#AgencyLife

I have been fortunate to enough work with multinational brands like Shell, Saab Group, McDonalds, Dominoes Pizza during my first design gig in brand management agency.

During that job worked under an experienced ad agency designer who apart from delegating tasks, shared the deep insights, about major ad agencies. A year or two in one agency will familiarise you with all ad agencies in town, trust me. My boss was a big shot news editor and let me in on a lot client meetings, as I was the youngest person in that company, Good ol days.

For the brands below, I worked as graphic and interaction designer, designed blogs, print collateral to application prototypes. I had to follow their extensive brand guidelines, and to give an example some clients would even have separate brand guidelines for motion graphics and sound design. That too back in Adobe Creative Suite 5 days.

Forget, Getty images or iStockphoto, clients I worked with, had their own indexed and searchable global asset/image management system. I was a Picture Researcher for few days of every month. Trying to find the best photograph for their print/web campaigns among thousands of photographs.

It is really fun working for ad agencies, there is a lot of learning especially about design standards, interaction design, emailers etc. Agencies are always thinking of the next big technology that would give brands an edge in their product campaigns – IoT, VR, AR, motion sensing, physical installations etc. The only downside is the depth in product development. Projects come and go much fast, and you have to repurpose projects to keep product costs low. Growth in agency is a bit linear, Jr. Designer for 2 years then Sr. Designer, and so on, I prefer making leaps and bounds in small time frames.

I highly recommend for people in their early design careers, especially for people in – Illustration, Motion Graphics, Video Editing, Sound design, Interaction design(agencies love parallax and crazy post modernist CSS3 experiments).

I love agencies but I love building /designing products more. You wouldn’t understand that unless you switch from ad service agency to a product company.

Clients:

• Shell
• Shell Foundation
• SAAB Group Defence
• Areva France
• Abraaj Group Dubai
• Havas Ad agency
• McDonalds India
• Dominoes Pizza

#ProductLife

Product company a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, stuck on one projects for years, till its shipped, till someone buys you out or till you cannot go any further. If there are right circumstances you actually make a product that thousands of people use and you have essentially created a 24×7 job(I bet in some cases its helluva lot fun).