We started off by talking about what might constitute a successful placement for both intern and placement provider. Rob pointed out that it is really difficult for a small agency like Bear to find the time to nurture and support designers who are straight out of college. Even placements need to provide some benefits to the business and an few employers can afford to spend time managing an interns experience.
The placements that Roberto provided for the FdA were all year 1 students and he now realises that for a placement to work for both parties it would need to take place in the second or third year.
He also suggested that it would be beneficial for the colleges to package the experience in some way so that employers knew what they were getting. If colleges could provide a suggested structure for the placement and/or a set of tasks that needed to be completed this would alleviate employers’ fears bout constantly having to think of something for the intern to do. This could be agreed at the beginning of the placement and possibly form a checklist that the student might work their way through.
The dynamic of a placement should be about a conversation between two professional bodies that provides a beneficial experience for all concerned.
Roberto suggested that we should try to define what a placement should be and use use this to provide the criteria for an offer. With his branding head on he talked about the packaging of this offer so that it is credible within the commercial world. For example ‘10 ways to a successful placement’, ‘A Rough Guide for Interns’, ‘A placement Toolkit’.
He also suggested that colleges spend some time outlining the full range of benefits of providing placements. These are more than just getting the tea made and the photocopying done. They include the potential for staff development, R&D, a review of studio PR, increased brand awareness and a heads up on emerging talent.
We then talked about other forms of work-based learning and the possibility of Bear being involved in some sort of mentorship scheme. Rob welcomed the opportunity of having time to work 1:1 with students and the idea of setting an afternoon or morning aside for them to come to the studio. There would need to be some financial incentive for a studio to do this but there seems no reason why colleges wouldn’t be able to find a way to make it happen.
The conversation then developed into a wider discussion about the nature of the contemporary creative industries and how the amount of small start-ups are destabilising the business financially. He talked about how the competitiveness of the industry has led to a culture of free pitching that is undermining the credibility of the profession.
Rob pointed out that students need to have an awareness of how what they do fits into the ‘value chain’ and that they need to be aware that a piece of design never exists in isolation. The creative aspect of a job always exists in relation to consultancy, production and delivery and unfortunately it is not always the most valuable.
Industry experience can ensure that new designers have a bit more business savvy and do not undermine the industry by being too desperate to secure work.
He stressed the importance of a graduate being able to work out their place within an increasingly complex business in order to provide competitiveness across the profession. Graphic designers today need to do much, much more than design logos and lay out type.
This brought us to a discussion about what qualities a successful graduate needs and as Rob pointed out this is changing all the time:
There is a definite tension between creativity and professional awareness. An awareness of what the industry requires can limit the creativity and curiosity of a graduate; but a graduate who is highly creative but cannot relate their ideas to a practical application is almost unusable. Maybe a good graduate has a balance of these qualities.
Similar is true of skills. Graduates need practical skills in order to realise their ideas, but an over reliance on software or process generates work that becomes generic or derivative.
A good graduate needs to be constantly developing all of these qualities to be really successful.
According to Rob students need to be aware of commercial constraints but see this as something that will lead creativity rather than limit it. Commercial constraints are often used as an excuse for a poor creative, when the reality is that at good agencies (BBH was given as an example) the tighter the commercial constraints the more creative the response.
Sometimes this lesson is lost in education as we worry about limiting our student’s creativity and maybe pander to our students’ natural reluctance to work on assignments that have too many restrictions.'
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