Tom Pickering - Studio Placement

"A last minute opportunity for work placement arrived from Shape just before I was to depart back to Manchester for my second year at the University of Salford. This was a big step forwards for me considering I hadn't been on a work placement before, and so I decided to grab the opportunity whilst I could.

With Web design and development never being my strongest field of design, it has never been a route that I would have seen myself pursuing in the future until working with the guys at Shape. They showed me a whole other side to the web industry, one where websites can be so clean and beautiful.

On my placement, I was set a number of briefs which really helped me push my skill set further with both design and development. The first week was predominantly based around design, where firstly I worked on the back-end layout of an E-Commerce site. I was then pushed on to create front-end layouts for another E-Commerce site, this time starting the design from scratch. In the second week, I moved on to development, where I was set the task of coding a website which had the basic structure in place, and I was to modify it to the bespoke aesthetics of the design signed off for by the client. With this task, I used LESS which is new to me, along with HTML and CSS.

Not only did all of these briefs push and expand my skill set by a huge degree, I also got a taster as to what it is like to work to deadlines in the real industry, which are short! This has made me a much more efficient worker and has set me up ahead of the game as I go into my second year.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, was made to feel extremely welcome by all the guys at Shape and the studio environment they have there is as casual as it is professional with atmosphere being very relaxed and full of banter! Thanks again for this brilliant opportunity to work with you guys and for teaching me so much, hope to work you again in the future!

Oh, and I also learnt about Widows and Orphans!!"

Thanks Tom, it was a pleasure having you and your retro VW Beetle in the studio.