It’s now the third week of my internship at Osaka University’s Photonics Center and I’m starting to feel at home here. We had another meeting to discuss my work and how I could best help the Photonics Center to the best of my ability. The two topics we discussed were my involvement with The Osaka Photonics initiative and also my future involvement in the revitalization of the Osaka Photonics Center’s main website. For the Osaka Photonics Initiative, we discussed the approach I should take while developing the other pages for the website. We also made a working list of some of the articles need to be created for the site. I was put in charge of creating most of these article so I’ll need to look over some information and think of a way to create easy to understand explanations for photonics concepts that can be understood by individuals in the community. We also spent a lot of time talking about the revitalization of the Osaka Photonics Center’s main website. We have a group of developers doing the backend- development for new website. I’ll be one of two developers that will be doing design work for the front-end. We still do not know when the back-end development will be completed so I will be focusing my time between writing articles for the Osaka Photonics initiative and designing the other web pages. Another task we have is the linkage of the Osaka Photonics Initiative to the Osaka Photonics Centers main homepage. We still need to decide how we are going to link the two together.

By the end of the second week of my internship I think I’ve started to get a little used to being in Japan. The previously bizarre customs and formalities due to the cultural shock of being in japan have started to become more familiar occurrences for me. My uptake of the language has also been going great. I’ve learned so much in the time  since my arrival because very few people speak English. This week, I continued doing work on the Osaka Photonics Initiative. This week was crucial for the entire movement because we need to figure out exactly what we hope to accomplish with the initiative so we can focus our efforts. After a few meetings and discussions, we decided that the movement would focus on Teachers, Students, Community and Industry. As a resource for teachers it would give them the tools to teach photonics in their classroom and inform them on the importance of photonics. As a resource for students, we want it to teach them about the growing field of photonics and give them the opportunity to get involved through photonic projects, events or OSA/SPIE student chapters. As a resource for community, we want to let government and citizens now about what photonics is and how it is both ecofriendly and creating a lot of jobs. As a resource for Industry, we hope to educate companies that using photonics is a great idea because it is a cheap and ecofriendly alternative to a lot of more harmful sciences. These ideas have become the foundation for the project.

I used my experience in Illustrator and Photoshop in order to develop some possible logos for the movement but in the end we decided that we were just going to use the school’s crest because we decided that we wanted the school to benefit from the traffic that will frequent the website. I began creating the template for the website. The template included the navigation bar, the body, the head banner and the site map at the bottom. I created the template by utilizing my knowledge of Bootstrap’s grid system. Bootstrap was my tool of choice for the project because it is extremely modern and compatible with mobile devices. In order to make the web page even more robust and professional, I spent a lot of time learning and implementing media queries that will detect the screen size and then show exclusive content for different devices. After I finished the initial version of the template, I had to spend a lot of time on bug fixes and small adjustments to padding and margins. Once the first version of the template was done I meet with my supervisors to go over the template and changes. After receiving feedback, I went ahead and made the necessary changes. Once a finalized version of the template was created, I started the development of the homepage. I wanted the home page to be great for a few reasons. The first one is that the homepage is page that will receive the highest amount of traffic. The second part is the homepage is the most important page for user retention. If the homepage is strong the user will stay and if it’s weak the user is more likely to leave. I decided to go with a block design where each block is a featured article. I thought this design would be hip and cool because the HD images would make the site look futuristic and high end. In order to implement the block system I had to spend a lot of time learning and working with Image manipulation. I got a good version of the homepage working but it still needs some more time to be prepared for launch.

