My role as a Creative Director at Th3rdlevel encompassed all levels of design. Our team was entirely made up of young adults with disabilities and their mentors and our brand was entirely design led. Each term I ran several Graphic Design workshops for our artists, coming up with an ecclectic range of themes to spark ideas. ('Animals in hats', 'Mexican day of the dead but must include flowers and feathers' Frustrated Sea animals' to name just a few) Our artists never disappointed and the range of quirky, imaginative creations they come up with would always yield an amazing array of options for us to screenprint on our garments.
I worked alongside our young designers so ensure that they were involved in every part of the design process, from the initial doodles to the photoshop editing, to mocking up the designs and working out the positioning of the design on the garment, to prepping the artwork for the screenprinters. In the meantime other mentors worked with their team members to research and source ethically produced organic garments that we could use as 'blanks'.
We organised a team of models for our catalogue studio based photoshoot for each range of seasonal clothing as well as a lifestyle shoot outdoors. Our mentored designers had the option to be models or to help behind the scenes with the photography, lighting and Art direction giving them exposure to working in a professional situation. I would then teach the team to edit, prepare images for the website and create new product pages.
I am incredibly proud of the quality of work that we produced together as a design team. Always learning, always growing in confidence ... it's a system that worked well for our young people and provided them with opportunities that they simply wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.
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