Here at Works with Water Nutraceuticals, we recently held a student design competition to discover young talent and help them on to the career ladder, with a prize of a 4 week work placement at prestigious design agency Elmwood, plus their design printed on a limited edition bag. The lucky winner was Georgina Henshall, aged 21, who tells us how her design came to fruition and how she feels about winning.

Georgina Henshall's winning design and adaptation for Works With Water's Bag

“When I first read the brief for the Works with Water competition, I was instantly captured and I had lots of ideas that were immediately running through my mind about potential outcomes. On the other hand, before entering I was slightly hesitant at first because although I have worked on projects before at University, I had never entered a design competition where everything would be down to me as such.

With finishing my degree later this year, I really wanted to begin to do as much work outside of my degree as I possibly could to get myself out there and to put some of my design skills to practice, and what better way to start than this. Potentially winning the chance to do a work placement in such a major company like Elmwood was always the goal, but I definitely didn’t expect it to come true.

Before I came up with my idea, I decided to do some background research. As the bag was to be used by a young and modern audience I thought there was no better place to ask people than at University. I asked various people, boys and girls, about what they would find most visually appealing on a bag they would be happy to carry around – either text or imagery – with creative text being the most popular.

With typography becoming somewhat of a trend at the moment and also being a subject that is a great passion of mine, I decided to take the typographic approach to my design.  I also read a lot of articles about raising self-confidence and self-esteem, where I found that in almost every article the main advice for this was based around this notion of increasing positivity – which therefore became the focus of my design.

When I had the email to say that my design had been chosen, I was absolutely ecstatic. Knowing that my design will now be placed on a bag that will be used and seen by hundreds of people is an idea that was once a dream and is now becoming very much reality. The competition has been such a great opportunity that I couldn’t be more grateful for, especially for getting the chance to work at Elmwood with professionals in the industry that I aspire to be a part of in the near future.”