Week 3 & 4

Between these two weeks, the workload was pretty much the same. The office started to get a little bit hectic and stressful in these last fourteen days due to the confusion between the uniforms, shipping, uniform colors etc.

One of the harder things about being a cheer uniform company is decided color pantones for the teams. There was a very big miscommunication between the printing company and All Star, resulting in the uniforms being delivered in two very different shades of blue. Here is Angel, my boss handling the printed pantone and everyone basically discussing the differences between the two colors.

The work I did was not so stressful, however. I did a proposal of the mesh shorts I've decided and received great feedback. They asked if I like what I've designed, which was my favorite and least favorite design and what I would've changed in terms of color and templates if I had more time.

With that put aside, they took the designs they liked into consideration and instructed the next part of the internship to design sports bras that may or may not come together with the mesh shorts. Just like the mesh shorts, I had to work within clipping masks and symmetry, but I found it much easier to handle and design.

These are a couple of the designs I came up with.

I really liked this limited edition design from Nike from the safari line. I really liked that I could try and manipulate and change it up a little bit and make it more me!

When I proposed it in the middle of week 4, the feedback was as good as it was with the mesh shorts. They were happy with the extent that I've learned in terms of my Illustrator skills and have seen them being put to good use, which is exactly what I intended. They also gave me constructive feedback about designs that would not work well in reality, with it having too many colors and patterns, causing the cost of the item to shoot to the roof.

The skull design that I did on the top has more than 4 colors, which will require a lot of money when it's printed. Which is why in theory it works very well but in real life it might not.

In other news, the company also over ordered about 10 plain pink mesh shorts and allowed me to design vinyls that could be heat pressed onto each shorts. These were also things that they plan to put up on the website to be sold as individual items.

The process of vinyl printing and heat pressing is quite extensive and interesting!

 This is the workroom, or the work shop where the company does the more physical handiwork. The mac mini is uses a program much like the laser cutters at uni to send information out to the printer to do it's work. After doing a design, the rolls next to the laptops are the vinyls that we then align an snap to the grid on the printer as we can see in the picture.

 The printer then cuts very thinly into the vinyl according to the pressure settings. These are the samples that I've printed out. By peeling off the white sheet, only the design is left. The peeling process is called weeding.

 The tool that you see in the picture above is a weeding tool. It picks up the unnecessary vinyl very gently and I am able to remove the excess without ruining the design.

Unfortunately I was not able to take a picture of the final outcome of the designs being printed onto the shorts, but they turned out very well for my first heat press!


At the end of the week, they gave me a limited edition All Star jumper design that they were working on. We also all went out for Chinese food which is always a student's dream!

Overall, I really loved it. The small company, the cozy environment, the laid back attitude of everyone at the work place gave me a different outlook on the graphic design life. Yes, it would be absolutely amazing to work in a huge company and live from deadline to deadline, but sometimes, it's so much nicer to take a step back and use the road less taken!

Till then.

Week 2

As the progression of the week went by, I sat by still drawing out templates in various themes for the company. These in turn were used for upcoming designs for teams which under private conditions, were not allowed by me to publicize before the teams get to see them. However, I managed to see them in the Brookes Bluebirds design team, which is the wings at the back of the uniform.

On Thursday and Friday, I was asked to work on a new project, which was to design mesh shorts to be put up on the website for people to pick and choose. The entire market profit of All Star Nation is actually focused on team putting in specific orders for their members in their own team names. This was a new was to branch out into selling individual pieces to the public to enjoy without buying in bulk. The whole idea of it was for it to be very open ended. And with no client or design in mind, I could really pour into my creative process. I had to work with clipping masks between each layers to make sure that the seams match up and the proposals will mirror the printing process.

Most of the designs which you see are generated from the computer or picked from the templates which I've done beforehand. These were a couple of examples that I came up with.

Throughout the week, there were many uniforms that came in that the clients wanted photos of. As the job of the only female in the office, it's also my intern job to try on the fit of the uniforms.

