Intern Recap

Wow, it has been a crazy / busy / amazing eight months.

In case you are new to the blog or missed the memo, I'm Eleanor Bartosh, the intern for Erin Morrill's creative marketing firm, Victory Dog Design. I've been working here since roughly the end of August, and have had the absolute pleasure of working with Erin and members of the Giant Noise PR team, with whom we share an office.

Due to the fact that I may possibly be taking a brief hiatus from Victory Dog during the summer (but never fear, I'll be back in the fall), Erin and I thought it would be a great idea for me to write a re-cap of sorts, so all of you dear readers could get a glimpse of the behind the scenes action.

While we do spend a lot of our days designing logos and posters, developing and updating web sites, employing social media for our clients and creating the occasional proposal, we also do a lot more:

The past two semesters have also been filled with countless trips to the printer (have you ever been in a print shop? They smell awesome.), working in a VIP lounge during ACL, helping to re-open an old restaurant and re-brand it into something else entirely, marketing an upcoming art show, spray mounting until 9 p.m. on a Friday and eating way too much gourmet food at the Texas Wine and Food Festival (not that we minded).

Below is a recap of some of the things we've done for (and some funny things that have happened with) our wonderful clients:

Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival --

Next to my work at UT's Cactus yearbook (which is a totally different animal), I have never been involved in a project whose branding, development and production was spread out over such a long time. I remember it being Thanksgiving time and discussing poster concepts for the 25th annual festival. I also remember an afternoon of food-based photographs for an initial poster campaign concept, after which, we ate blackberries off the white paper background. (That idea was scrapped, but anyway...) Five seemingly solid months of web site creation (and more updates than you could imagine), sponsors, posters and signage production later, I found myself standing at the most popular event of the festival. That evening we all ate and drank copious amounts of local gourmet food and champagne. (This event went much more smoothly than the one the night before, where we all ended up soaked and greeting unhappy attendees to tell them that their "rain or shine" event would not actually be shining that night... All jokes and unpleasantness aside, however, Victory Dog Design received a great deal of praise for our customer service and help that evening.)

One day, we decided to make some press books for Bunkhouse. Now, these weren't your normal press books... There were four, handmade copies of 90-page, mounted press booklets, which would be used for a business presentation shortly after we made them. And, yes, we definitely stayed up in the office until 9 p.m. that Friday night. (A big thank you to the cleaning lady for cleaning our spray-adhesived floor.)

Client meetings have definitely been some of the most interesting parts of this internship. It's been great seeing how Erin interacts with people, whether it be in person for the first time, over the phone or just a standard sit-down and catch up meeting. I've learned a lot from her about how to interact with people you don't necessarily know very well, and still make them feel comfortable.

As for work I've done on my own - I did some minor site updates (think replacing out-dated flash buttons with newer standard rollovers, and swapping photos) for a client, Shelton Home Services, a while back. I also was responsible for building the VO2 fitness website after Erin designed it. I largely helped to launch www.earlytexasart.com for our client, Russell Tether, after Erin built the slightly-complicated code, and have basically been the point-person for updates for both of Russell Tether's websites.

All in all, though, what it boils down to is not just how hard we work, how many hours we spend in the office or even what awesome parties we get to go to. What is great is coming to work every day when you really love what you do, what you're learning, the people you work with, and the one for whom you work. I cannot begin to explain or quantify how much my knowledge has increased over the past eight months, and if I do end up leaving for the summer, I already can't wait to be back.

xoxo,

Eleanor