So we were intrigued when Katie Finch from Bournville College asked us if we wanted to take a Dutch graphic design placement student. Now we are very careful about placements. With a few honourable exceptions, it has been our experience that work experience at school age seems an afterthought and is often not that well planned. And even at college level it is patchy with placements not always matching students and companies well.

And post-graduation there has grown up a culture of unpaid internships that many companies seem to use to get cheap labour, but which we have always been very doubtful about. So we needed to learn more about the Dutch graphic education system and found out that work placements and developing practical skills is an integral part of the way they train – so we decided to give it a go.

Kirsten Bangert from Deltion College in Zwolle joined us in September 2011 and the experience was very positive. Her technical skills were ahead of what we have come to expect from UK students at both College and Degree level. We found that she was able to contribute a lot to live work with supervision. The Dutch graphic design education system certainly seems to provide students with much better appreciation of technical skills and the world of work than here in the UK, through structured and lengthy work placements.

Kirsten left us in early February 2012 to finish her course and do her exams. We think she will be back! You can download and read her quirky story about her time here in Birmingham and about how she found Homer Creative below together with a set of her photographs.

Meet The Bull download Kirsten’s story here

Kirsten’s photographs download here

And now Nathalie Hop also from Deltion College has joined us and we are looking forward to another good work placement experience.

We are introducing Responsive Web design into our client offer. Responsive Web means that your website is designed to look good on any device whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or mobile phone all at little or no extra cost.

This is revolutionising the web. Mobile devices are already used for 7% of web browsing and is growing fast – it’s up from less than 1% only three years ago. So making sure your website not only looks good on mobile devices but works well with any special features like the gestures you can use on an iPad is very important.

And even better it means that in most situations it saves the money needed to develop special Apps for lots of different mobile devices and their different operating systems. This is because with Responsive Web design we can build style sheets specially for each device very easily so on a mobile device your website will look as though its been customized specially and it will look like an App!

We are currently working hard to make our own website responsive so we can demonstrate how it works. We’ll then be rolling it out to our new website work so that our clients can get all the benefits.

To find out more about how Responsive Web can benefit you give Matt here at Homer Creative a call on 0121 551 5544 or email him here