Brass Agency

Andrew who works with Brass Agency, kindly came in to talk about the world of design and what his agency does in industry. Andrew began by talking about employ-ability and placements. It was interesting to hear that he personally doesn't look at degree grades and what Uni they have graduated from, he prefers to see portfolio quality. He encourages people to create their own independent stuff, away from Uni work, websites, posters, videos and all other kinds of design associated things. He prefers to see an interesting array of skills to define who you are and also it makes you an interesting candidate to train and take on.

After, he discussed his own work with Brass and expressed how the work he does has changed due to the continuous rise of digital technologies. Most of the design work he does now is video based to play on YouTube, Social media and TV. Andrew has designed in all kinds of aspects, Websites, games, social media, YouTube, commercial advertising and more. He started off talking about the websites he had designed. Umbro, Pandol and First direct are companies he mentioned he had worked for. I liked the Umbro website where he had taken a photograph of one of my favourite footballers Deco underwater kicking a football. A lot of the work he does is really interactive and hands on which appeals to me. He said it was great fun to purposely set up the action of Deco kicking a ball under water, because 'who else gets to do that'. Also, he created games for the children's TV show with Hacker the dog, working with CBBC.

Moving on, the majority of the work he does is video based, for social media, TV and YouTube platforms. He discovered a video on YouTube with a person called Richard Povian, promoting promoting a hair product he was working for at the time. In the YouTube video the guy had created it everything he could have included and more, than what Andrew himself could have included in an advert with his design team. So to promote the product, he rang the guy up and asked him if he could promote his video, basically asking if he could make him more famous. Of course the guy said yes. Andrew arranged to fly the boy and his dad into london to work on this topic and talk about the campaign of the product. This was very interesting to discover and an eye opener to the world of design.


Continuing with his talk, he mentions many companies he has worked with. To list a few, Moam, lil-lets, loriel, Asda, Sensodine, H&M, Lucazade sport and Ribena. I thought the Lucazade sport campaign he was working with was interesting. It was at the time of the brazil World Cup and Lucozade had created a conditions zone. This conditions zone emulated the weather conditions you would expect playing in brazil, this provides an insight of how the players will endure the extreme conditions in South America. Brass created designs for all of the technologies inside the conditions centre. The technologies they created designs for monitored the temperature, heart rate, sweat loss, breathing rate and much more scientific measures.

Andrew then went on to talk about briefs. Some can be straight forward, some maybe not as straight forward. For example, he spoke about a brief he received from Ribena. This brief wanted a 'childish approach, but not a childish approach'. 'Its for adults, but make it seem as if its for kids, but not for kids'. 'We want adults to colour stuff in, make it fun'. He said this was one of the most challenging complicated briefs he has had to break down. There were also other complications, Ribena at the time was seen to be bad for having too much sugar. Plus, at the time it was said people was not consuming enough vitamin C. So through all of these complications Brass and Ribena had to deal with they created an amazing outcome for the rebranding. The Colouring Café by Ribena was invented and people could interact with the brand from online platforms to on the doorstep, people could colour tiles and place them of a huge wall and build up the puzzle to create a wall full of individually coloured tiles. The video below speaks for itself.


All in all, I have learnt a great deal from this Guest lecture from Brass agency. Andrew ended by speaking a little further about placements. He said Leeds is a lot of Independent design agencies, like Brass. Manchester has a lot of production and post-production design, BBC, ITV, etc. Then London, which has it all and huge for network agencies, WWP agencies, JWT, AQQA, Omnicom and more. His best advice to succeed is to work hard, work with people and have fun which I believe is true.