Designing anywhere? It’s Possible!

Daniel Mihai is Senior Designer with Carnation Possible Worldwide Romania. This summer, he was sent to London to work on a project and decided to share with us the story

Monday 4 August 2014

Stefan calls me out in the lounge and sits down on the couch. Goes straight to subject:

-How would you like to go to London for a week and work for one of POSSIBLE’s London project?

I freeze for 1 sec. and go:

-Wow! That’s big, and it sounds pretty awesome. Whats the catch?

– No catch. There is an opportunity for you to go for one week to London and work for one of the top clients Christmas project.

Friday 9 August 2014

At the end of the day I’ve had a first overview of the project.

Monday morning 11 August 2014

Waking up late – f*@k! – one hour left until boarding closes. Wrap up all the bags, grab in a rush the documents, keys & wallet. Run in the street to grab the taxi, tell the address of the hotel and breathe.

Too little, too late… huge accident on the way, delay, flat tire, more waiting, change cab and arrive too late… the air travel company said they could resched. me on to the next flight – almost 5 hour later.

Finally I got boarded and on my way to London, spending my flight going through project’s brief. A few hours later I was walking outside the tube station, a couple of streets away from 77 Hatton Garden– a modern 6 stories building housing about 5 trending companies.

From this point forward everything happened on fast forward: debriefings, planning, meetings, UX department meet up, 1st design round, review, printing and at the end of the day one last status and setting next day’s steps. And the next days continued in the same working style. There was a fantastic energy around every days tasks shown by all the individuals that were surrounding you in the office which was almost contagious. Due to being adjusted to Bucharest’s +2 GMT hour, I London was getting up very early in had plenty of time to handle some emails for Bucharest office, had time for breakfast and even for a bit of Feedly reading. When I was reaching the office, all I needed was a big cup of black coffee and I was good to go for 8h straight, without any distractions or interruptions working on the days template drawing.

By Wednesday, I was making big progress in my template drawing and was ready for my first review from POSSIBLE’s Creative Director. I’ve done my presentation, shown my designs & a few minutes later I was given a short feedback, very precise and very on the subject. The next day I had everything updated according to the feedback and completed a few templates more.

The PM of the project & I had the chance by now to learn our working style and begin to collaborate quite efficiently and things were running smoothly. We had good progress and it felt awesome. Also it felt that you really have an impact over the projects development and that your decisions are making things happen. And I can’t even describe the wide range of resources available for you to do your work properly: direct access to any of the other departments leader, plenty of documentation and quite a few dedicated spaces for you to chill out with a coffee and brainstorm for creative digital solutions.

Thursday evening 14 August 2014

After a long hard week, a beer night was just what the doctor prescribed. And so we did, but when a say beer, I really mean beer. Tens of carefully brewed British beer brands to suit anyone’s taste. A few pints later, a few chats later the energy was running low so I got going, having enough time left for a quick Thai dinner.

Friday 15 August 2014

Its Friday morning and things need to be wrapped up. Every instance of the project was ready, the copy has been reviewed, updated, approved. All the supported resolutions were set in interactive mockups on my Invision account.

By the end of the day, close to 200 layouts have been rendered and approved both by the PM and the Creative Director. The UX was done and my colleague soon after left to a conference, I handed of my assets over in archived form to the PM, said good bye and left.

With special thanks to Blandine Escoffier, Programme Director in POSSIBLE Grey London, Leroyson Fegueira, Creative Director of POSSIBLE Grey London and to Stefan, András & Marci from my Carnation Group’s team that trusted me with this task, I managed to deliver high end solution for high demanding international client, exactly how it was expected from someone with my qualifications.

Follow up

Saturday morning I was ready to go with my baggage already packed. But it was pretty early so I still had some time for taking a walk down to the Waterloo bridge, to take a few photos of the London Eye, stop by for a coffee at Starbucks, have breakfast and get going to airport.

For a proper week ending, I’ve decided to quickly grab a couple of things, pick up my girlfriend from work and leave Bucharest for the weekend. Chill mode is on.

You can find more about Daniel on LinkedIn and on his personal website, on Behance or Dribbble.