In the summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to work for Brother USA as a Graphic Design Intern for ten weeks. I worked on a variety of projects at a fast-pace, and I learned about designing in a corporate environment.
I designed and resized many web advertisements, instant rebates, and promos for various Brother products. I learned how ads should have minimal text, a call to action, the brand logo, and a disclaimer and product image if applicable. I learned how to resize these advertisements in different formats for various web pages.
At the beginning of the summer, I helped come up with concepts for the Refresh Summer Savings Promo. Refresh is Brother's toner auto-refill subscription. We used summer imagery like the ice cream cone and waves in CMYK colors because those are the toner colors. I resized and reformatted these promos to fit the guidelines of retailers such as Office Depot, Best Buy, Amazon, Staples, and Instagram. This project taught me to use brand guidelines for Brother as a whole corporation, for specific departments of Brother like Refresh, and for the retailers displaying the ads.
I created the content for the Brother Sews social media accounts for July and August. The Brother Sews accounts post sewing projects, sewing quotes, and their new sewing products. Once I created the content using the brief from the social media team, I resized them for different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Working with the social media team, I learned more about designing for a specific audience, which for Brother Sews was an older female demographic. The social media team wanted to engage a younger audience as well, so we experimented with making Instagram stickers shown below.
I created stickers for the Brother Sews social media account to use on Instagram stories. These stickers are branded with the Brother logo, so when other accounts use them it will spread brand awareness. I created evergreen stickers, meaning they can be used all year-round, and I created stickers for Brother Experience. Brother Experience is an exclusive event where Brother shows their new sewing products to dealers only. The social media team wanted animated gifs and static stickers, so I learned how to create gifs and simple animations using Photoshop.
I created graphics for the Brother Experience event app. As mentioned above, Brother Experience is an event where the new sewing products are shown exclusively to the dealers. These graphics made the app look nicer and more interesting, and they had to match the Texas theme for 2023's Brother Experience event because it took place in Austin, Texas.
Artspira is an app that is used to create sewing and crafting projects, and it is used to operate some of Brother's crafting and sewing machines. Brother had an Artspira Immersive Gallery, where different projects made with Artspira were displayed. For this gallery, they wanted title cards with information about each project and for the cards to match the Artspira branding and aesthetic.
I created spinner images for the new Brother printers that launched this year. Spinner images are the pictures that showcase specific features when shopping for a product online. There were twenty-two printers that launched, so this project took a lot of organization to pull the images together, send them for feedback, and make edits. This project enhanced my Photoshop skills as I changed screens, buttons, colors, and numbers on the printers. I also learned how to use artboards in Photoshop for this project.
