Straight to junior designer

by Brendan Browne-Adams 

I spent my summer refining my portfolio and resume because I knew that I wanted to make sure that I landed an internship before the end of summer and this led to me applying for various internships. After sending numerous emails out I had an interview for Particle 6 Productions, which is a video production company who were at the time looking to work on branding projects for one of their clients.

This internship was completely different from what I expected. I was hired as an intern but given the title of junior Graphic Designer working under the creative director. Adjusting to the pace of working on a lot of projects has been interesting and I have found it hard at times especially because I am so used to the working schedule of University working and being given a term to work on a project compared to working as a designer I often am given a day to produce content.

I have learnt whilst working as the in-house Graphic Designer is that I usually don’t have much creative control over the work that I have been producing. I do notice a couple of creative differences between me and the creative director which is understandable but means that I am producing work that is what the creative director likes rather than what I like.

Because I have been hired as a Graphic Designer rather than an intern, I do feel the pressure of being expected to know how to do a lot, even though this is my first creative professional job. There are various things that I don’t know I want to learn but because I’m the in-house Graphic Designer the only person above me is the creative director and she does not have a background in Graphic Design.

I do notice a difference between working on university projects and real briefs for clients. I do miss the creative freedom and time frame with university projects. Working on real briefs have meant that the final say comes from the creative director and then the client. And in terms of timeframe, I am given a much shorter time to work on a project which is something that I struggled on in the beginning.

I am very proud of my first project that I worked on for tech start-up Crypto Quantique. They had an exhibition in the IOT solutions congress in Barcelona and the project allowed me to fly to Barcelona to oversee my branding that I created for the client. It was a surreal experience being able to see my designs printed in large and next to other tech brands such as Microsoft & Google.