Our newest blog has been written by Isabel, a Young Creative with Bradford 2025 City of Culture. She writes:
I am part of the Young Creatives at Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, a training programme that gives young people living in Bradford the opportunity to gain skills and experience in the arts and cultural sector. The cohort of 10 is spread across the departments at Bradford 2025 and my role is within the Evaluation team.
I studied Illustration at Leeds Arts University and my background in visual arts was a desirable skill to bring to the Evaluation team who are keen to make things as visual as possible. I’ve used my eye for design to pull together exciting evaluation resources to boost engagement at events as well as creating visual interpretations of our evaluation strategy such as our ‘Story of Change’ to make complicated concepts easier to understand. The Bradford 2025 Story of Change has been designed to understand the impact that Bradford 2025 will make to the people and places of Bradford District. You can see my artwork here:
As part of the Young Creatives programme I am undertaking a Level 4 qualification in Creative Enterprise which provides us with the skills, knowledge and understanding to develop careers as creative professionals.
Through working at Bradford 2025, I discovered live illustration which is where I take visual notes at meetings, workshops and events. Working in an office environment and attending lots of meetings made me notice that meeting minutes aren’t the most useful and accessible way to share information. Minutes often aren’t read due to being long and hard to decipher. Visual notes on the other hand are an engaging, visual summary that helps attendees better understand, remember, and connect with the content.
The combination of the Creative Enterprise qualification and my role at Bradford 2025 has given me the opportunity to develop a live illustration freelance business plan whilst developing the skill through practicing at all the Bradford 2025 events.
On top of all of these amazing opportunities, the Young Creatives all do a placement day once a week at a partner arts organisation in Bradford. I’ve been working at Bradford District Museums and Galleries (BDMG) and gaining a whole load of new skills there and seeing the behind the scenes of how a museum and art gallery is run.
BDMG is vast, spanning four sites across Bradford, so I’ve been hopping around, dipping in and out of the work that the staff team are doing. I’ve had the chance to assist from accessioning (the formal transfer of an object into museum collections) and cataloguing the collections, supporting the photo archives by digitising negatives and sourcing material for inquires, to supporting the learning team at family play days in the school holidays. I’ve also been able to make use of my illustration and design skills, designing site specific logos and live illustrating the Young Ambassadors meetings.
My experience working at Bradford 2025 and BDMG has shown me that there is appetite for more visual resources. With the rise of AI notetakers, there is growing demand for human-centred notes.
Although an AI notetaker can somewhat accurately record a whole meeting, these notes can be too formulaic and overwhelming to read. In contrast, live illustration involves active listening and synthesising discussions into key themes and takeaways. By nature, it doesn’t capture every word, but it doesn’t need to. What people value is a creative perspective that transforms conversations into concise, visually engaging, and easy-to-read summaries.
Looking to the future, I want to continue developing my live illustration practice and improve my skills in communicating complicated ideas through drawing to help organisations capture important information that audiences engage with.
A highlight of my placement with Bradford District Museum’s and Galleries was working with the Young Ambassadors to plan and delivery the Z Open, a open exhibition for young artists in Bradford.
I got involved in the project in a few ways. I designed a logo for the Young Ambassadors and with some support from a graffiti expert in the team, I turned it into a stencil to mark the exhibition as curated by the Young Ambassadors. I have a love for handmade processes so it was a joy to spend time in the Industrial Museum’s print gallery learning from industry professionals typesetting and printing with Victorian letter press. It was a perfect time to use these skills to design and print a bespoke bookmark for the Z Open exhibition.
The launch of the Z Open was the perfect way to wrap up my placement. It was a pleasure to hear feedback from artists who submitted their work, stating how accessible they found the application process and how much they appreciated the opportunity to have their work on display at the Industrial Museum.
