Wrapping Up the Semester – and the Year at WXPN

My last two days at my internship are approaching this week. This semester I’ve had the opportunity to intern at WXPN, a member-supported public radio station broadcast from the University of Pennsylvania, where I did graphic design.

I’ve been able to work on some fun projects, but my favorite was a promotional postcard created for the “2014 Year in Review.” It encourages listeners to submit their favorite songs of the year so that a list of the Top 200 Songs can be compiled and then played on the air.

My supervisors didn’t have too many guidelines for the design, just the copy. So I decided to loosely base it off a current campaign that an agency created called “Vinyl at Heart,” alluding to the fact that XPN is a public radio station that can play more curated music, not just what every other station is playing. Yes, this countdown is based on the top music of 2014, but I still wanted to include vinyl imagery because LPs are making a huge comeback for current artists and many XPN listeners definitely bought vinyl albums this year.

It wasn’t too difficult of a project, but I enjoyed it the most. I was thankful that my supervisors in the marketing department pushed me to really take my typographic hierarchy to the next level. My first draft had decent type but they knew I could do better — and they were right. I’m happy with the outcome as well. It was great to see a large box of them arrive back from the printer. As an XPN volunteer on the side, I also have distributed them at concerts along with other marketing materials. I know other interns say it too, but it’s a great feeling to see your work actually being used!