Firebook_Jose-Benitez_Internship_Presentation

It is almost the end of the semester and the internship program as well. When I came in to the office, the supervisor asked me to go out for lunch with her. When we went in to a restaurant and sat down, she asked me about working part-time for them. At first I was very happy and surprised to hear this news, because I didn’t think I did well. But, I realized that I also have another part-time job to support myself that also wanted to hire me for full-time. I then told the supervisor that I could only work one day per week for them if they wanted me for part-time. The supervisor agreed because she knew that I have another job as well. When we got back to the office she asked me to design a huge banner. The size of the banner was so large that every time when I saved the work on Photoshop, it seemed like it took forever to save. When I was finally done with the banner, the supervisor asked me to do another poster ad that was also huge. I could not get the poster done because it was closing time, so the supervisor did the rest of it. While walking home, I thought a lot about whether I should challenge the advertising field. I remember when I haven’t start working here as an intern yet, I had a lot of fears. I started to gain some confidence after working in this company. Originally, I thought it was going to be very challenging, but the experience defeated some of my fears. I am still struggling to overcome my fears, but I am definitely very happy to take the opportunity.

Before I even got to the work place today, I got a phone call from the supervisor. She told me that she needed me to design a flyer for a hair salon. I could not hear very clearly due to the surroundings being too noisy and loud, so I asked her to tell me in depth when I get there. As expected, she repeated what she just said on the phone. She already had the flyer’s layout set for me. As usual, I started out with text layout first and then background design later. I took advantage of the hair salon’s logo and turned into a design element. At first I just wanted to use black and white contrast with gradient filler, because I thought it looked very sleek and classy, but the supervisor felt it was not appealing enough. I then edited the texture and color of it to make it more playful. The supervisor was not very pleased about it so she told me that she wanted me to make it more fancy and like high brand design. But due to the flyer size being very small, I could not make it the way that she requested. She started browsing on Google to show me what type of design that she was looking for. That was when I got irritated because all the images that she showed me were poster size ads with a lot of elements. Then I questioned her about the neighborhood that the hair salon was surrounded by and their targeted audience. She told me that neighborhood has a lot of old people so she wanted the flyer to pop in their face. I started to argue with her saying that old people cannot stand too colorful designs. She persisted on to convince me into thinking that she was right, so I gave up. I made a whole new design to please her. She told me to save the previous design as well just in case. On the way home, I got a phone call from her again. She told me that she showed both the design to the client and the client preferred the original design over the fancy one. That moment, I felt so happy because I knew I was right from the start.

It is almost the end of May and my job today was to proofread the entire May magazine before it is being sent to the production company. The reason that they entrusted me with this task was because they discovered that I am very good at organizing and structuring the layout. They discovered it through these past weeks of assignments that I did. I started off by fixing the space and punctuation mistakes because almost every magazine ads had this problem except the ones that I designed unless others disrupted it for copying and pasting while not being careful. But fixing the space among the Chinese characters was a lot of work. Chinese character does not break down into hyphen like the alphabetical letters to the next line. The only way to fix it was to change the text box width. But, what worked for one text box does not guarantee that it would work for the other text boxes. So readjusting the length and width, size, and font was necessary to make sure that it worked for most. The biggest challenge was to find the right font for the document. Some words do not show up with certain fonts and with limited selection of fonts. Thus, doubling my work by triple. The final step was to justify all the text to the right. After done with adjusting the texts, fixing some of the images and design alignments were next. The images and design alignments were pretty fast. Because I was so into the assignment, I completely forgot to keep track of time. When I realized the time, I felt so energetic.

Today I was assigned to design the back cover of the magazine, which is something very unusual from what I normally was assigned to do. Doing the back cover was not as easy as I thought. The supervisor requested what type of design and style she wanted. She said that she wanted vibrant and technology-related background. Of course, finding the right image for the background was not as easy as well. Almost every image that I tried to use, it has some conflicts with the texts. At first she said to only change the background image and leave the rest untouched. But slowly, she started to change her mind throughout the process. When I told her that the text layout does not work with the background image because it was all over the place, she finally said that I could do whatever I want as long certain texts are within each another like a group. I then left the background alone and worked on the text layout first instead because I just cannot stand it being unorganized. It caused me a lot of distractions and I get irritated easily. When I was finally done with the text layout, I continued to do the background design where I left off before. When I was finally done with the back cover design, the supervisor liked and approved of it. Then I took a lunch break and came back waiting for another assignment. Just when I thought everything was set, the supervisor wanted me to redesign the back cover again because she forgot to add some details in. My goodness, that was very nice of you.

I came to the work late today because I forgot to set my alarm clock. The moment I came in to the office, I explained to them before they even get to open their mouth. But they do not seem to be interested in my story; instead they questioned me if I ever designed a menu before. Now that made me looked like a complete fool. Then I replied to them that I am very organized when it comes to designing text layouts. They handed me the old version of the restaurant menu and asked me to design multiple panels of it. The supervisor already had the document size set for me. I started typing and organizing the text layout first because that is my way of estimating how much potential it has without the image. The supervisor somehow sneaked behind me and was looking at how I was doing because she was a little worried that I am not familiar with menu design. She was surprised that I did the text layout before the background because she does the opposite of what I did. Looking at the content of the menu it seemed like it should be done very quickly, but I neglected the fact that I have an obsession with texts being horizontally and vertically aligned, and with even spacing for texts and numbers. That took longer than I expected to be complete. By the time I was done with designing the text layouts, I finally started designing the background. As for the background, they just want images of foods so I asked them for images. They told me that the client did not provide any images so that means I have to get images from the websites. Suddenly, I felt a panic. My heartbeat increased as I told them the risk of using Internet images without permission. They reassured me that it would be fine since their targeted audiences were not Americans. To be on the safe side, I warned them that if they ever get caught and sued in the future, I would not have any responsibilities whatsoever.

Recently, I started paying really close attention to the Ads on the subways. While heading off to work at the other workplace, during the subway ride, I pay close attention to the elements and the color that they corporate together in the ads. Some of them caught my attention and I thought to myself what if I incorporate this design into the Chinese magazine that I worked on. One Ad that left me a very deep impression was the Ads that only use three colors; black, white, and blue. It was very simple and clean. As soon as I thought of that the second thought hits me, it is not going to work with the Chinese magazine. Even though the American ads are all about simplicity, but the ads on the subways are just too ugly to look at. Out of a hundred of them, probably only a few that would really catch my attention. Then on the way home taking the subway, one ad totally caught my attention. That ad featured one of my classmates that are also from NYCCT. That moment, I felt like she was a celebrity and I was so honored that I knew her. Because of that, I completely stopped paying attention to the other ads. What a bad influence.

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