Colin Davies, founder of One Nine Four came in to give us a talk today. Colin is a self taught graphical wizard, who dropped out of a non creative related course in his 3rd year at Newcastle University. He then learnt graphic design, on his own, completely self taught, now he's the owner and founder of Newcastle based One Nine Four.
Colins presentation and story of how he got to where he is today was very inspirational and showed me that if you set your mind to it, you can get anything you want.
He also went through some "rules" of graphic design and working freelance, which I found extremely helpful, some of these rules were along the lines of...
"write up a contract before you do any work"
"always keep the client up to date"
"make sure both you and the client know the cost of the project"
And
"always ensure you have time to do the project, before you take it on"
I found these very helpful and it is one of those lovely situations where somebody shares their experiences, so that you can learn from their mistakes.
Which was nice of him
But while Colin was showing the work that he had done in the past there was one project he worked on that really caught my attention.
Based in gateshead the council were looking to brighten up the place, as old, closed down shops were making the streets look untidy.
Colin was given the task to go all out with his creativity and paint the stores to how he liked.
he made disgusting, dirty buildings that nobody would give a second look, into beautiful works of art that you could stand and look at all day.
Did I mention that his Agency is called One Nine Four, because thats how much he got paid for a brief he did for his friends dad. (he was meant to get paid more)
He learnt from his mistakes and thats why he named his company One Nine Four.
So he would never forget.
That's cool.
