Danielle Gellings Fall 2010

Danielle GellingsGraphic Design Internship

Fall 2010

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design projectswebsite

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intern proceduresI interned at Beauty during the Fall semester of 2010 as a graphic design intern. My time there was very rewarding and I feel that I learned a lot from being in a professional environ-ment. Not only did I learn a lot about real life design and gain real life experience, my skills were expanded upon greatly. Beauty was such a wonderful creative environment to work in, and I always felt inpired and motivated to work.

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the salonWith a team of the most highly educated stylists Milwaukee has to offer in both Downtown and East side locations, Beauty is the salon for you. Voted Milwaukees No. 1 salon over the years by Milwaukee Magazine, the Shep-herd Express, and more.

Beauty on v Avenue is the business center for Beauty Inc., including two Beauty salons and two Cutting Groups. The upper floors are a functioning design space while the lower floors house the business and marketing ef-forts.

As an intern at Beauty, I report two times a week to the location on Farwell Ave., as it is the business center for Beauty Inc. Beauty Inc. owns two Beauty salons and two Cutting Group salons, with a third Cutting Group to be opening soon. All of these salons are in the East side and Downtown areas of Milwaukee, allowing for a close working environment between all of the salons. At Beauty on Farwell Ave., the upper floors are a functioning salon space and the lower floor houses the business and marketing efforts. I love the space at Beauty, the entire salon is within an old Milwaukee house, and one of the things that the owner, Tom Miller, likes to do when he opens a salon, is to keep part of the original aesthetic of the location in tact and make it part of the new design. Beauty still has the old wood floors and the space is creatively broken up into a workspace and office space. The environment is wonderful here as well, there are so many people around the place is constantly abuzz with excitement.

I have formed, and continue to form, valuable work relationships with all of the employees at Beauty. Rory Kurtz is my supervisor/director, and I feel that I am learning so much as he takes me under his wing. Rory is an accomplished designer, photographer and il-lustrator and has had success while he lived in Chicago and now continues to have success in his freelance illustrating business with clients around the world. He is a very talented individual and I am constantly trying to learn from him and get him to tell me all of his secrets (which he is very open to sharing with me)! I really enjoy working with Rory because it is not a sterile environment whatsoev-er. At Beauty, they really promote creativity and personal expression, and I dont always feel as though I am a design intern working under my supervisor, I feel like I am part of a collaborative creative effort.

Its not unusual for me to come into work and find the owner, Tom Miller, and Rory sitting in our design office hashing out ideas. They

intern duties

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are both very energetic and creative people and get very excited about what they are doing. Tom is an artist himself, having experi-ence in photography, and as a visual and creative person I feel that I really jive with the two of them. Tom has this aura about himself that is very exciting and I feel that wears off on the people around him and gets them excited about things too. I think that his energy is really the driving force behind Beauty, and is what keep the salon going and continuing to have success as well.

As an Intern at Beauty, I am responsible for the identity of the salon in both printed and web form, along with the maintenance and de-sign of the website under the guidance of my design director, Rory Kurtz. I have had various projects to work on so far, mainly in the realms of web design, printed identity, mock-ups and design proj-ects.

When I started at Beauty, Rory and I sat down to discuss what I wanted to get out of this internship. He wanted to know what I am interested in, what I would like more experience in and what I wanted to learn from both himself and my experience at Beauty. Honestly, I am interested in learning anything that I can get my hands on, but I especially was interested in having more web design experience. Lucky for me, Beauty is in dire need of a new website. I had noticed this about their website before, as I am also a client of Beauty, and had thought about how great it would be to redesign their website, and here the opportunity was, right in my lap!

My first few days at Beauty were spent designing mock ups for the new website. I was really excited to jump in and get going. While I was designing the website, Rory and I were discussing possible redesigning the whole identity of the salon. Over the last few years, the design and identity of Beauty had kind off fallen off the radar as there was nobody really responsible for the design maintenance of the company. Rory and I really want to make everything cohesive, so that when people see some form of Beautys brand, they will know

whom it belongs to. I was keeping this new identity in mind while creative the site, how it could cross over to various other materials, colors and imagery. We wanted the website to be something simple, but not boring. We want it to be a useful and informative tool to the customer, much different from how the website is now. I have actually coded the entire website and it is now live! We spent much time collaborating on ideas for the website and making small tweaks here and there until we have finally come up with a final design. I am excited that I got to code the website as well, as I think that is valuable knowledge for every designer to have. Not only did I build on my previous knowledge of CSS and HTML, I have learned new techniques and tricks along the way that will always be useful to know. It feels so good to look at this website that I completely de-signed and coded on my own! It also feels good to see the change between the old website and the new one, it really makes me feel that my time here has been worthwhile.

Other projects that I have worked on consist of creating business cards, signs, imagery for the website, gift cards, greeting cards and the holiday card to promote and event that they had at the beginning of December. I am quite happy with the way that the holiday card has turned out and it was exciting to work on my own, as Rory gave me complete creative freedom in the design of this item.

Overall, my experience has been fantastic. I love all of the people that I work with, everyone is nice, friendly and fun, and am meeting new people everyday as Beautys list of employees is quite large! My supervisors are wonderful as well and I am learning so much from them. I feel that I have gained valuable real life experience that will definitely help me once I am out in the real world in less than a week.

