My name is Virginia Yu. I’m a senior environmental design major with a graphic design concentration. During the summer before my senior year, I interned at Seidenfaden Design Copenhagen. It all started when I left in January 2013 to study abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. After a month of living in Denmark, I fell in love with the country and I knew I wanted to extend my stay. That’s when the idea of an internship came to mind. The school I studied at was the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. They had a website that specialized in finding internships all around the world, it was called www.discareergate.dk . After a month of searching and scheduling interviews, I was hired by Seidenfaden Design Copenhagen as a graphic design intern.
I worked under
the company’s graphic designer, Wakana Sakihama. Seidenfaden Design Copenhagen
is an international design studio that specializes in industrial design and graphic design.
They focus mostly on household and lifestyle products as well as packaging and
branding. I was surprised at how much freedom and control the company gave me. I
thought I wouldn’t have as much involvement as an intern but it turns out they were
willing to completely let me be in charge of certain assignments. One project for
instance, was Magasin. Magasin is a huge mall chain in Denmark. It can be compared to
Printemps or Galeries Lafayette in France. Magasin plans on creating a convenience
food line. They plan on selling sandwiches, salads and any other type of quick to go
foods. I was in charge of designing the packaging for these types of food. Another
project I did was recreating the packaging for “Little Sun” which is a rechargeable sun
lamp designed by Olafur Eliasson. These lamps are mostly used in Africa and other
various third world countries where light is limited. Aside from packaging, I worked on
branding projects as well such as Ishuset Christianshavn, an ice cream shop that
recently opened in the summer. I worked with Wakana on the logos, interior signs and
the color scheme for the shop. I think out of all the projects, I would say the packaging
ones were the ones I was most proud of. Those were the most challenging but at the
final outcome I was pleased with what I had come up with. My biggest take-away from
this experience was learning about office etiquette, how to present myself and my
work, how to interact with clients as well as improving my skills in the adobe suite. I
think the most important thing I learned is that there will be times you will screw up or
you will have to clean up someone’s mess, but at the end of the day, if you’re pursuing
something you love doing, those hours at work won’t seem so long after all. This
internship has definitely clarified a lot for me. Aside from wanting to pursue a career in
graphic design, I want to relocate to Denmark for a few years after graduation. My
internship has inspired me to take more graphic design classes, meeting a
concentration’s requirements is merely not enough. 