Reclaiming Friday afternoons to push ourselves to learn new skills
Every Friday we take the afternoon off to learn and develop our skills. Whether that's a course, training initiative or learning a new program. This helps us take the time to grow, develop, and expand our practice. To help support this, every member of our team is given £1000 a year to spend on courses or training.
Last week we got together to present everything we’ve learnt so far this year. From learning Blender and getting to grips with 3D modelling, to cleaning up our animation skills, to creating our very own typeface using Glyphs. Read on below to find out what we've been up to so far.
Henry Brown
Design Director
I’d designed typefaces as a student at university and loved it, so this was the perfect opportunity to revisit a lost love. I decided on creating a display typeface, but with lowercase vowels (and some special characters). I wanted it to be squishy, organic and slightly refined, thus Dumpling was born. Designing the typeface involved learning how to use Glyphs as well some fundamentals of type-design. It is in no-way perfect and if I was to do it again, I’d probably set some character proportions so the kerning wasn’t a f*****g nightmare. Anyway, I can say I’m a Type Designer on LinkedIn now.
Mollie Kendell
Designer
After following a lot of 3D artists on Instagram and creating endless boards on Pinterest, I wanted to learn Blender and get to grips with 3D modelling. I spent around 6 weeks completing Blender Guru’s famous donut beginner course (see Reddit thread here). It went into great detail from modelling, learning geometry nodes, animation, lighting through to rendering. From tedious weeks of not knowing what I was doing and making lumpy donuts. I’m now excited to start putting this into practice and brushing up on everything i’ve learnt so far.
Baz Forrister
Senior Designer
I'd wanted to get more hands-on with animation for a while as I believe having a better understanding of its capabilities can add to early creative thoughts. I chose a course by Ben Marriott, which has an equal balance of theory and walkthrough application. I found it really valuable to learn about animation principles, and I'm looking forward to taking these and the hands-on skills into future projects.