The Coolest Feeling: My Features in Fabulous Magazine

Forever Unique: Week Four

I felt seriously overwhelmed at the beginning of this week; I'm obviously glad that my placement is busy and my role is worthwhile but the prospect of spending 12 months - now 11 - with such an intense workload means I feel extremely under pressure. While I normally pile the pressure on to do well in my assignments, it's a much scarier feeling to take creative risks in the real world. Just by typing up this blog post at the end of the week, it's clear that my workload has been extremely full on and it really is no wonder that I've felt so stressed! 

This week, Forever Unique held a charity danceathon event in aid of the Manchester Emergency Fund. I've created a lot of content towards the event so far, including t-shirt designs, an invitation and a branded poster wall for photo opportunities at the event. This week my focus was on creating some interesting content for the brand's social media platforms in the form of countdown GIFs. I tried to stay on brand by using brand fonts and a sophisticated style, while taking aspects of competitor's social house styles to catch customers' eyes. I'm finding that communication between myself and the rest of the creative time and the social/marketing team isn't very good and I'd really like to sit down with the head of Marketing & PR at some point to discuss exactly what kind of content they would like to see from me, because at this point I kind of feel like I'm in the dark about future projects and events in the calendar when I'd really like to be planning ahead with my content and creating a backlog.

Once again, I stood in for a colleague who is currently away on holiday by carrying out her usual tasks which include designing the website and email newsletter for the week. These tasks have become much simpler to understand now that I have carried them out for the second time around and I really hope that I'll be able to continue to do them, despite how long and tenuous the task actually is. The task basically involves resizing images which are assigned for use by a more senior member of the team to fit into specific dimensions for each block on the webpage's template, arranging the clickable buttons, creating matching blocks in mobile dimensions for the brand's mobile platform site and then finally gathering copywriting from another colleague towards the end of the day to complete the design of the page overall. Once this is done I have to navigate Magento, which is quite a tricky site to get my head around. It hasn't helped that the rest of the team have limited knowledge of it so I really have been left to figure out on my own. I know from previously looking at intern/job applications that having experience in CMS ("Content Management Systems") is quite highly sought out so I'm glad to have that skill under my belt. I started to create an online portfolio this week so I will be sure to update my relevant skills section with the new things I've been learning.

Midweek I created a gif intended for use on the emails which customers will receive if they have a) had a bad experience shopping with the brand or b) haven't purchased anything from the brand for a certain amount of time. While I am really happy with the end result, the actual design process was extremely frustrating. The task was delegated to me by a member of staff that has very limited digital & design knowledge so she couldn't really explain exactly what she wanted me to create for her which lead to a lot of wasted time as I had to constantly go back and edit what I had done. Once again, communication has been an issue for me because surprisingly, considering that the team is fairly small in comparison to the large operation at Fabulous magazine & The Sun newspaper, direction often isn't very clear.

I also completed another task for the same colleague later in the week and was left feeling really despondent by the end of it; the task involved creating a small banner intended to be sent by text to welcome new customers and introduce them to the style advice service offered by Forever Unique. Once again there really wasn't very clear instruction and several other members of the team who would usually be there to offer advice and direction weren't in the office. Despite this, I know I do thrive by working independently so I did my best to create something I was happy with. What left me feeling quite annoyed however, were the comments that came afterwards from other staff members who actually told me that sending the banner by text didn't make sense when an e-mail was already in place for these new customers, nobody particularly liked the wording of the writing that I had been provided with to include and that sending texts weren't a cost efficient method anyway. A lack of communication once again meant that I had wasted precious hours of my day on a throwaway task. Something valuable which did come from this task was my awareness of mobile dimensions - I did some research before starting the task and found that a certain amount of the top and bottom of the image would initially be cut off from view when the customer initially viewed the message before tapping it to view the full screen so I had to be aware of this when putting together the layout of the design.

A highlight of the week was the launch of the AW17 campaign which began this week with a presentation by Mark, the Creative Director, before the campaign and collection will begin to roll out next month. It was an uplifting and motivating presentation and it will be really exciting to get behind a whole campaign with the level of responsibility I have had. It felt really special to see people impressed with their mock-ID badges which I designed and were later printed onto perspex and I was pleased when I was recognised during Mark's presentation for my hard work and initial prep of the new campaign in front of all the staff, management and brand owners! I feel really inspired by the theme of the campaign, which has a really strong sexy, sci-fi, space influence which I think will be really memorable and hopefully successful for the brand! I can't wait to get stuck in creatively to making some cool, integrative and interesting content.

A new strategy which I'd really like to bring to the table for Forever Unique is to produce relevant social content based on certain events and commemorative days all-year-round, such as 'nationally observed' days which remain relevant to or can be linked to the brand ethos, like International Kissing Day for example which took place this week. Competitors with strong social media presence like Missguided, Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing all mark these days with creative gifs and interesting stories which help to create a relationship between brand and customer which goes beyond simply trying to sell a product. These brands really utilise the different aspects of their brand personalities to branch out into relevant content related to beauty, music etc. which I think is a strategy that Forever Unique has yet to explore yet. That's why I created a simple gif this week to recognise National Kissing Day for use on the brand's Instagram and Snapchat stories which took an image of the brand's co-owners and husband-wife duo, who are easily recognisable to the Forever Unique target consumer and produced something a bit different to the usual content that the brand has produced up to this point. Myself and the PR & Marketing Manager had a chat at the end of the week to discuss putting together a solid strategy going forward to keep producing relevant content like this to compete against our competitors. I mentioned the need for us to have a calendar with all of these different events and commemorative days marked so that we can all as a team be prepared. I really romanticised the idea of leaving my 9-5 intern job behind me at the end of the week and not needing to think about it again until Monday morning - having working non-stop at all times of the day and night for the past two years on uni assignments and my part-time work - but I'm finding it's not as easy as just 'switching off' wherever a role in social media is concerned; the office is closed for the weekend but the social media presence must continue over that period moreso than ever and more importantly, I have to come to work with fresh and competitive ideas each week no matter what.


The most unusual task I've undertaken so far during this internship has been creating a giant Forever Unique template logo which will be used later this month at a blogger event in London, constructed from fresh flowers to form the Forever Unique U. I would looooooove to go to one of these events eventually but I'm not too sure that I'll get the chance to unfortunately. At this rate, I don't think I'll have time to even take a day off with all of the work that's being expected of me! I'm worried that I'll be doing overtime for a month to prepare for the week's holiday that I've allowed myself in October.

(Cont)
Gifs for Paris takeover
Sale gifs