During the internship, I’ve learned and gotten inspired not only from my supervisor Lenny but also from collaborating with other designers. One of them was Lia, who is also a former intern at the Vyater Group. She was very understanding and willing to help me with my learning process. As a team, we were required to come up with different logo concepts for Cantor Charity Day.

Having worked on this account before, Lia gave me some background about the Cantor Day which is an annual charity event in remembrance of September 11 victims. A new logo is part of a plan to refresh and expand the fundraising event worldwide. After discussing on which direction to go, Lia and I decided to stay away from the iconography that reminds of  World Trade Center and New York city. The plan was that each of us would come up with as many ideas as possible before finalizing the best ones for client approval. After playing around with common imagery of hands and heart, I started to developing more the ideas of using the candle and the sun icons. During the process, getting comments from Lia and my supervisor Lenny was the key to make sure we were going the right direction. At the end of the day, we were able to come up with a final list of strong concepts that were ready to send to the clients.

Working with Lia and observing the way she tackled the problem made me realize that I need to change my creative process and be more efficient at work. The final list showed off with not much of a dynamic performance on my part.  While Lia were exploring different solutions without worrying too much about the details, I got drawn into making different versions of the same concepts. The business world requires the designers to be flexible in creative thinking in order to reach the highest level of efficiency. And the lesson is to keep moving forward and exploring different aspects of the problem instead of getting yourself trapped in the initial ideas.