This week was my first week at the internship. As HRA is a city agency with a small graphics department within it, they provide their own workstations. Every one has a mac and a pc in addition to logins for each. A server holds all of our work and the interns had to make a folder that holds all of our work. So far I have helped on 3 projects in some form or another.
My first project was a poster for a Jobs Fair at HRA. I used a typographic treatment while my co-worker/intern went with a more graphical approach and recycled existing material from the server. After that, I was in charge of creating a new logo for a new department. It had to follow guidelines that were given to me in a binder. HRA has a strict method for its logo branding that shows consistency throughout all the logos of all the departments. Another project I worked on was correctly translating materials for an instructional poster. The languages included Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Hatian Creole. Arabic provided the most trouble and we needed to use both MS Word and Illustrator to make it copy in the proper format. The last memorable project I worked on was signage that will be used in a building. This sign was delivered to me with centered text that had no boundaries, jumping all over the place, a handicap wheelchair figure with non rounded wheels, and they needed an arrow placed in there. I completely recreated the figure and enlarged the text to fit the documents boundaries, in addition to providing hierarchy through different fonts. My supervisor loved it and forwarded it to the requester.
Lastly I’ve gotten to bond a bit with my co-intern Sean who is here in NYC studying at SVA and is originally from Seoul Korea, and Seattle, WA. He is currently reading a book on graphic design and helped me with some research on the handicap sign to inform me that there is a new more “active” version being tested. It gave me the insight that I too should be reading more often and taking in more of the world around me in order to better myself as a designer.
