Finishing Up My Intership

My time at co:lab this summer was a wonderful experience and now my internship has come to a close. What follows are some thoughts and stories about my experience.

During the second week of my internship, I met with Rich and Troy to go over what I wanted to get from the internship and what our objectives were. We talked about how the brand and the story has to dictate how something is designed. The message defines the style and aesthetic. 

It’s not about the designer deciding to use a trick that’s already been done, choosing a typeface for no reason other than the desire to to use it, or just making something that people would think is creative. It’s much more about what the brand needs to be and what it wants to be. When starting a new project, it’s important not to focus on what the final outcome is going to look like and much more important to focus on the ideas and story that it should portray. 

At AIGA Connecticut, we are in the process of developing programs for students that include in-class workshops with professionals, a lecture series, and more. At co:lab during my internship we worked on designing a logo for each of these programs. 

Other miscellaneous work that I got to take part in included image searches, online research, and working on the Design is Love twitter page. One week there was a lot focus on preparing for the CADC Awards Show. I was responsible for importing the list of winners from a spreadsheet into Indesign for the tags that would accompany the winning pieces when they were on display. 

Another project that co:lab worked on was a booklet for Otis Elevators which required several photos of elevators in high-rise buildings. I went on my first photo-shoot at two buildings in downtown Hartford. My role involved mostly observing what was going on and helping to move things around to set up and clean up the shoot.

Throughout my internship I learned a lot about process and am looking forward to applying this new process to the upcoming school year. First, you make a very specific creative brief that has all the background information and what actually needs to be accomplished. You figure this out through research and conversations with the client where you ask lots of questions. Also, its about taking a look at how things are functioning currently, and what is working and what is not. 

Its important to understand the brand and figure things out first such as strategy and what the design needs to do. When I was working on the AIGA Education logos, for each program and corresponding logo, we listed out words that represented each of them. Having those lists of words really help.

Then you move onto the “brain dump” where you sketch out everything you can think of. The idea here is to get everything down on paper, even it’s stupid or doesn’t make sense.

Do lots of sketches and figure out what the design needs to portray and how the sketches/concepts relate to the ideas, then once its time to actually execute on the computer, thats the easy part cause you have done the sketches.

It helps to try out ideas very rough at first, if it doesn’t work don’t waste your time trying to resolve it and move on. When you find some ideas that have potential, push those concepts further.

Thanks so much to the crew at co:lab, it has been an amazing summer and two months working here. Be sure to check out co:lab’s work on their Facebook page and get involved with Design is Love.