For the Summer term, I started an internship at Who We Play For. Who We Play For is a non-profit organization created to fight against cardiac arrest in student athletes. The organization first came together as a memorial soccer game for Rafe Maccarone, a student athlete from Cocoa Beach who passed away in 2007 due to Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a form of sudden cardiac arrest. His friends and community has since then developed many events and programs in order to detect and prevent future sudden cardiac arrests in other student athletes. I became acquainted with Evan Ernst, Megan Myers, and Kieran Easton, three of the founders and Rafe’s closest friends, in August 2014. I volunteered my graphic design knowledge for certain events and eventually signed on as their first graphic design intern.
The internship requires me to redesign and update any previous and new materials for promotional and informative use during their rebranding. I am most frequently assigned to make a number of small changes to a base generic flyer for Heart Screening Events in different areas of Florida, mostly at public schools. Because the design is from their previous branding, I will be adjusting the design to fit their more modernized, flattened appearance. I just finished designing the new informational handout about Who We Play For’s electrocardiogram (ECG) school physical programs, which fits the new design model. The biggest project I am working on now is the graphics for their chapter handout, which will be distributed to other universities that want to start up their own Who We Play for chapters. Because this will be used as an extensive guide, I am working with one of the founding leaders to make sure nothing is overlooked and that the handbook is easy to follow.
The main challenge during this internship is the timing of communication between the sponsors and the organization. More than often, sponsors will email the leaders with last minute changes to their event, which I need to immediately make in order to allow the materials to get printed on time. However, because of this I feel that it is preparing me for similar emergencies in my future workplace. My desired field of work is not in graphic design, but in storyboarding and children’s illustration. These environments come with the expectation to work late and to always be prepared for last minute changes, and I am welcome to any training to help with those adjustments.
While the future jobs and internships I have applied for are in storyboarding and illustration, I feel that doing this graphic design internship is helping me accomplish working fluidly through different programs. For a majority of my design work for the organization so far, I have had to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign in tandem with each other in order to get the desired effects. Because I am working both traditionally and digitally in my personal work, being able to work fluidly is a necessity if I want my work to mature.