New Things, New Opportunities

Hi my name is Julia Ditro and this past fall semester I was a graphic design intern for Temple Football. With this being my first internship, I walked in on the first day dressed in business casual attire. Although you can wear whatever your heart desires (within reasoning in a work environment), I realized that this was going to be laxer than I had imagined. Being able to wear sport shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers to an internship was awesome.

Even though my attire was causal, there was still work that needed to be done. Entering this internship, I had absolutely no Adobe After Effects or Adobe Premiere skills. This experience has taught me that I can challenge myself past my own comfort zone.

The first time I tried to execute a project that required me using Adobe After Effects, I was searching for videos and struggled to find the answers I was looking for. I was making some progress, but knew that I needed to go ask for help. Once I realized I couldn’t figure it out on my own, one of my supervisors assisted me and I was able to get a hang of it from there.\

My time with TU Football mainly focused on creating Owls in The NFL weekly videos that were posted onto their Instagram. Each week, I would update images of former Temple players with the current games that matched up with the week. I then would take each deliverable and make a video with transitions that would show about 14 players. After completing a few After Effects projects, I was given the challenge to create Instagram and Recruit graphics.

I believe that in graphic design and Art Direction (specifically advertising), I find myself using InDesign and Illustrator more often than Photoshop. Prior to interning with TU Football, I had forgotten a good amount of information when it came to Photoshop. I value the projects that I worked on while interning because I would have lost interest in the other Adobe Creative Suites. I was telling myself that I was “bad” at Photoshop just because I haven’t done it in a while when in reality, I just wasn’t interacting with it as much as I used to.

Although there were a lot of lessons that I learned, one specifically would be to always say “yes” when it comes to creating. Even if you do not know how to do something, you have resources, so just use them. Stop telling yourself that you can’t do something just because you aren’t willing to try. Learning new things, meeting new people, and allowing positive change have helped me become a better artist.