Internship Photo Essay

The Fountain That Spurts Chocolate Flowers

Final Designs – What did I make?

Sakura

I’ve always been skilled with illustrations and design, and I’ve always thought about my future. Ever since I entered high school and I heard about internships from my brother, I thought about where I would like to be placed. At the very end of my sophomore year, a future High Tech High Media Arts teacher saw me working on a photo manipulation, and he talked to me about what I liked to do. When I mentioned internships, he offered to set up one for me with his friend at SkinIt, a company that creates vinyl stickers that protect and personalize devices. In January of 2010, I spent three and a half weeks interning for John O’Brien. I spent my first weeks working on daily production, and then I got to move onto creating my own designs, not only as a project but as a personal goal to improve my graphic design skills and put my talent to the test. I had never done anything to such a large scale like this before, and I was excited for the opportunity to get my work into a world outside my own. Cherry Blossom was my first design. It was inspired by a box pattern that I thought was cute and my fascination with the Japanese culture. I created this design in Adobe Photoshop at the end of my first full week, using it to experiment with Smart Objects. I made nine color variations on it, and when I showed it to my sister, she suggested that I create a Jacaranda version of the Cherry Blossom design, so I did. It added to the color variations, and I think it looked nice. When I was creating it, I got a few critiques from my coworkers and mentor. For instance, I added scan lines behind the flowers and John told me, “I think it adds texture, especially for something like that where it’s a plain gradient.” I personally love the vibrant colors of the design as well, and I’m glad this was my first design.

Coffee

Spiral Dots, my second design, is, in my own opinion, my most original design. The inspiration for this came out of nowhere, almost literally, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with coffee, which is interesting because I don’t even drink coffee. This design started off as a grid of dots on Photoshop, which I tried to warp and transform in various ways, but it didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to. I tried bigger dots and smaller dots and it still didn’t look right. I had to then place every dot exactly where I wanted it, and exactly the size I wanted it. The whole process was really annoying, and there were so many layers that Photoshop became extremely slow, but it mostly came out the way I imagined it would look in my head, so I was happy. However, it caused me a lot of trouble, since after I got the dots arranged the way I wanted them to be, I couldn’t apply any Smart Filters to it because the file took up so much space that my computer ran out of space to render anything. Eventually I found the alternative in a fisheye warp, which looked a lot better than I thought it would. Then there was a problem with saving it—it took half an hour. I had to do a lot of waiting for this design, and then some more for the color variations of this design—there were over two dozen! I loved this design, but I also hated it. Well, as John said to me once, not being satisfied is part of being a good designer.

Sprout

Dream Fountain was the design I made after Spiral Dots. I hadn’t actually planned this to be my third design to begin with, and I had something more along the floral and going-green kind of theme in mind, but when I talked to my sister this idea came up and I started working on this at home on a weekend. I learned my lessons with Cherry Blossom and Spiral Dots, and I created the shapes for this design in Adobe Illustrator to save myself the trouble of a boatload of layers. I finished it at the art department office where I worked, and made a little over a dozen color variations. While I was laying this design out on some skin templates, John gave me some pointers on how to lay it out, since the lace at the top had a feminine touch to it and the design was somewhat gender-neutral. The top got cut off a little on a cell phone with a screen on the front or an iPod, but I didn’t mind it too much. I personally love this design—it’s simple and elegant, and it’s dedicated to my sister.

Skinners

After I created my designs and laid them out on the three archetype templates for laptops, cell phones, and music players, I used a premade Photoshop action to create skinners of them. Skinners are photorealistic models of the skin on a device. I did this because obviously, I had many designs and color variations, so instead of printing it all and wasting resources, I printed only a few and created 3D models of the rest. That way I could see how all the designs look, since I didn’t have three iPods to put my designs on or a Motorola Razor to skin. After I created the skinners, I arranged them in Adobe InDesign, so that I could have some comp sheets to print out. Comp sheets are layouts used to present some of the designs, along with the skinners to show how they looked on the devices. They were useful because my designs could be presented without actually having a skinned device with me. After all, the point of creating a skin design was to see it on a product!

Skinned Devices

After I created the comp sheets, the designs were printed and I actually skinned some of my own personal devices, along with some of my sister’s devices too. My final skinned devices look positively beautiful. I skinned my phone, my sister’s phone, both of our Game Boy Advance SP handheld gaming platforms, my Nintendo DS, and my Compaq laptop. A majority of my devices are decorated with my Dream Fountain design, but I absolutely adore my Cherry Blossom laptop. I’m very satisfied with the outcome of my project, my time at SkinIt, and my new personalized devices! SkinIt is something that is really addicting and I would definitely skin more things in the future. Unfortunately, my designs are unique to my own devices right now, since they are not up on the website, but I’ve talked to John and maybe someday everyone else can enjoy them too.