Bonjour!

Hello!

I have been inspired by my fellow designers at my new internship with Premier Media Group to start a blog. I have decided to start a blog for 2 reasons: 1) to fill in all my lovely relatives and friends afar of my life and 2) to include you in my planning for a trip my roommate and I are taking to France in May in the hopes you may have any little tips :)

I was pleased to discover last December that I would be interning at Premier Media Group starting in January. Premier Media Group publishes two magazines, 425 Magazine, which focuses on the Eastside (for those of you not from Washington that is the Eastside of Lake Washington, like Kirkland/Bellevue for example) and the South Sound Magazine which focuses on the greater Tacoma area where I reside at school. When I found out I could potentially be designing for such local magazines I was very excited, what fun! I began interning a few weeks back and have loved every minute. It has been such a great experience, I actually get to help design article spreads. I have two designers who oversee my work, who are both great to work with and a lot of fun! They started a new thing this year called Daily Design Challenges. They're 10 minutes of creative silliness to keep our minds fresh. We pull a topic out of the box every day and get 10 minutes to make a design. To see some of our work go to, Design Challenges

I feel very blessed to have had (and be having) the opportunity to intern at such great companies. For those of you who don't know, I also spent this last summer interning full-time at Pierce Transit. Pierce Transit is Pierce County's (Tacoma Area) Transit system. I grew a lot as a graphic designer over the summer, gaining confidence and experience. I managed my own Marketing Requests from my Marketing Advisor from start to finish. This means I contacted the client (usually a person within Pierce Transit), created the design, went through proofing and then printed/mounted or whatever needed to be done for it. I spent a lot of my time designing A-board signs to go up around town, designing Bus Stop signs for Special Events, designing In-House Materials for events, designing Zip Code Maps, photographing bus stop destinations for the Website and cutting cutting cutting out signs. I learned how to perfect the art of using an exacto knife, only slicing a tiny piece of my thumb once. I also had a taste of the real-world working 8-5 in an office. Boy do you learn to go to bed early, just ask my roommate. Overall it was a great experience, taught me a lot about designing in the real world, how to communicate clearly and effectively with clients, and enough about buses to tell the world. :)

Anywho hope you enjoy reading this blog as it takes you through my life and eventually into Europe!

~Holly