Internship site: SkinIt
Department: Design
Project Title: Skins (and possibly "Skins for a cause") [If anyone has any better ideas for a project title, please do suggest it.]
General Description: Design some skins to contribute to the Skinit website and design selection. Floral designs mainly, and hopefully I'll have some that can go into the "Premium", "Art", or "Fashion" sections. If I can get my "Skins for a cause" idea licensed, I will work on that as well.
Learning Objectives: How to use Photoshop and Illustrator, design for someone else, and manage time. Also, learning how to communicate with my coworkers for critique and to other departments for other means (like licensing).
Organization/Company Objectives & Benefits: They get some new skins to add to their massive collection/they can sell it. If I get TWLOHA up and affiliated, it can last a long time and it can be really beneficial in the long run, for both companies.
Schedule: My general schedule seems to be "work on dailies in the morning, work on design after lunch", but maybe next week I'll switch it around a bit. I'm working on designs at home as well, and I hope to have two to three designs done by next Friday. If TWLOHA is approved by then too, I'll be working on that next week and on the final week.
Academic Skills: Communication, design.
Technical Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, designs
Collaboration—Skills and Opportunities: TWLOHA is a big opportunity, since it's an organization outside of my school or work or anything I do in general, so it gives me the opportunity to go outside my comfort zone. The whole internship experience allows me to see how a real workplace operates, and contributing my own designs gives me the opportunity to see if I'm any good, not to mention that on the way I have a lot of people who can give me advice and critique.
Exhibition Plans: I plan on posting and advertising my designs on my blog, digital portfolio, some networking sites, and I want to have some skins printed out to display. I also want to have some of Skinit's other designs too to show what kind of work they do, what I have been doing to try and meet their standards and beyond, and their products (also in comparison to mine).
Schedule & Timelines: I already talked to licensing about getting TWLOHA to collaborate, but it will take some time before it actually goes live. I started working on my first design today, and I'll try to finish it this weekend. By Tuesday I hope to be starting a second design, or even finishing it if I already started it during the weekend, and by Friday I'll have two to three designs mapped out on the three archetype skins for laptops, cell phones, and MP3 players. By the third week I might be working on more designs, finalizing and getting them live, collaborating with TWLOHA (hopefully), and preparing for my Presentation of Learning.
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A summary of my week
I spent almost my entire week at internship working on daily productions. Even though the holidays have passed and they don't have a lot of orders coming in, it's kind of swamped up so I helped them out with them and learned about the process of arranging and organizing them quickly efficiently. I took my time at first, but throughout the week I gained a steady pace for working on the dailies. The average time I spent on one skin was twenty to thirty minutes at first, and I only got about more than a dozen done, but as the week progressed, I got faster. On Wednesday my average time spent on one skin was five minutes, and I got over forty done (in six hours!). The average fell again on Thursday, but that was because I spent some time planning my designs, and I took on some more difficult skins so it took a while to get used to. On the last day of the week I worked on dailies in the morning and got a lot done because the design team was a bit swamped--I got over two dozen skins done, and that's pretty good for about a half a day's work. I spent the later half of that day working on my own design. It was just a start but I think I'm a little more than a third of the way done.
A screen shot of some of the work I got done on my own design. It's a work in progress.
To be a little more specific about the dailies I worked on throughout the week, on Monday I tried out some of the flourish and sports designs. I found out they were really high quality and not too bad to work on. I also tried to design a game device skins, like Nintendo DS. I usually did phones and laptops before, so when I tried the game devices I found them really hard but fun to figure out. I tried some of the "premium" designs, like the Lotus, Koi, and some of the Kanji designs too. I found those really fun to do because they had very little elements to them, but I also had to figure out how to make it look good on something like an iPhone or a Dell where there is only a limited amount of usable space. I also found out Dell laptops are really hard to work with since they have that circle in the middle that they insist on not covering.
A Disney skin I worked on (this picture was taken on Monday).
On Tuesday I went to talk to Linda from the licensing/legal department about working with TWLOHA, but whatever happens with the licensing and how long it takes was out of my hands so I just worked on dailies for the rest of the day. I went for mostly things I was familiar with, like the premium designs and Disney and Twlight New Moon designs, both of the latter of which I had discovered were fun to do last week on Friday. Except for Pirates of the Caribbean designs--while they're Disney, it took a lot of time to arrange the skins with those designs. I tried more game skins for things like the DS Lite, GameBoy Advanced, and PSP. I worked on camera skins too, and they're really fun to work with. I actually went in and worked with a "smart object" for the first time too. I was afraid to do anything more than transform them before, because I thought it would affect every other file that had the smart object in it, but then I learned that they weren't really linked so I could rearrange the smart object if I needed to.
A Conduct Happiness skin I worked on (I took this picture on Friday).
On Wednesday I worked mostly on flourishes, which were the easiest to do and took the least time, in my opinion. I played around with more smart objects (I tried not to do it too much though, in case it did affect the others... but even it didn't seem to, I was cautious). There were a few Disney and Conduct Happiness (another type of design I really liked to do that I found last Friday) designs, some Koi ones, some Pirates of the Caribbean, and there were some fantasy artwork and artist ones I had fun with (Ruth Thompson and Peter Horjus art skins especially). I had to wait a long time after I finished work for my mom to come, so I ended up taking a lot of pictures of the sky too. The sunset in Miramar is so beautiful!
A skin with art by Ruth Thompson. It can be found on Skinit here. (Picture taken on Wednesday.)
On Thursday, my mentor John was out sick. I had been hoping to talk to him about my design ideas, but I talked to my coworker Michael about what to do to start a design instead and then worked on dailies all day. Most of the first batch I worked on were corporate skins from Crizal, and a little later on I worked on a string of Twilight skins (and as I said in an earlier post, while I may not like Twilight, the skins sure are fun and easy to work with) and a lot of sports skins. I saw some weird designs, something that struck me was a Virgin Mary and a Jesus Christ design, and I saw some strange devices too, like a "Venture (intel) Ascent (AMD) Face Plate" (which I had trouble trying to figure out what it was when I couldn't search up its 6-digit device code, SYSTMX). I did a few more fantasy art skins from Kerem Beyit (via Voottoo) and Ed Beard Jr. too. Oh, and during lunch I met someone who worked in the floor below me, Matt, who was the one who made all the skin templates, which was pretty cool.
On Friday I brought in my tablet and installed the driver, but I didn't use it until later. Michael had me fix a few skins I worked on the previous day and taught me what to do with certain legal lines and to not arrange objects to be edge-to-edge with the template. Then I worked on some flourishes, Alchemy, and artist deisngs like Peter Horjus, Jorge Oswaldo, and Al McWhite. There were a few Dell orders, and as I said before, Dells aren't that fun to do. After lunch, as I said above, I got to work on my first design for my project, and I got about a third of the way done before I packed up and left. I learned a lot by doing even the beginning of it--I didn't even know Smart Filters existed! And when I checked CS3 at home I figured out it had existed before too. It came in real handy when I was working, and I got to use Smart Objects too, and it's my first time using both functions. Oh, and when I got home and checked the Skinit website, I was really surprised to see that they changed the layout! I had heard John and the others talking with some people who came into the department, and I think John was working on it throughout the week, but it seems like they got a revamped website live really quickly. It was totally more easy to navigate and there were no glitches that I could see too, so I was impressed.
My workstation with my tablet. (Picture taken Friday.)
I also worked on some LA Williams this week too, and I hope I can work on some more fantasy artists like Larry Elmore, Ciruelo Cabral, and Ruth Sanderson.
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