Graphic Designing for Fine Art

For the past four months, I have been a lead graphic design intern for Alfa Art Gallery. This experience has been very valuable in helping me grow in my graphic design and professional skills. My career goal is to be an art director at an advertising agency or in-house at a company that I am passionate about, so this position is the perfect first step into my career path. I was hired as a hybrid employee, going into Alfa Art Gallery in New Brunswick, NJ every other week and for in-person receptions.

There are many things I am tasked with at my internship. This includes creating promotional posters for print and online banners to promote upcoming events and exhibitions, making layouts for catalogs which can be up to 300 pages, and creating slideshow layouts for receptions. All of these have strengthened my design skills, and put them to use in a way I may not have thought of before. The catalogs specifically have allowed me to become more proficient in InDesign and working with larger-scale documents. We also use a software called ArtSteps to create virtual exhibitions, essentially making the gallery space online. This was a completely new software to me and I have now been able to become proficient in it through this internship.

Something great about this internship is how it strengthened my professional communication in a remote setting. Many of the interns at Alfa Art work remotely, but we always need to be in communication with one another so we can keep progress on all of our projects. We have daily Zoom meetings with the entire team on our working days so we can give general updates, and we are also all in a Slack network where we can communicate with individuals, just the graphic design team, or everyone. This has led Alfa Art to be recognized by universities like NYU and Rutgers as a reliable remote internship. I, however, am a hybrid intern, so I go into the gallery sometimes. This has been one of the highlights of this internship, as I am at events with local artists who I can network with and learn from.

Overall this experience has taught me that I always have room to grow as a graphic designer and in professional communication. If you are looking for an internship and are looking in-house at a company you don’t know much about, I would highly recommend it! Learning about the work Alfa Art does to uplift local and upcoming artists has been extremely rewarding, and I look forward to the rest of my time at Alfa Art Gallery.