Day 6:

We started with our weekly status check-in with the entire team, and for the rest of the day, I continued to work on the social media animations from last week. Trying to find art style references, finding illustrators, and refining the ideas. Incredibly, I might be able to hire illustrators I find and recommend!

Day 7:

My morning started with a 1:1 chat with Eric Seymour and heard about her design journey, too 123w. After, he brought me on board to do some concept sketches for an ad campaign he and his partner, Pierre Chan, is working on. I got to sit in their call as they spitballed ideas. I didn’t have much to contribute to the discussion, but it was cool seeing how fast CDs ideate.

In the afternoon, I had a 1:1 chat with Mo. Sadly, for all my calls today, I forgot to take screenshots after. But I had a great time hearing about what Moreen (Mo) Bofill is doing at 123w as a new partner, how quickly the team is expanding, and a bit of how she deals with imposter syndrome. It’s comforting to know that every creative will always have moments of self-doubt, even after years of experience! I even got to discuss my portfolio with her and got some tips on presenting my work. If you can’t explain your project in one sentence, you don’t know your concept well enough.

And finally, the day ended off with a regroup with John on the social media animations. We went through the refined ideas and chosen art directions. Everything was pretty solid, and I just had some quick refinements to my presentation and a couple of ideas. I might get to present these to Rob Sweetman later this week—exciting!

Day 8:

I spent my morning finishing up the sketches I started yesterday for Eric and Pierre and worked on the social media animation presentation fixes. Everything is looking pretty good. Later in the afternoon, John briefed me for the next phase in the alcohol TV ad from last week. It’ll be nice being able to take a break from projects to reference source again!

At the end of the day, I got to chat with Tim Hoffpauir, a workshop teacher at IDEA! I had a fun time chatting about projects, the design industry, and how meditating layouting type can be after tons of project concepting (like the InDesign type nerds we are). Hopefully, we get to work on a project together soon!

Luckily, I finally remembered to take a screenshot of my call!

Day 9:

Eric brought me onto a beer packing project today! So far, I’ve been tasked to do the base layouts for their new 12-pack box and cans. It’s pretty interesting working to a real 12-pack box template and working around what is possible and not possible to do in terms of designs. The draft layouts are due tomorrow; luckily this is just a brand extension, so I’m not building anything out of scratch, just testing new configurations with previous assets.

Aside from switching between old projects, I took some time in the afternoon to talk to previous IDEA grad, Taeyeon Kim! She was lovely, and we connected over IDEA. My biggest takeaways from our convo were that it’s essential to have a concept, always keep your progress sketches to show, and ask for portfolio reviews (especially if you’re a new grad)!!

Day 10:

I met with Rob Sweetman and John today to present the animation concepts. It went well, and Rob had great feedback on improving the concepts to make them more cohesive and concise. I’m excited to fix the concepts further and potentially move onto the next phase sometime next week.

I also got brought into a website project to do some Quality Assurance (QA) in the afternoon. It’s interesting to see how 123w works on their digital website projects and use different tools like Trello, Invision, etc., to collaborate. I didn’t know Trello could be used as a task manager as well!

I handed in the beer layouts and ended my Friday with some virtual drinks with the 123w team.