Working at an agency

Design work:

Designing emails and landing pages, making sure all of the designs are responsible.
Always communicating with the UI/UX director to plan and think ahead how can we better make this landing page user friendly and effective. <Sage, Swiftpage-act! and Saleslogix>

Assisting Design Director and Assistant design director with branding, such as designing logos and style guides, then helping them with building out the stationaries and other collateral. <Pop Heath Care, Windrose-Sunbelt Holding, Mytek, Infusionsoft, Panda, InstaHue and etc.>

I was involved in few project where our design team built websites from scratch. and also few storyboarding for videos.

I was responsible mostly in designing projects under the client called Sage, a national business managing software company, main projects included, landing pages, emails, banners, powerpoint presentation decks, brochures, catalog, direct mailer and infographics.

My most memorable project I did so far is probably, designing the business card for Bigfish & logo for a secret project. My design directors, Kev and Lear gave me this task to work as side projects and funny enough it was the most enjoyable design project Ive done. My design for the business card passed the production and had distributed to every single employers in our office, felt amazing. As well as for this secret project that I recently had approval to move up to coding, the process of finalizing the logo was fun and exciting, my first hand-drawn logo and surprised that everyone liked it.

Skills:
I developed my design skill during college by doing many projects but its different when you're out in the real world, you don't always use the same tools and techniques to produce designs, I mean, back in school, you make the choices of what kinds or medium or style you'd like to approach certain projects, such as, posters, I designed so many posters while I was in school, but oddly enough, I didn't get to design as poster at work. Instead, I had to design bunch of banners, animations and emails and landing pages.

Team work:
There are many things that college design program don't teach students. one that I had to learn the hard way after graduating and working at an agency was working in teams. I had no idea before I started working, who account managers were. To briefly explain the process of getting the design project, it always comes through account managers, they bring the work to us, specifically to my design directors, then my director assigns the project to me. I work hand in hand with the copy writer and director director to get through the design process(sometimes, the UI/UX director gets involved too), I send it to account manager so they can proof everything from copy to making sure I've met all the client's requests. Then comes the waiting- account managers go back and forth with the clients to finalize the design, I have to make adjustments and improvements during this time. and once the design is finalized, depending on the media, if its digital work, it moves on to coding where developers turn my design to actually live somewhere, not just in my computer screen, and if the design is something that need to be produced physically, then we go through the production steps. thats another field that Im learning currently, dealing with the vendors, spec everything, researching for the papers, prints and yada yada. I didn't realize until working at an agency that I would have to work with so many people to get a design to the client. It took me awhile for me to get used to this process and involvement of many people but now, its something that so natural to me, having someone always proofing your work and getting feedbacks and sometimes criticism. I can't imagine an agency life without an email; its so interesting to see people react when the networks goes down and there's no internet. People frantic and you hear f-word all over the place, at times its a good chance to disconnect but most of the time you freak out, especially the developers, they're the first to shout out when the network is down :) Anyway, I love to work in teams, its fun to brainstorm ideas with, and getting feedback is always the key. With design, there' always room for improvement, and having people around you working together, they always help to make it improve.