On Friday 23^rd June, our first ever Designer in Residence, Boomerang Creative, ran a workshop for some of our talented Year 9 and 10 GCSE Design & Technology (D&T) students.

Boomerang Creative are a digital design agency based in Newbury, with services including website design, graphic design, branding, marketing, print and social media. They are a well-established company having worked for a range of clients including Arigato, Phoenix Sporting Goods and Hadley’s Hairdressing Group.

Students were able to hear first-hand from the company’s creative director, Anna Sampson, about the day-to-day work of a designer and she also shared some of the projects that Boomerang Creative have worked on. Students were also lucky enough to hear from one of the company’s apprentices about different paths into design-based careers.

Boomerang Creative set the group of students a live brief for one of their clients based around branding and spent the afternoon with students working through ideas and discussing the process the company go through when they are given a brief by a client.  The students were set the challenge of coming up with a brand for the client and will work on this over the coming months; this could possibly be used if the client likes the students’ branding ideas.

We also had the privilege of Anna opening our new Design and Inspiration Library for students to use during lessons to find inspiration and use as a source of research.

Our Designer in Residence will be returning to do some work with the students in September and to see their end results for the brief they have been set. Well done to all students involved in this and a massive thank you to Boomerang Creative for their time.