Senior Designer
V&A Museum

Time Code INTERVIEW WITH JO GLOVER 00:01 I’m Joanne Glover. I’m a senior designer at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 00:06 I do anything that you see, anything visual from exhibition graphics, like this space here or the marketing for the exhibitions, advertising that you see on the tube and press ads to way-finding around the museum and displays, temporary displays and other major exhibitions within the museum. 00:31 When I graduated, I did an arts and cultural job in a tiny design agency, that wasn’t very well paid, but I learned the nitty-gritty detail of typography to such a high level that that actually probably got me jobs like this I really wanted, further down the line. I also did more scary commercial jobs that, for me, was out of my comfort zone. I worked in a branding agency on massive brands like Sky, Discovery Channel, HMV and I worked there full-time and then went down to three days a week freelance, to fund doing an MA at the Royal College of Art. 01:12 We have to do a lot of presentations to senior members of the staff and the board, if it’s the annual review and even if we’re good at producing something really beautiful visually, if you can’t explain your concept, then you can really fall down by not being able to convince someone of your idea. It’s brilliant if people are really good at artwork and in other programmes like in design, photoshop and illustrator inside out. But yeah, it’s brilliant if you have someone that you can just get along with and who is friendly and confident, because we deal with so many departments, from marketing to exhibitions, which have really large teams and there are only two of us. 01:53 We’ve had someone from London College of Communication, where I went to do my BA, through the industrial placement year and she’s been coming in every Friday. But she’s just graduated, so we can offer voluntary work for people on that year out. 02:17 If you wanted to do my job, the normal pathway would be to do A Levels in creative subjects, like graphic design, and then people tend to do a foundation course. I studied BA in graphic and media design with experimental typography, which is a four year course and I think the most important part of that course was the year in industry, which allows you to work at different work placements that you get yourself. That allowed me to work at four different branding agencies in Australia, Manchester. So many graduates are now doing design that it’s really important that you’ve actually had the chance to work and learn the more professional side of the job, like setting up artworks, sending things to print. 03:04 In comparison to advertising and branding, it’s a really nice place to work and everything’s very well structured, planned up to a year in advance, so you know when you have to deliver and how much your budget is, and that doesn’t change, whereas, if you’re working for a client, as such, it’s much more difficult. They might demand to have a presentation the next day and you’ll be up all night working. 03:29 END