Finding My Niche

Hi everyone, my name is Emily Street, a senior in the Art Direction Track of Advertising with a fine art minor. I have been interning with TPD Design House in Wayne for about 6 months now. TPD is an award winning design agency specializing in branding and custom invitation design that lives in a huge industrial style warehouse. The designers here are amazing at what they do and inspire me to try harder. Many of the employees here were interns at one point, so they have been in my same position.

After bouncing around in Tyler School of Art for two years, I switched over to Klein College and while the course work is entirely different, I’ve learned so many things I would have never learned in Tyler about working in the real world like printing, color matching, proofs, etc. While I was worried about slowing down my growth as a designer after switching into Klein, this internship essentially threw me into the wolves and I had to learn a lot, and fast. It is much different than getting a grade on a made up project, any of my past intern work, or doing work for my friends and family. These are actual clients, with serious budgets, deadlines, etc.

The pressure of keeping up with the designers has helped me strive to be the best that I can and learn to work as efficiently as possible. It is really exciting to have a client like your work and to see your work actually produced (especially after dozens of revisions or re-dos). Often times interns’ work at other places do not make it to production or to the client, so it is certainly a luxury and portfolio booster.

Working here has made me realize that I want to specialize in branding and invitation design over advertising. I hope to one day establish my own boutique design studio and have my own interns to teach!