Preparating for my interview

Creating a portfolio is an essential step in launching my career as a junior graphic designer, especially when targeting big names like Hearst Media Services. It's essential to align my portfolio, job advert, and interview preparation with my career goals, skills, and the expectations of potential employers to help me succeed in this module and thrive in my future career. First and foremost, creating a portfolio is essential to showcase my skills, creativity, and expertise to prospective employers. Drawing inspiration from portfolio websites helped me create my website concept and how a successful fresh graduate portfolio should look. I chose certain colours to represent the creative idea I had in mind, which was a light purple colour scheme. I worked on making clear and eye-catching designs by adding illustrations of myself to express myself in a way that represents a graphic designer. After completing the design phase, I decided to handwrite the portfolio and blog code entirely to help showcase my coding skills to my future employer. After completing the programming phase, I started collecting data that may interest my prospective employers, such as name, skills, qualifications and others; I attached my certificates, knowing that they are usually not attached here in the UK but in my country, Oman, they are essential and must be attached, I created a special section to display my creative work from print designs, graphic designs, 3D designs, and web designs. This made me confident that the contents will cover all aspects and questions and give a comprehensive view of my skills. Collecting feedback gathered through evaluation and user testing helped me to improve my portfolio; I started by consulting with my university professor, who identified weaknesses that I could focus on in my portfolio and helped me to use my remaining time to finish the remaining minor things in the remaining time. In addition, I consulted several people working in the creative design industry in oman, for example, film director Dawood, who advised me to use a special uniform color for my identity to help me stand out among competitors and make my name memorable for browsers. Muaid Alfannah, a popular graphic designer in Oman, advised me to distinguish between high-end work and poor-quality work to avoid adding it to my portfolio.

Next, I did a search for job ads, and my main goal was to get an ad that included all the skills I acquired in my course, the most important of which are graphic design, web design and 3d design; it was challenging to find both skills in the same jobs because of the difference between them, for example, the person who works on web design usually works with the coding team, and the same applies to the graphic designer. After a long search, I came up with several options, and the most suitable option was to advertise the job of a junior graphic designer at Hearst Media Service, which offered a comprehensive job in design. What attracted me in their advert was that they asked the applicant to be ready to design anything; today, you might design a website and then design an Instagram post the day after; this is what ignited the enthusiasm in me, and I found in myself a love of designing different things.