Category: COMD 4900 Internship

Week 3: 2/12/2023–2/18/2023 | Featured Image by Vivian Li

The final deliverables for my first project have been completed. It has been a busy week, so I was unfortunately unable to go see my monitor slides up on the college monitors, but I at least got to see my web banner up on the faculty commons website. Being able to see my work up on a website is very different from seeing it as a completed standalone PDF on an image/PDF viewer application. I feel like I’ve gained perspective. Although I have successfully completed the project, I should be mindful of the platform my work will be displayed on and the other content it will be in the company of.

Fortunately, I had two days of rest before I was assigned a new project. For the new project, I will be creating mascot graphics for the Liberal Arts and Sciences department. Unlike the previous project, this one does not have an immediate deadline. The client has suggested that the mascot for the department be a funny looking animal, and one of my mentors has asked that I illustrate an array of emotions for the mascot so that they can be reused on future posters for the department. I have decided to begin with some drafts of character designs for the client to choose from.

During the status meeting, I was able to receive helpful feedback from the team. While the drafts for the mascot were well received for the most part, one of the mentors who have experience with illustration kindly pointed out that I should be mindful of the proportions for the mascots. It’s hard to spot these faults when I am the one who is staring at my own work, so her feedback was much appreciated. I still have much to learn.

The next steps are to refine these drafts some more so that they can be sent to the client for approval.

Week 2: 2/5/2023–2/11/2023 | Featured Image by Vivian Li

During this week, I met with the client and my mentor to go over the deliverables for the project. I am working on a workshop that promotes and informs interested faculty members of how they may use an upcoming exhibit to enrich their students’ learning in the Fall 2023 semester. For this project, I have been tasked with producing 3 sets of deliverables:

• 1 poster for the E-Mail blast that will be sent out to the faculty

• 2 monitor slides for the college monitors (vertical and horizontal)

• 1 web banner for the faculty commons website

The meeting took place on Wednesday morning, and I was informed by the client that he would prefer to see drafts by the Friday of the same week as the E-Mail blast had to be sent out on the Tuesday morning of next week. This would mean that all deliverables must be approved by both the team as well as the client by Monday latest. The project is highly time-sensitive, so time management was one of the skills that I developed throughout this week.

On that same Wednesday, I had a status meeting with the team to discuss our progress. I shared my thoughts on the meeting thus far with the team and received feedback on how I should approach the project. My mentor also met with me after the status meeting, and I shared some rough drafts that I had come up with between meetings on that Wednesday. She offered feedback and suggestions as to how my layout can improve with minor changes.

I was hit with another roadblock, however, when I was informed that the client wanted three paragraphs of text to be included in the poster. I discussed my concerns with my mentor as I did not believe that a poster should be so text-heavy. Furthermore, the abundance of text would decrease readability of the poster as I would have to fit all elements (textual and graphic) into an A4 poster, which proved to be difficult. With some encouragement from my mentor, I eventually followed through and produced a few concepts for a very text-heavy poster.

As I am currently balancing the school work of a full-time student along with the internship, I was worried that I may not have enough time to complete both. After the client had decided on one of the few concepts presented to him, I proceeded to create the other deliverables.

My mentor and supervisor advised that I meet with them on Monday before sending any other drafts to the client. As such, my current priority is to complete all drafts for the deliverables so that I can receive feedback on Monday’s meeting.