Industry facing materials

devlin-j41
Jan 12, 2023
5 min read

For my industry facing materials module I must look at a specific job role and use it to create a business card, CV, portfolio, and cover letter. The job role that I have chosen is Associate Producer release management at Blizzard Entertainment.

Business Cards

Looking at business cards, the main goal for a business card is to grab the attention of whoever you give it to make it unique, so they are interested in it. This is a much easier task for the roles dedicated to art, modelling etc as they will already have an idea of what they would like to do. For me.

Below are some references of business cards found online:

This blue business card looks awesome, its unique and stands out well against anyone's wallet with its vibrant blue colouring. It also has a QR code on the back of it, which would link the user to the portfolio. Overall, however, it’s a bit much for a business card in my opinion.

This white sleek business card reminds me of the older business cards from the 90's, everything needed is all on one side of the card, the art is funky and basic, colour scheme is extremely bland. This shows me what not to make my card look like.

Now, looking at my own business card here is the first iteration.

Concept 1

This version of my business card used triangles to break up the space around the card, with my original pixel artwork being used as a logo of myself. The background on this card is a bid dark and takes away from the light colours used in the pixel art.

The back of the card looks good, it has everything I need on it, all of the information that someone looking to contact me would need. However I again with the grey colouring, it doesn't fit as well as I would like it to.

Concept 2

This is my second go at my business card and I think that it looks much better, the lighter tan colours matches well with the pixel art and makes the triangles pop more.

The tan colour also makes it easier to read the text on the back of the card, as well as being a unique.

This is the final outcome of my business card.

cv

The next piece I worked on was my CV, I was lucky enough that I already had a C.V. created from a before starting second year, so I used that one to create a better, more appealing one.

CVs in general are usually simplified down into specific sections, such as:

Personal summary
Experience
Awards
Contact details
Education
Soft/hard skills

Below is a screenshot of my original CV:

Using the word "Aspiring producer" as I was told that because I'm a student, I hadn't been a producer yet so I couldn't say it. (This is changed later). When building this CV I took a lot of inspiration from CV's that I had seen in the NIGD (Northern Ireland Game Dev) Discord. Including, using plenty of colour, using buzz words like "Experienced, intermediate". This CV was the groundworks for what is to come later, the main problems with it being hard to read, having useless buzzwords such as "experienced, intermediate" the reason these don't work in game design is because what I think experienced is vs what the hiring department of a game studio feel experienced is, are two different things.

Updated CV

Below is my second attempt at creating a good cv.

As you can see in the image above, I have added Icons, changed the skill buzz words from "experienced and intermediate" to how many years of experienced I have, as well as changing the colour of the fonts to make it easier to read as well as more concise. This revision was good, but it still wasn't perfect, I felt like I needed to make the big blocks of paragraphs shorter, easier to read as well as being told by Sabrina that using years of experience is the same as saying "experienced, intermediate". This is where my third revision comes in.

CV Updated 2

This is my third and final revision to my cv.

After sending my CV into the UU discord a plethora of times, I landed on this. Sleek, great use of space and bullet points, clear and concise. One of the main things was changing over all of the font to be the same size in the right areas, as well as changing its colour. Taking out the icons from the previous CV as they didn't add much to it and were the first thing someone would notice when they looked at the CV, replacing the "Assistant Manager - Game" section, with a section about what I did for my VR horror group project Abhorrence. I am quite happy with the end results of my revisions. Below are some more screenshots of other attempts at changing the CV to make it look a bit different.

Other Concepts

CV Feedback

To also add to this, here are screenshots of feedback I have received from a variety of sources:

Kitty has provided me feedback on a multitude of occasions, but this time it was extra helpful. This message is from the NIGD server.

Benjamin also replied with similar feedback to kitty, however I wanted to keep the left hand side column, as I thought it split up the page well. This message is from the NIGD server.

Josh Davidson from the UU discord was an amazing help, as always.

Luke Shingleton from the UU Discord provided me with a much needed confidence boost, which I really appreciated.

Turlough from the UU Discord also gave me some really sound feedback, and PROTESTED that I remove the logos from the CV, which in the end, I did.

This was some of the best feedback that I received from anyone, I sent my CV off to Samantha in December and she replied with this, allowing me a much better insight into creating a CV, considering she has worked at Hypixel. Using this I updated my CV for my second CV. All of the feedback above in some way shape or form, helped me create the CV that I now have today and I'm grateful for everything that provided feedback. I also received feedback from Mathew on multiple occasions, however I do not know if I can provide screenshots as they are in private messages. Everyone else shown giving feedback have agreed to let me show these screenshots.

Cover Letter

Below is an image of my Cover letter that I am submitting for the assessment.

When creating this cover letter I took a lot of inspiration from previous students cover letters, mainly Holly Boyles and Luke Shingletons.

To create all of this work, I looked at websites such as Linkedin, Hitmarker and Indeed. Hitmarker was originally recommended to me by Turlough much earlier in the year, I check it everyday for possible placements. I even used it to find the "pretend job application" for this module. Below is an image of it:

For my cover letter I tried my best to keep everything as simple as possible, sticking to only the important points.

This has been a short blog on all of my industry facing materials.