The more boring things I've done in the office would be standard paperwork. It's a job of  mine to transfer information from the document sent by the printing company into the documents that we would send out to the clients. When new uniforms come in from shipping, it's also partly my duty to sort through loose threads, sizes, and quantity before being shipped off to their new owners. I've made errands to the post office to psot sample t-shirts to places like Kent to Egypt, as well as sampled a couple of shorts that have errors in them, so it gives us a better idea of how to fix it as a whole.

I feel that interning in a small company, the boring jobs have to be passed on because more important things have to be done. I don't feel that the standard administration work is something beneath me because everything I take home becomes a great learning process.

Overall the experience has been slightly exhausting considering I go into work everyday from 9am to 5pm, but I still love it. Gwen's Taiwanese mum makes me delicious free Asian dinners so I get to go home happy and full almost every night of the week!

Gwen's mum has also taught me how to knit! Which is the coolest thing ever, I would say. I didn't think that knitting would be part of my job during lunch hours, but I'm having the best time of my life!

 

First week!

I would say my internship days are going much as I planned it would.

All Star Nation (linked in text) is a wonderful graphic design company solely focused on cheer apparels. These things include training kits, sizing kits, uniforms, sports bras, team t-shirts, bows, whatever you name it for cheer, they have it. They have done designs for teams all over Europe, as well as Team England, which recently represented us at cheerleading worlds in America. All Star Nation also does designs for Westminster, which is how I came into contact with them for my month-long internship.

The office is set in a quiet little house in Golder's Green, with a wonderful backyard. I'd also like to mention that I've donated a portion of my 160 Yorkshire tea bags to them so I can brew tea whenever I like. My day consists of waking up early, shovelling an apple and peach yoghurt down my throat before making my way to the office for a day's worth of work.

For the first two days, I mostly dabbled in physical illustrations and artwork. Below are some of the templates I've worked on.

I basically had to work around drawing things that would appeal to clients. For example, if the team wanted lightning, wings, diamonds, bows or fire, we had to have a set of workable vector templates for us to choose from when we want to start designing to be able to give a wide scope of proposals to them.

I then moved into scanning my work onto the computer and using image trace to turn them into vector images. I'd also like to mention that up until now, my Illustrator skills have deteriorated because of my very fearful relationship with it. I'd much prefer Photoshop, which usually makes me shy away from the slight difference in techniques.

I revelled in the image trace tool like it was a god. I am a hands on type of designer, I love working with pencils and graphic pens and the recent discovery of image trace has made my world all the more better. I was also able to increase my knowledge in how to correct things that I didn't like with the pen tool.

Next I was asked to work on drawing physical models that fit each uniform template for both men and women. When it came to proposals, it's obviously hard for the client to imagine what the uniforms would look like on a person and my task was to provide them of this service. I used the same type of techniques to generate a 3 vector bodies and heads for the three different types of uniforms, male, female competition uniforms, and female training kits.

 

I also had to work within layers on Illustrator, (which was something I had no experience with) to ease the design process of looking at skirts and shorts at the same place without having to change windows. I also had to work with filling colour to each model, which was quite a challenge. I worked with the gradient and colour picking tool from images online to help me stay within a realistic range of skin tones.


The entire process I've gone through so far has been very rewarding. I see myself taking these Illustrator techniques with me a long way into the future and it's helped me venture out from the comfort zone which is Photoshop. It also opens my eyes to the amount of detailing in paperwork and documenting that goes into each set of shipping.

On top of free Oreos and home made cookies, freshly brewed tea 2-3 times a day, getting all the inside gossip about cheer world, and modelling for the samples shipped into the office, I'm having the time of my life. Maybe going to a bigger, more established graphic design company would've let me to open my eyes to what my work life would eventually be like, but I always feel like starting small and working in such close groups will always lead me to learning more at the start.

Here's to me, looking forward to another 3 weeks of my internship here at All Star Nation.