Back to School Blog

I'm back in Syracuse after a fantastically lovely summer. My summer internship went very well. This was my second year doing graphic design for the Public Health Department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Last year I spent all summer designing two booklets to help teens and adults quit smoking. After the intense year of CommDesign I went through last year I was able to tackle three logos, multiple pieces for a children's handwashing campaign, and design the board for a board game. It proved to me what my professors have been telling me all along. They cram an undergraduate's degree worth of education into the CommDesigner's sophomore year. It was intense, bit it was worth it. I went back to that internship a different designer. In a meeting with the Cleveland Board of Public Health I was introduced to the board not as an intern like the other girl I worked with, but as the designer working on the project. It felt good.

Now I'm back and getting into the groove again. Junior year feels very different than sophomore year. We are treated like graduate students. We have loose guidelines, and we get to choose our own projects. If it wasn't for the strict guidelines for projects last year I wouldn't be comfortable with this freedom, but they trained us well. The trick is to come up with a good idea that you're passionate about and that you won't mind working intensely on for a month. I've chosen to further the kind of handwashing campaign I worked on over the summer, but doing it my own way :) This time I'm aiming it toward young adults, making it a guerilla ad campaign and seeing if I can even give it a viral aspect. The trick (and the fun) of the project is to make an edgy exciting project about handwashing. This week I'm preparing a presentation including an in depth design brief, pitching names, slogans and a look and feel. This class is very special because the juniors and seniors are being taught together. That means we get critiqued not just by our peers and our professor but by kids who have already been through this. I'm very excited.

In my second CommDesign class I have another where we talk about design issues, what we want to know about being a designer, what is good design, who are good designers etc. My whole grade is in this class together (around than 30 kids), and it's team taught by two of our professors. The class is very energetic. Everyone participates and debates. I enjoy having forum where everyone sits down and discusses in depth design, the career of design, and what I'm getting myself into.

I'll try to talk a bit about my non-design classes in future posts. For the record, I'm enjoying all three of them. I think this is going to be a good semester. Thank goodness.