My Apprenticeship Year at Xigen

It’s been a year today since I started working here on the design team at Xigen and it’s been a wonderfully unique experience. One I think will be hard to replicate.

On my first day, as soon as I walked into the office, it didn’t feel like your average everyday business; the environment was calm and even though everyone was busy working, I was greeted by smiles all around and instantly felt welcome.

Being a new employee anywhere can be difficult, whether you’re trying to get to grips with the techniques used or if you just feel like you don’t know anyone. That’ll always happen, but the timeframe in which I was able to settle and begin increasing my knowledgebase was much quicker than anywhere else.

When I walked into Xigen, compared to now, I had essentially no knowledge in web design as a whole. A year later, being able to pick up impressive and innovative information from the fantastic group around me has really developed and moulded my personal skillset and it’s improved the way in which I’m able to look at design.

Personally, I think it’s down to the people. Everyone here is approachable and it’s surprising just how well I know my colleagues. Each and every one of them has something they excel at and if I’m struggling with anything, there’s always someone I can turn to for advice, and even when it’s really simple they’ve always got the patience and right approach to help me understand how to come to a solution.

I hadn’t worked in web design before Xigen, so typical practices and general guidelines were something I needed to get to grips with, which meant a lot of effort on my part, ensuring I worked up to the standard, but with the help of the people around me, it was such a smooth process.

I might be a member of the design team, but with all projects, it requires work from backend development, frontend development and design. There’ll be times where someone from either dev team needs us to quickly put something together for them to make their job smoother and there’s certainly times where we need their help too.

Even being a designer myself in Xigen, I still marvel at the work we produce and watching people create masterpieces from scratch in such short time frames is amazing. There’s a wealth of knowledge and a great deal of skill in every single person.

Communication is always a key aspect of a business, even more so in web design, but that’s not a challenge at Xigen, it’s something that flows naturally.

Over the course of my time at Xigen I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve worked on a lot of projects and there’s no better feeling than not just finishing a project, but seeing it out there, where others can see the time and effort you’ve put into it.

One example I always enjoy is a design for packaging for one of our client’s products. I had finished the project and entirely put the thought of it aside while I worked on others, but during my lunch time one day, I saw this particular product in a store, in the packaging I had worked on and walked away feeling proud.

For me, that’s what it means to work at Xigen, to not only work to the best of your ability, but to proud and recognise your accomplishments of the work you do.