COMD 4900 Internship

• In the past I have used other creative work. In my free time I like to make cartoons and short animations and I usually go out of my way to include music in them. Most of the time the music is copyright free and the only thing I have to do is credit the original composer in a video caption or description. Sometimes if I want to use copyrighted music I go out of my way and reach out to the artist via email and ask for permission to use their music. 

• Although I love Shepard Fairey’s design and I think that it was truly impactful, he was not right. Fairey argues that artists should have the freedom to freely create art when they are inspired without repercussions. That way of thinking is just blatantly wrong. It is one thing to say if you only referenced the photo of Obama, it is another to trace directly off copyrighted images. If people were given that freedom, art theft would be more apparent. It also doesn’t help that it is a lot easier to steal art on the internet without crediting people. That’s why NFT artwork is so hated by the art community because there are no rules and regulations to stop art theft from happening. Literally, thousands of artists’ artwork were sold off to the blockchain and they were unable to do anything about it. 

• Most of the resources I use when sourcing images in my internship are copyright free. I mainly use a website called pexels.com where all the images and resources on it are free for anyone to use. I wish not to get myself or the organization in trouble so all the assets I use in my designs, I make myself in either illustrator or photoshop. I was also allowed access to the company’s logo and brand identity files. Now I wasn’t told anything, but I believe it should be understood that those files should not be redistributed to anyone else. 

• I did not have to sign a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement for my internship site. 

I have always been quite anxious about joining a collaborative creative environment, however, as we are coming close to the end of this class I can say I have gained more confidence. To be able to take a task and execute it in a time frame in a non-school environment feels a lot more different than doing an assignment for class. I also gained confidence because for each project I had a different approach for which programs I used. For some projects, I used only Photoshop and for others, I would use a combination of Illustrator and Indesign. By the end of the internship, I started to gain a sense of workflow and was able to execute my ideas in a more timely manner. I stopped second-guessing my designs and just enjoyed the process of designing.

This internship was also one of the first times in my life where I had to value myself as an artist. I had to speak to a client, set a reasonable time frame, and set the conditions required for me to complete the project. When the conditions were not met, I respectfully declined and the client completely understood. I believe this was only the beginning of a real-world skill necessary to be a designer.

For this week, I was tasked with designing a hoodie. I was given the freedom to approach this project however I wanted. For the first day or two, I had no ideas about my approach. My first go at it was just slapping the company logo on the shirt. So then I drew inspiration from the company’s Linkedin profile. The profile had a slogan that I thought would work very well with the hoodie design. I made one with only using the color white against a navy blue hoodie. I also did a second approach, but this time I used the company’s brand colors on the text itself. I also decided to use a navy blue hoodie as a template because it fits with the brand’s identity.

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I am a designer for the Communications and Marketing Team. One of my main tasks is to design Newsletters, they are to be designed in size A4 and exported as a png. However, I will occasionally also be tasked with creating mock-ups on items such as masks, hoodies and T-shirts. 

I believe that I am able to perform these tasks efficiently because of my software skills in Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop. I am comfortable especially with Photoshop and Indesign. 

I was approached by my director and was asked if I would be interested in illustrating a children’s book. I was very excited to hear this because it’s on my bucket list of things I want to do in life. I told him I was interested and I was soon contacted by the client. The client introduced me to another artist who I would collaborate with to help me design and complete the book. However, as she was briefing I was unamused by the information she was giving us. From the beginning, she was asking for too much work to be completed in such a little time frame. I was contacted by her on a Wednesday afternoon and was asking for us to complete a 48-page children’s book by that Saturday. I spoke with my collaborator privately and addressed my concerns, after that we both agreed and told the client we could not work within that time frame, for us to effectively create a children’s book in a reasonable amount of time would be at least 3 weeks. The client told us she would get back to us within the next 48 hours. In the meantime, I created a spreadsheet to keep my collaborator and me on track and made a Pinterest mood board for inspiration. She came back and told us that she could only extend the time frame to one week. I was saddened to hear the news. I currently have other priorities in my life right now and I genuinely would not have the time to complete such a project. I parted ways with the client and my collaborator soon followed. I went back to my director and asked for another project to work on. I was told to design a Newsletter Cover for May. 

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The second task I was asked to create was face mask mockups using the organization’s logo. This was due on the 22nd of June. I came up with 3 designs. A design for a white mask, a design for a black mask, and a patterned mask design. I did not want to overcomplicate them so I made sure they were clear, easy, and readable. I only used Adobe Photoshop for my design process.

For the first design  I took the Logo and made it black then I wanted to incorporate the logo in the design so I used the “U” almost as if it was a drop cap and wrote out the words. I asked my director for the name of the font family used in their logo so that I can match it. I was told the font’s name was Poppins, but he also told me I had the creative freedom to use whatever font I wanted. I decided to go with Futura standard bold because I figured the bold strokes of the logo would compliment that font very well. For the black mask, I took the same logo and painted tooled it white however, I had a new challenge of putting the design into a mask perspective to make it look like someone was wearing the design. I utilized a combination of skewing, transforming, and liquifying.

After about an hour I got it just right. For the third design, I wanted to do something very different from the other two. I wanted to make the mask look more expressive so I created a pattern. I took the organization’s logo and made 6 duplicates of it. I spaced them out evenly then I colored each duplicate into a different color of the brand colors. Once I finished the design I went into photoshop and I set the 6 duplicates as a pattern that spread out throughout the entire page. I cut out the mask with the pen tool and masked the pattern to that mask layer. Lastly, I transformed and liquified the pattern then colored in the lights and shadows to make the mock-up more convincing. I think out of the 3 designs I am most proud of the pattern mask.

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My first task as an intern with the organization was to design an article for May. The title of the article was called “Messages in Movies by Morgan Taylor”. I was given this task on June 9th and it was due on June 17th. I was told that the design had to be done in an A4 size and the final design must be submitted as a PNG image. I was also given the files for the logo and the color palette. I got started on the project right away. My first draft of the article design was a terrible go at it. I felt like I was overcomplicating the design and was rather unsure of the first draft I created. I had designed the entire article to fit into text message bubbles, but it did not look very appealing. I listened to the designer’s voice deep down inside me and started from scratch, trusting the process. So instead of playing with the word messages in my design, I decided to play around with the movie concept in the title. I went into Adobe illustrator and I started designing a simple strop of film that would act as a design for the title. Once I completed that, I placed that image into Adobe InDesign and began redesigning the article. Lastly, I added a drop shadow and removed any widows, and limited the hyphenations to make the text look nicer and more legible.

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For week 1, everything I had planned to prepare for this internship class fell into shambles. The internship I had lined up ran out of space and I was on a waiting list just when this class started. I asked for help from the professor and she was able to get me an internship with a civic and social organization. They seek to build economic stability and sustainable communities. For my first week, I sent paperwork for them to fill out, and then I was told to sign up on a website called web.rock.so where they utilize messages between team members. I was invited to a server and spoke with the head of the department. He interviewed me and asked me to write a short response answering How would I be able to make a change in the community? After answering that, I was contacted by the director of the communications and marketing department. He welcomed me to the organization and said that he would have something for me to do in the next few days.