Getting my feet wet in new industries and types of work.

What company? 42 Growth Strategies (a social media marketing agency) works with clients in the health & wellness, sports and pharmaceutical industries.

I was the 3rd designer in this company and I was an intern. The company was established only 6 months before I joined. Myself and two other designers (also interns) received information on the new clients coming on from the owners through Slack and Asana (did I mention it was remote?). We were tasked with determining what the client graphics would look like…I should add, these were social media Instagram graphics.

As an intern, with a fine art background, I was very new to design. This was the first professional experience I had designing for real clients and they were in industries foreign to me at the time. I researched everything I could about the clients, and tried to understand what made their brand unique so I could make the graphics stand out. I also relied on constant communication with the marketing team on the accounts to ensure I was on track with my approach. I approached the work as I would with an art piece, considering the composition, and space to create a dynamic graphic. Knowing it was social media and people scrolled through images a lot, I aimed for one element to have the largest impact to pull the viewer in. I consider myself to be structured and organized, and therefore like my work to provide that structure for the viewer.

I thought up innovative ways to designing the graphics such as creating one visual that would work alone without text, like the vector above that represents the 5 tips inside of the brain (that I drew). The above graphics are only a few examples of the accounts myself and two others created the visual style of the graphics for. This experience was very rewarding as I was creating for real brands and I was able to constantly communicate with the account managers, who’d answer my questions and provide me the information I needed about the clients to ensure I was designing the best way for them. It was preparation for my next experience. Read on.

What company? A Class Act NY, a theatre school for children and adults that hosts programs with Broadway Stars and Theatre Pros.

Enter Danielle… I was the sole designer/marketing/social person. It was myself, the secretary and the owners. My job was to promote the programs as they needed to be, therefore my tasks were changing day-by-day/hour-by-hour, and I had to remain flexible. As a class was announced, or sold out, I created Instagram graphics (captions), stories and engaged with the audience. I created supplemental graphics for the events that would be published to the website as I wrote the events up on Wordpress and Eventbrite. Oh, not to mention the newsletter that went out every day, I created a graphic for that as well.

What started as a chat on the phone every day with the owner about the daily goals, developed into a spreadsheet that outlined the daily goals for graphics. I suggested it as a method to create a more structured process for distributing assignments and in result would free up time for the owner, so she wasn’t getting interrupted throughout the day. What helped here was that I am a major theatre fanatic. I also tried to create a visual narrative with these, such as the Oct 6 Monologue one, since the shows themselves did such, and would place the actors in settings the viewers could recognize.

I spent a lot of time researching how similar companies advertised their programs. In doing so I developed the two styles above (that developed into templates for these types of graphics).