Every semester, a professor will assign a group project because they feel it will help better prepare students for the real world where they will be forced to work with others on projects within any company they may go on to land a job at. However, the majority of my time at Sacatelle consisted of me being assigned a project, doing research and coming up with designs that not only would work within a client’s branding but also within their budgetary needs. In the few short weeks I had left at my internship, I finally had the opportunity to collaborate with another intern on a client project. I was excited to finally be working with someone else in a collaborative effort, however, that only happened to be my initial feelings on the matter.
The person I happened to work with, in my opinion, was a really good designer. Things that he came up with for client portfolios sometimes made me a bit envious at his ability to be so creative and skilled at using Adobe Illustrator. So was happy at the thought of being able to work with someone whose creative mind I admired.
This fellow intern designer, being that only he and I were working on the project, approached me and inquired what design plans I might have since he had been put on the project second to me. I had no ideas at the time because I too had only just started research on the brand. After a little while, he approached me again and decided to ‘guide’ the direction we should take for the client’s portfolio. To be honest, I didn’t entirely mind him voicing to me which routes we should elect to take so that we were both working on different parts of the brief that needed to be completed. What I did have a problem with, however, is when he tried to stunt my creativity.
Usually, whenever an intern works on an assignment, we go through the steps that lead us to whatever designs we create and then upload them for feedback from the senior designers. Finally, we make revisions accordingly. Through this process, some people upload their designs as they finish while others wait until the end of there day at the company to upload all of their created designs in one shot. I tend to do the former, mostly because I never wanted a senior designer to think I wasn’t trying or was being lazy but also because it may give another designer inspiration when being stuck on what to do for a project they’re on – and looking at my designs is exactly what my fellow intern did.
He took it upon himself to critique every single design I came up with and gave me his input on how he thought it should look for the client portfolio, as if it was his project to complete that I was merely helping with. Needless to say, at some point, this man began to annoy me, but I decided to be polite and keep my composure, because that’s what you should do when in a professional environment: you never let your personal feelings get in the way of things. I even humored him by making some suggested changes that day. One in particular he had a problem with and couldn’t manage to adequately explain to me what it was he thought I should do. I halfway changed the design, and when he saw this the next day, he brought it up to me moments after I started working that day. I explained to him that I just couldn’t make it work the way he was speaking about and left it at that.
In the end, I wasn’t too happy with all I had produced. I felt like I didn’t contribute enough to the design portfolio since I was so busy making adjustment to my designs so my fellow intern would leave me alone to work. In addition, he made assumptions about me and how my work process is. I always try different techniques and angles whenever trying to design something before landing on my final design piece that I feel has the best design implemented for it.
I very much understand that no matter where you are, you will encounter different personalities that you have to figure out how to work with (or around), and that sometimes those personalities just may not mesh well with your own. Throughout this whole experience, despite me being unhappy in the end, I just had to look on the bright side of it all: the project was finally complete, and I didn’t have to be bothered by that one intern again.
