Overview
Worked for Red Frame Lab part-time as a student Graphic Designer for 3.5 years making promotional material for print and digital. I met monthly with a team consisting of my bosses and some other students to discuss strategies for expanding Red Frame’s presence on campus. I had complete creative freedom when it came to designing for events, though I worked closely with my boss to develop a consistent brand identity for our content during my last 2 years.
My job
I was responsible for creating visual promotional content for print (11x17 posters) and digital (social media and TV screen). Being a part-time student job, I would receive about 1-3 projects per semester from my bosses usually with a 2-3 week turnaround. Starting with an email or Slack message filled with logistics, a description, and maybe a headshot of the speaker/group leading the event, I would then have complete creative freedom when it came to deciding how I would portray the event through visual design.
A typical 11x17 poster
1x1 for social media
1920x1080 for TV screen
My process
After getting hired my freshman year, I remember stopping in front of a large bulletin board outside my dining hall overcrowded with posters advertising groups, events, and opportunities all across campus. I stared at the board for a minute or two and asked myself:
“How can I make a poster that stands out on this wall or any other on campus?”
When beginning a poster, I would always start with the title. I love working with type, so I found that by figuring out a font and style I liked with the title, I could then continue the rest of the poster accordingly. I write essays the same way—start with the introduction paragraph and then write the rest of the paper.
SP22
SP22
FA19
FA21
SP19
SP19
SP22
FA19
FA20
SP19
Other projects
Amongst the typical event posters, I also had the opportunity to design logos for subbrands within Red Frame, such as their consulting program, Red Start Up. From brainstorming to sketching to tinkering in illustrator, I went through many iterations of this logo before landing on the final design.
Final RED logo
Logo iterations from start to finish
In the fall of 2019, I had the chance to tackle a much bigger project for Red Frame, which was designing a series of cohesive advertisements to help promote their annual alumni summit, ReMix.
Takeaways
Looking back, this was such an excellent opportunity for someone like me who was passionate about design and needed an outlet to practice and show my work. Being a busy college student, having a casual, low-stakes design job during school was a nice creative outlet to test out techniques I had learned online or in class.
The biggest aspect I was missing from this experience was critique. None of my bosses were designers, so whenever I would finish and send them a project, it was always “great,” aside from maybe a typo or a time change. So, while I was producing lots of posters and feeling confident about them, I wasn’t developing my design skills. I gained plenty of experience in workplace communication, collaboration, and inner-company logistics.