This was the first week of my internship at Osaka University’s Photonics Center. I flew into Tokyo on Monday around 3 and I made it to Osaka around midnight.  I got to experience sunlight for 48 hours during my travel to Osaka as a result of how time zones and the sun’s rotation work. Once I arrived at my housing, went to bed because I was exhausted from the trip. The next day was the first day of my internship. I was told to arrive for my first day at around 10:30. When I arrived, everyone at the office was having their weekly tea time which they have every Tuesday at 10:30. I had the opportunity to talk to everyone at the center and I also had the opportunity to try a lot of different Japanese snacks. During my first day on the job, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of the staff and students and learn about their involvement at Osaka University and the surrounding community. Notably I was interested by their yearly program called “child science super light school” where they teach children grades 4-6^th about light and photonics through hands on projects. For the remainder of Monday, I was asked to help out with some graphics design work and a meeting was arranged for Tuesday to discuss the project that they planned for me to lead during my time here. On Tuesday I learned that the project I would be leading is The Osaka Photonics Initiative; A project that will enable members of the community to learn about photonics and how it is used in everyday life. It will also give teachers the resources to easily teach photonics concepts to their students through hands on learning projects. To start the process of creating this online resource, there was an initial interview where we discussed the vision and objectives for the initiative. Once the meeting was finished I took the list of objectives and designed a few mock site with these ideas in mind. They included PDF layouts, color schemes and page organization documents. Once these were created, I had another meeting with my supervisors where we decided on which format we wanted to move forward with. After we decided on one I went ahead and started to create the homepage for the website using BootStrap, CSS, HTML and Dreamweaver. My first week was extremely busy but I was able to accomplish a lot.

Going into finals week, I will write this post before I start my exams. My design studio internship has been an incredible experience that has rewarded me with knowledge in graphic design, web development, web design,  managing databases, and WordPress.  I could not be more grateful with my supervisor for everything that I have learned.  I didn’t only learn a lot by working but, I also discovered my passion. I decided to specialize in UX design. By designing layouts of websites with my supervisor, I learned how to do wireframes, prototypes and flow layouts which I found incredibly interesting. Being the tech industry in the boom that it is now, UX design is becoming almost crucial component for any company that needs an application or a web service. That inspired me to contact Go Pro’s senior UX designer Jake Krajewski. After having an interview with him I decided to become a UX designer for sure. This would have never happened without this internship.

Another part for which I feel very grateful is how patient my supervisor was with me. I was able to learn so much from her thanks to her patience and teaching abilities. Outside of the internship I learned that it is better to focus only in one thing and do it right rather than do to many. Also I understood the struggle of how to manage a design studio.  By being part of this studio I saw the ambition and the tenacity of being an entrepreneur in the design world. At last but not least, I learned a lot of photoshop and illustrator techniques that I didn’t know before.

Overall I feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of this studio for a semester and I can’t wait to see what it becomes. It has been an amazing time.

These past three weeks have been one of the craziest in my life. My schedule has gone from having classes only three times a week, to waking up at 8 and going to sleep until 3 in the morning every day. There were two weeks I was having three jobs at once, plus classes. It has been truly exhausting. So my performance at the studio hasn’t been the greatest. I have been having a lot more of graphic design projects which I have been ok at… However, I have improved a lot in my photoshop skills. She has taught me many shortcuts, techniques and other photoshop “secrets” that have become very useful. Also, I have been designing more web site layouts which has been very exciting. This is helping me in my UX design career path I want to focus on later on.  But no matter how much I was interested in the work I was doing, I was constantly stressed thinking on my to-do list of the day. So after finishing one of the three jobs, I decided to put priorities first and I quit my second job at the stetson marketing office. I was doing good at it, and I was learning a lot too, but it got to a point that it was too much. So, I decided put all my focus in the internship and in my classes. This was all a big learning experience for me. I learned that pushing the limits can be good sometimes; but most of the times is very unpractical.

After only having to work at the design studio I have been more relaxed and more focused on my job. I am more energetic and I am constantly learning new things. I learned this past week how to manage lighting in photoshop and how to have a good balance in a picture or graphic design project. Every day I am learning something new. Overall these have been exhausting but very exciting weeks.

These past three weeks have been better at the studio. My performance has increased and I am way faster in doing the projects than I used to be. I have finally learned how to back up all the different websites, databases, and plug-ins for most of the websites without needing my supervisor’s help. That has been a great achievement. However, there is still a lot more to learn. That has been my lesson for the last weeks. I need to put more effort into learning for long term projects rather than just doing it for the moment. I also learned that I need to improve greatly in my Photoshop and Illustrator skills. Even though I thought I knew a lot of illustrator, there is still much more to know. I have learned a lot from my supervisor by using both programs with her supervision. I have done more graphic and web projects these weeks that I have done it before.

