I’m an intern for Haute Living Magazine (Link) since the second week of February. The company is a Network of Luxury publications with bimonthly regional editors in LA, San Fransisco, Miami and New York. The office is located in 230 Park Ave, 31st Floor, NY which I have yet to go see. I got the internship after emailing the art director, showing my resume and portfolio. Couple minutes later he emailed back about the opportunity being available.
I am part of the communication design team and I have one supervisor: who is the Art Director of the magazine. I was told I’d work on magazine spreads, do the layout and design the pages accordingly, using the images and information provided by the supervisor himself. My schedule is flexible hours/remotely. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The first thing I did was get access to the typefaces they use for the magazine and go over some of their recent published issues. Overall their style is very elegant, simple and straightforward. Not too many design elements on the page: mostly images with some variation of thin and thick lines. Lastly, their colors which are Red, white and black.
On my first day of the internship, I was asked to change the information on the given INDD files. Supervisor told me about how the magazine just recently published an issue and therefore there wasn’t much to do for the next one.It was mostly to see if I got the fonts down correctly and how well I would do following the instructions. Working by email isn’t as easy as some might think but for the first job I did well.
Last time I talked about how the magazine didn’t have much to get done for the next issue, and it is been slow. My supervisor still had some work for me to get done, although they weren’t related to the Haute Living Magazine. Honestly these weren’t that bad, the clients needed some Sliders and Landing pages. I was instructed to keep it simple and sophisticated and I did a couple examples. At the end they decided to go with the ones my supervisor did. This was a good learning experience for working as a team, bringing as many ideas as we could for them to choose from.
As part of this job, I had to transfer my supervisor’s INDD files into Photoshop files. This was interesting because normally for images I work on Photoshop and then bring to InDesign. Here is mine idea and his.
This week I worked on Sliders and Landing pages for Mystical Mayakoba. This one was fun to do, I had some good ideas and did a few versions. It was for a week spa event, I used images the supervisor sent me as well as some I found myself. I went with two different approaches, one dark and another light. Personally I liked the light version more just because people usually draw to brightness; you see the sun and smile so I tried to give that relaxed, vacation feeling.
More Sliders and Landing pages, I have been enjoying these a lot. This time the client is Josephine Cosmetics. Really loved the images they provided, I tried to create a design that worked well with them which I successfully did as they ended up choosing it. Though my first versions didn’t feel right to me, I did some research for more inspiration. Took a moment away from the design and came back to it. This is something I often do, mostly to see things with fresh eyes and fix any mistakes I do. Overall this one was fun, really enjoyed these.
No more side jobs. This week I was working on a couple spreads for the magazine. I gotta say I enjoyed the sliders and landing pages more than these. One of the reason being that I feel these spreads get very repetitive, makes me feel blank and not as creative as I know I can be. I will say that this is the first time I didn’t enjoy simplicity. That being said, another reason I feel that this weren’t as interesting or fun is because I feel limited. Finding myself trying to keep it consistent to their prior work/design instead of making my very own. On the bright side of this is the experience that we can’t always do what we want or be as creative.
In addition, another challenge is communication with my supervisor. Sometimes his instructions aren’t as clear which makes things more difficult for me. Because of this miscommunication and other classes work, I didn’t do as well as I’d wish to do.
This week I worked on more spreads, and communication with the supervisor improved a lot. Come times we get on a phone call to go over the work, or he would make comments on the PDFs I send him which I found to be more useful and effective. I have gotten used to the layout process and what it is expected from me. Though still feeling limited and also lack of inspiration. As comfortable as it is to work from home I feel like it is harder to find myself motivated or inspired. Because of this I either rush or take too long to finish my work, so I’m working on finding a way to stay motivated.
For the last weeks of my internship things slowed down a lot. I’ve been working a day per week, so everything has stayed the same. Not much to update but here I’ll share some of the projects I worked on.
PRESENTATION: CLICK HERE