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Beauty is salon made of over 60 employees. As a graphic design intern, I worked closely under my supervisor Rory Kurtz, who is the marketing director for Beauty, every day that I was there. I also worked closely with Thom Miller, who is one of the owners of Beauty. While Rory and I collabo-rated on many projects, nothing was final until it was approved by Thom or Stephanie Miller, who are the owner of Beauty.

work relationships

Thom Miller - OwnerStephanie Miller - OwnerRory Kurtz - Marketing Bjorn Nasset - Salon Manager I worked closely with Rory Kurtz and Thom Miller as a graphic design intern.

hierarchy of workplace

rory kurtzme

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I havent had many frustrating moments at Beauty, but sometimes I became frustrated with the amount of time that I had to work on projects. I would not always have the amount of time that I thought I would, usually my time was shortened, and sometimes I felt that it negatively effected the end result of my work.

However, it taught me that in a real workplace things are constantly moving and changing. I have to be prepared for these types of thing to happen in the workplace and I have to learn to learn and adapt to these changes - essentially I have to learn to roll with the punches!

most frustrating moment

One of the more exciting things that I have found from working at Beauty is getting to see my designs used in real life settings! I remember when I saw the first set of cache cards that I designed out on the counter for customers to use - I was beaming with delight. Recently, the holiday cards that I have designed have been printed, and the imagery that I created is also being used to promote the event on the Beauty blog and in a large window promotion that they are doing at the Grand Avenue Mall. Its little successes like that that I find so valuable, as they are not something that I would find from completing and assignment in class.

The thing that has been the most satisfying to me, however, is see-ing my website live on the Internet! I put in so much hard work with designing, coding and problem solving that it just feels absolutely wonderful to see it up, fully funcitoning, and representing both Beauty and my work as a design intern at Beauty.

Its real life experiences that are going to be teaching me things more than a classroom could teach me, and Im so grateful that I have had this opportunity!

most satisfying moment

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dates & hours spent at beauty

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task

Meeting, Discussing procedures

Designing website mock ups

Redesigning Beauty logos

Website mock ups

Website mock ups

Website mock ups

Designing business cards, poster for beauty blowout

bar, ordering business cards, website mock ups

Creating imagery for website, creating header for

website, discussing/reviewing website content with

owner, running errands

Redesigning product logos, creating imagery for

website

Holiday card, entering data into spreadsheets, order-

ing business cards

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Creating imagery for website, holiday card

Creating images for website, finishing invite postcard

for Beauty holiday party, ordering things from Kinkos,

Begin coding website

Code website, research new techniques

Design elements for web page, code web page

Web page, research/create list of media contacts, put

stickers on envelopes

Website research

*Aiga field trip

Coding website

*Thanksgiving Break

Coding website

Coding website, making signs, preparing for holiday

party

Coding website

Coding website

FINAL DAY - Uploading finished website!

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design projectsAs a design intern at Beauty, I was responsible for a few design tasks including cache cards, postcards, posters, web advertisements and most importantly, the redesign of Beautys website. A majority of my time was spent working on the website while other design projects filled in the spaces.

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These Beauty Blow Our Bar cache cards were created for an even that Beauty holds weekly at the Downtown YMCA where the give free blowouts and samples to women finishing their work-outs. The cards needed to be related, but not identical, to the cards that Beauty already uses for normal business. The Beauty cards are designated a color for each salon (Downtown or East Side) and the cutting group cards are designated by a change of address.

beauty blow out bar cache cards

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This is a sign that I created for Beautys weekly Blow Out Bar at the Downtown YMCA. The goal was to create a simple poster that was clear, easy to read and informative.

beauty blow out bar poster

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These postcards were created for Beautys annual Holiday Part held at their East Side location for the employeesa and clients. Again, the goal was to be clear and informative, but in a creative way. My goal was to make sure that all of the information on the back was organized in a clear manner, while still maintaining good use of typography and design.

beauty holiday party postcard

SATURDAY DECEMBER 4TH, 20107pm - midnight

A chance to win a trip to New York City for

fashion week.

Gift Certificate specials and rewards.

10% off all products with representatives

available for consultations.

Crafts and unique gifts from local artisans.

Gift bags and giveaways for all guests.

Complementary wine and hors d'oeuvres.

A visit from Santa Claus himself!

Beauty wants to celebrate the holidays with you. Stop by for an evening of music,

entertainment, crafts and shopping.

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This is a poster that I created to be hung up in the salon for a new promotion called Beautys favorite things, where stylists would pick their favorite products and have their picture taken with it and this sign would designate the area where those pictures would be. I used inspiration from the Bumble and Bumble product design to create a more cohesive appearance between the product and the sign.

our favorite things poster

our favorite favorite things

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websiteAs a design intern at Beauty, a majority of my time was spent working on the website while other design projects filled in the spaces. I spent much time creating mock ups for poten-tial formats of the site and then refined them to get the final look.

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The next few pages cover basic mock up ideas that I initially created for Beautys new website. I wanted to create somthing simple, yet engaging, and most of all, user friendly.

beautymilwaukee.com mock ups

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After much refinement of the earlier mock ups, these are the final choices for each page. The designs were altered slightly as they were coded into the site, but they have still mostly main-tained the same ideas. Since I did not have time to complete the entire website, the last few images show the mock ups for the pages that are yet to be created.

beautymilwaukee.com final mock ups

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The following pages contain screen shots of the finished Beauty website. Not only did I enitrely design the whole site, but I created all of the imagery and coded the site as well. It was by far the biggest project I worked on all semester, and Im very proud to have finished it. There are a few pages at the end that are still in process, but they will be finished outside of my designated internship time at Beauty as a freelance designer.

beautymilwaukee.com finished site

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