– Pixel Dreams Internship
Tuesday August 27, 2019
Written by: Helen Wang
Featured image by: Helen Wang
When applying for design internships, I found tons of choices in Toronto. I applied to the design agency Pixel Dreams and they asked me to complete some questionnaires. Surprisingly, I found it was really interesting for me to answer questions about my life, my dreams, and my skills. There were also some Ah-Mai-Zing philosophy questions that I enjoyed answering.
After I gained admission to the PD internship, I was really excited by the opportunity to learn lots of knowledge, skills, and techniques. And most amazingly to engage with the PD team. During the very first 2 weeks, I felt it was pretty tough to adapt to the new environment, but after lots of practice and extra learning, I got sharper and noticed improvement as a professional designer.
What have I learnt during the 3 month design internship?
- File Organization: Importance of backing up files, naming conventions
- Time Management: Daily/weekly schedule
- Improvement (Kaizen): Improving design skills, multi-tasking. The overall internship is a process of constantly improving yourself!
- Presentation: Monday 8am weekly-heartbeat, Friducation presentations, Learn some tricks (i.e. strong confidence, feel no fear, no awkwardness)
- Scrum: Teamwork, Asana, daily stand-up at 4pm, weekly radar on Monday morning
- Ownership: Take responsibility for your own tasks, ensure the process are right on track.
- Email formatting: The hierarchy of information sharing
- Branding ideology: Design sharing, how to successfully hit the concept requirements
- Friendship: Team engagement, fun times (i.e. Learn and share memes Pepe the frog, Party Parrot, Nonna, Tingz, Whaooo!)
How have I Improved?
During the 3 months internship, I feel I have gained a lot of experience on presentation, design thinking, and making friends. Mentally, I feel that I grew up a little bit during the internship. Skillswise, I improved a lot on Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD techniques and skills. My speed and design quality are way better than the first day of the internship. My reading speed is much faster since I have read lots of books and look forward to reading more. My organization skills are way better than before. Speaking of knowledge gained, I learnt about ownership, leadership, scrum and team work from the required readings. And I also improved my knowledge of cooking.
What was I dreaming about?
I always liked drawing and painting when I was young, but I was not thinking about getting into a design major until I turned 18. After much confusion about if I chose the right path and meeting lots of obstacles, such as adapting to a new city and learning a new language, I finally found the best choice is to go to art school. I was improving a lot while studying and now I finally understand what art and design are, including both the skills and concepts. I sometimes struggled with my art and design skills, but they slowly improved. Then once I figured out that in order to move to the next step, I needed to choose my own career path, I realized that getting into the design industry was the most approachable, reliable, possible way to improve myself. I was dreaming about where I would first work and how far I could get in the industry. I found that Pixel Dreams is a place that taught me a lot about the industry and I actually made friends with lots of different people!
Now I have new ideas and thoughts about art and design, but I’m not sure if they will work. Most of all, I hope I will continue to improve with the team.
