After finishing my last day at The Signal Box, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write a short summary of my time at Strawberrysoup.

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In the three and a half years I've worked here, I've learnt a tremendous amount and enjoyed collaborating with so many talented designers and developers. It's been tricky and I stayed late way too many times to finish working something out but fundamentally I was solely responsible for designing every aspect of a website for a given project I was assigned to. This meant I did the user journeys/persona's, the sitemap, the research, the concepts, the presentation, thoughts about animation style, the branding, the image searching etc. I was lucky enough to experience all of the things that go into a website as well as any marketing used to drive traffic to the site such as display ads, social media campaigns and print collateral. 

As an employer, they've been incredibly generous by paying for any kind of training, equipment and getting in the rounds at social gatherings. Originally when I started at Strawberrysoup, I had very little practical experience let alone a portfolio of real clients having just interned and graduated 8 months before. So I was really lucky in the sense they gave me a permanent job with a wage to get my hands dirty. They were really patient and just from asking developers dumb questions and making various mistakes I began to understand more about the medium I was designing for let alone the lingo.

I've always been someone who enjoys learning new things either on the job or in my spare time but nothing helps more than talking something through with another designer or developer. You get a real mix of opinions and experience thrown in, sometimes a discussion can feel quite heated but it's good to thrash some things out particularly when you're working on a project you feel really passionate about. Also, working in such a subjective medium, having different opinions and understanding other people's perspective can be really helpful in rationalising a concept. From my time, I have a couple favourite projects which stand out for me just because of how well design and development collaborated on a brief. 

So here's to those good times! And the few cheeky ping pong games squeezed in between!