Recalling The Familiar - Weeks 1 and 2
This Summer, I’m working with The Familiar (PKA: MPJDesign) as a Design Intern. Whilst there, I’ll be working both on work for their clients, but also on internal projects as The Familiar comes fully into being and transitions to an expanded design offering. In this short series of blog posts, I plan to outline what I cover each week. So, let’s start at the beginning.
Week 1
Tuesday
After a morning of discussion and planning around the internship, what I’m looking to achieve, and my goals for my career, I jumped into production work in the afternoon by sourcing icons for a website redesign for an MPJDesign Client from Adobe Stock.
This ended up taking a lot longer than expected, due to the niche nature of the client and their offerings. This meant finding icons that had a consistent visual language whilst also finding the icons we needed for the relevant situations were both difficult tasks.
At the end of the day, I had 3-4 potential icon sets set aside for us to decide from.
Tools Used: Adobe Stock
Wednesday
Wednesday morning, fresh back in the office, we realised that none of the sets I had identified the night before truly matched what we were looking for. So, I spent the morning trying to find the panacea. The true cure-all for our iconography needs. By lunchtime, I’d managed to find 4 sets from the same illustrator - three sets of filled glyphs and one set of line icons - that we were able to use.
I spent the afternoon slightly customising the icons, exporting them as SVGs, and then cleaning up the SVG code to ensure it would work properly in our web environment.
Tools Used: Adobe Stock, Adobe Illustrator, Visual Studio Code
Friday
Friday, I worked from home. In the morning, I cut together a short video to go as the hero element on the client website. I then created the screenshot assets needed for when the video is hosted, so that they can be used as placeholder images whilst the video loads.
I also collated and cropped images for testimonials to go on the website, from approved images we were given permission to use.
Tools Used: LumaFusion and Affinity Designer for iPad Pro
Week 2
Monday
On Monday Morning, Martin and I discussed the strategy for The Familiar and the deliverables we’re going to need to deliver for the official launch of the company. The first stage of this was the creation of business cards for Martin to take to an event the following week.
After spending some time reading and understanding the style guide for The Familiar, I spent the afternoon in Affinity Designer creating the business card design.
Tools used: Affinity Designer, Whiteboard & Pen.
Wednesday
Working from home on Wednesday, I took a deep dive into the target customers and sectors for The Familiar, to create a foundation for future work. Whilst Martin had spent time understanding his business and the sectors he felt best-skilled to approach, the time had not been available to do a true deep-dive and understand potential customers, their journey to finding us, and how those different stages could affect how they find us, what they’re looking for, etc.
Building on the knowledge I acquired from my B2B Research internship with Deeson, and through video chats with Martin, I defined the customer journey for The Familiar.
Tools used: Pen and Paper, Pages, Zoom
Friday
Friday, I worked from home again. I spent the 4 hours before lunch looking at Case Studies and the role they will play in the Customer Journey and website experience for The Familiar. This involved looking at the typical journeys we see customers going through, understanding the different kinds of buyers we are looking to work with, and the content and features of the Case Studies themselves.
I spent the afternoon working on wireframes for the new Case Studies pages. This is definitely an area where I need a little practice.
Tools used: Pen and Paper