After this time at the internship, I have noticed that the graphic projects are more stressful than backing up the databases. I thought it was mainly because graphic design can be kind of relative. Good design is the eye of the beholder. That’s why I was always trying to make the designs in my supervisor’s style so she could like them. However, today I noticed that is better to know your own style and design based on that rather on making your boss like it. I take way more time trying to design something that does not come natural to me. I still need to find a balance between my style and what the clients want, however, I believe this discovery has been a great learning experience. Overall, I have learned a lot at the studio and I can’t wait to learn more everyday.

These past two weeks were a little bit different than the others at the studio. Even though I did the usual back ups of the websites and the updates of plug ins and versions of WordPress, I finally got to do some graphics design projects. The first one was to make a Valentine’s day banner for one of the client’s websites. This wasn’t difficult but I had some help of my supervisor. I learned to use Photoshop better and to use the pencil tool properly. I also learned that graphic design projects had to be done in no less than an hour. Then, I had to design business cards for another client and this one was particularly frustrating. The client had some specific details she wanted to add to the cards and no matter what I did, I wasn’t able to make a design that looked good. This was the first time this happened to me with a graphic design project. So I had to look for inspiration and tried several designs until until a got some that were better. I presented 4 to my supervisor and we sent one of them completely finished for the client’s approval. I believe it took me so long because I was really tired that day. So, I have been to trying to sleep more in order to perform better at the studio. And the third and last project was an anniversary logo. This one was easier and I got to be a little bit more creative because the clients had no specific petitions. Overall, I learned a lot of new things in these weeks, and I am still excited to learn more.

This is the first post about my experience thus far interning at Collective.  Ben and Jess are wonderful people whom I have the pleasure of working alongside.  Jess is Ben’s assistant and has given me the framework of my role at Collective.

The first thing I noticed was the tech savy nature of the workplace.  Communication is done through Gmail, Evernote, and Dropbox.   After getting acquainted with how things worked, I was given my first couple of assignments.  The first assignment I completed was a promotional poster for a Superbowl tailgate they were having.  So I went outside, took a picture of the parking lot, and brought the picture into Photoshop.

Having the knowledge of working with Photoshop really helped with this assignment.  I just threw in some effects alongside text describing the event, blurred certain parts of the image and adjusted the coloring.  After the image was made I had to make a Facebook event for the tailgate, inviting the different groups for the event.

Another task I do every week is invite people to the weekly Collective service on Facebook as well as the other events throughout the week they host.  After each service on Sunday, I pull the audio and create a podcast.  I usually compress the audio file in Logic and then upload this to the Pod Bean account they have (this is a podcast hosting service).  After the podcast is made, I make a blog post for their website through New York Ave compiling the podcast, a service summary written by the other intern, and the images corresponding to that event.

This week we worked on something different than backing up websites or maintaining them. The most interesting part from this week was figuring out how build a newsletter for one of the studio’s clients. I had to copy the design from a photoshop layout and copy it to WordPress so the clients could use the layout and change its content everytime they needed to. This project taught me to be humble and just learn as much as I could from it. Even though it was frustrating to make since it was the first time, me and my supervisor were able to finish it after a lot of work. Coding was pretty frustrating but its good to learn every type of front-end developing I can.

Everyday, thanks to this internship, I have been gaining more and more experience with WordPress. However, I will try to learn more and more outside of work to learn all of its features and its potential.

And last but not least, this week’s lesson was more about organizing myself than anything else. Since I just started my other job plus this internship and my university work, I had to learn to organize my time and be able to finish everything that I need to do on time. This week I was able to so and I expect it to keep that way for as long as I can. Overall, this week was really amazing in the internship and I am excited to learn more

I have learned a lot during my first week at the internship. My supervisor is incredibly nice, the workspace is clean and beautiful, and the work is perfect in giving me real-world experience. This week, the studio’s manager taught me her methodology to do work, how to organize the workload, and how to use different programs like Filezilla to upload and download files from a server. Another big part of the time she taught me me how to back up and maintain many of the websites from their clients. It was also my first time working with WordPress. I am specially excited to learn how to use this application because it will be useful for the rest of my career. I also had to see some tutorials in Lynda.com to understand its functions better. What was most interesting to me was the amount of work that goes behind building a website. I didn’t know much of it is based on databases and PHP programming. And last but not least, I was amazed by how much you learn by having hands-on experience rather than just being in a classroom. I believe I have learned more in this week than in a lot of my classes in my college. Overall, my first impression of my internship has been great.