JBU Honors Program T-Shirt Design
I designed two T-shirt designs for a local farmer's market, created for the purpose of screenprinting with no more than three colors.
Outdoor Cap: Marketing Design & Product Photography
CLIENT: OUTDOOR CAP
WORK DONE: DIGITAL & PRINT MARKETING DESIGN; EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS; AND PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY & EDITING
For three months, I had the opportunity to work for Outdoor Cap, a hat and apparel company located in Bentonville, AR, in their marketing department as part of my college degree. I was required to participate in an internship for college credit, so I was fortunate enough to secure this paid internship the summer before my senior year. Their designers reached out to JBU in search of a graphic design intern, and my workstudy supervisor forwarded their information to me, and the rest is history.
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At this point I was comfortable enough with Adobe Creative Suite that I gained minmal knowledge of the design process from this internship, but the areas wherein I did gain significant knowledge were workflow resources such as Trello and PageProof. Being held accountable for my design process, meeting deadlines, and fulfilling critiques and changes were all new areas of learning for me with this internship. I learned about collaborating on a corporate level as well as the etiquette that came with that.
This internship solidified in my mind what I might be doing for the duration of my career. I learned my likes and dislikes in an office setting, as well as the value of communication and finding the areas where I can fit in and am needed on a team.
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Here I have a sampling of about five of the projects I tackled for Outdoor Cap, ranging from small to significant. What I cannot show are several other projects that were done in collaboration with the work of Outdoor Cap's full-time designers, such as updating pricing and imagery on over fifty product flyers, or internal company projects, such as a corporate marketing communications Powerpoint and an employee satisfaction survey design. In total I assisted with or independently completed about fifteen unique projects, which ranged from small edits on an already existing asset to shooting and editing over 130 product photos over the course of a month.
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I really enjoyed this internship, and I hope to find something similar to this job in the future.
Custom Patch Mockups
One of my first projects was to create some custom faux leather patch mockups for our client Halo. One of the marketing departments major ongoing projects is to develop and update customer flyers to promote specific styles and colorways of headgear, so this was my first experience with developing one of these custom flyers.
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At the time we did not have a particular way to generate these mockups with the proper textures and colorways, so I did some of my own digging to purchase and use a leather texture. I experimented with blending modes and different colors in Illustrator to get the right effect. Once I had made the patches with the client's logo (below), I brought everything into Photoshop, including the blank hats and working .psd file of the original flyer (shown below) to put it all together. The final two-sided flyer is to the right, where I superimposed the patches onto the hats.
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This project got me comfortable working with these kinds of flyers in Photoshop, which Outdoor Cap's marketing department used heavily.
Another patch mockup I did was for a digital ad for RMEF, where I was thankfully provided with the correct textures and colorways to get this mockup done. It was very much a similar project - our client had updated their logo and needed a refreshed mockup with the same colorway of hat. Additionally, our only reference file was an export that was completely non-editable (left), so I started from scratch to recreate the new ad (above). It was a simple project but I'm happy with how similarly they turned out.
Social Media & Email Campaigns
Another one of the steady streams of projects that came through the marketing department were to put together social media and email campaigns for Banner & Oak, a branch of Outdoor Cap that catered to a trendier, outdoorsy, millennial market. These campaigns entailed two hero images for the Banner & Oak website - one for web, one for mobile - an Instagram post, an Instagram story, a Facebook banner, a Twitter header, and an email.
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I worked on two of these campaigns in my time at Outdoor Cap. The designers were provided with a small collection of images to work with, as well as a rough sense of the copy and calls to action that were needed. We had to finalize the specifics and layout of the text. The social media and website assets were relatively easy to put together, as each only required some layout adjustments. The emails were a bit more complicated as it required a lot more imagery and communication. They were ultimately delivered via Klaviyo.
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I enjoyed these projects as they catered to a market that was a bit closer to home for me. Working with layout and writing copy is very enjoyable for me, and I wish I had more of a hand in choosing the final set of images to work with - which I did somewhat with the email campaigns - as these design and marketing decisions are very fun for me.
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I did these asset sets entirely in Photoshop using their artboards setting, working within a premade Photoshop document that served as a template for all of these designs. I learned a lot about working with Photoshop in this way while at Outdoor Cap, especially when it came to exporting. As someone who clings to Illustrator, I learned to appreciate the capabilities of other programs.
Product Catalog Photography
The biggest project I tackled while at Outdoor Cap was to help with catalog photography. This entailed assisting our photographer with shooting about 90 new styles and colorways of hats for use in the catalog - both print and digital - as well as the website. I worked with an Iconasys turning table, which can be seen in the unedited photos below.
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Another step of the process involved taking the raw files and removing the background with Iconasys' editing software. The final images can be seen the left. It was a tedious process, since for each hat there were eight different angles, and the color selector for the background would often detect the light areas of the hat.
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Photography is definitely not my forte, but the learning curve was a lot smaller than I expected and I learned how to work hard and quickly to help the team as best as I was able. This internship was all around a great experience because it was by no means overly challenging, but it got me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways, and I learned so much about good workflows and communication.