Creative students hear details of joys of working in greetings industry
The GCA’s Amanda Fergusson has gone back to college to inspire the next generation of creatives about the importance of greeting cards.
The association CEO had a date with 16 and 17-year-olds at Kingston College, part of the South Thames Colleges Group, where she gave a presentation to year 11 graphic design students from the creative industries department.
The teenagers are in the first year of their A levels, working on a project about designing a greeting card, and the two lecturers from the second year also took part, joining in with the Q&A session.
“It’s a project the college have done for the last few years, and it’s been popular with students and has got a lot of engagement so they plan to keep running it,” explained Amanda, who was sales director at Caroline Gardner for almost 12 years before becoming a business development consultant and then joining the GCA.
“They were very interested to learn about what makes a good card design, captions and the wording, and standard sizing. We also talked about how cards appear on the rack and the importance of the caption and design being visible in the top part of the card!
“They asked about my career and were interested in how I and others get into the card industry and there was a lot of interest in our New Creative Talent project, careers in the industry, AI and we also discussed the importance of having a unique selling point and the challenges of plagiarism.”
Amanda said she was “thrilled” to be asked to return next year – and her presentation, which includes a number of industry statistics will soon be available on the GCA website so anyone who wants to use and adapt her slides for use if they want to visit a local school or college.
