
Personal experience
The internship at Meivia was my first experience working at a corporate company and also my first experience of creating a complete website. I was a little apprehensive about taking up the project as I wasn’t sure I wanted to do website design, my interests leaning more towards print related and publication design. This opportunity came up right after I completed college and since it would be better to explore rather than fix on one field when I was just starting out, I decided to take it up.
In the beginning as the result of a small communication gap I thought that my job was to create the entire branding for the company, which would include a new logo, company collateral as well as the website. It turned out that it was only to develop the existing logo and bring visual consistency across the company’s material, with the website being a priority. However, since I felt that it would be good to look into rebranding as well I was allowed to work on new logo options. I proposed and presented three new logo options for the company along with examples of website pages for each of them as well as an example website page for the existing logo. The options were received well but in the end the existing logo was chosen along with a combination of elements from the different options. One of the challenges I faced was to recreate the old logo from scratch as the original files were unavailable and to develop a colour palette for it that was similar to the existing one. Working on a largely text based website was interesting especially as it was, in a way, close to working with something print related.
I would have enjoyed working on a completely new logo and brand identity as I would get to explore and develop something different. In this case because of the restrictions I had of fitting the existing logo into a working visual language, I sometimes felt stuck and unable to find a proper solution. I realised that this is harder than creating something by yourself where all the elements are in your control.
The commute to the office was around two hours one way, sometimes it would take longer than that. Spending four hours travelling, changing buses as well as walking was something that I haven’t had to do before. It was interesting in the beginning because I was trying out different combinations of routes to find the fastest way to get to the office and it was good to be out and observe people around. Once I got used to it, it began to get a bit tiring and sometimes was a waste of time as I would have to get back home and work again. So as often as I could I tried to work from home.
Overall these three months were quite a good experience. I got to meet, talk and work with people who were working in a completely different field and get an idea of what an office environment is like.
Professional learning
I learnt to streamline my work and be organized so that the work flows smoothly and can be delivered on time. One of the things that I could not do before was accurately estimate the time required to complete a certain assignment. Having to do it a few times helped in getting a better idea of how to do the estimation. I learnt to work with deadlines where other people were dependent on whether I gave something on time or not.
I realised it is a challenge to be able to present your work convincingly and put forward your ideas in a polite and firm way. Also, it is something that can only come by practice.
Talking to the developers and seeing how they understand or translate the website page designs that I provided was a good learning experience. I realised that it is not easy to get it done exactly the way you want.
I also have a slightly better idea now on how to charge for projects that I do and how businesses work.