Woodberry Kitchen

 My name is Lauren Siminski and I am a junior Graphic Design major. Over the Fall 2014 semester, I was a Design Intern for Woodberry Kitchen, a Baltimore family of restaurants of food, coffee and cocktails, all locally sourced. In addition to Woodberry Pantry, where everything is canned and sold through, the Woodberry restaurants include Woodberry Kitchen, Artifact Coffee, Shoo-­fly Diner, and Parts & Labor Butchery. I had been to all of these restaurants previous to my internship and I fell in love with the food and the overall atmosphere. When I was informed of the design internship opportunity through Brockette Horne’s weekly graphic design emails, I was eager to apply.

I emailed Sabrina Kogan, the in-­house designer at Woodberry, about more information and I sent her my portfolio website. She responded shortly after, very excited to set up an interview. I interviewed twice and then I had the job!

A typical day at my internship site included arriving at 9am and talking with Sabrina about what needed to get done for that day, then walking over to Artifact and getting lunch and working again until I left at 2. I did everything from designing internal documents to painting huge signs. I did a lot of chalkboard signs for Woodberry during my time there, for the Baltimore Farmer’s Market, the Artifact Coffee market wall, and the Star Spangled Spectacular. Additionally, I was introduced to MailChimp and sent out several E-­Blasts to over 20 thousand email addresses. I’m most proud of the hand-­painted sign I did in less than 5 hours for the Woodberry Pantry display at John’s Hopkins University.

Overall, I really enjoyed this internship. I developed a new love for sign-­painting and gained a lot of experience in chalkboard lettering. I learned how to work in a fast-­paced environment and create great work in a short amount of time. This has already helped me a lot in my classes at MICA, and it will be a huge help throughout my future career journey.