Complete and utter frustration
Remember all that stuff I said in my first blog post about resilience? Yeh, I had forgotten about that too. But it was good to read it back since I needed to be reminded that the whole point of an internship is to learn. The entire thing is one huge, long learning curve and so it is OK to feel low, frustrated or less than competent at some points.
The reason I mention this is because I feel the last 2 weeks haven’t been the greatest. I have felt a little direction-less, to the point that I had to have a discussion with my intern supervisor at grums about my role. I am glad that we had the discussion, since it has allowed us to move forward in a more positive mindset.
So what have I actually been doing this past two weeks? Well, first and most importantly, we had the official launch of the kickstarter campaign.
I was actually really excited to launch the Kickstarter as this was going to be tangible proof of how something I created actually fared in the ‘real world’. In order to hype it up a bit I created an Instagram story for the grums account. The background images were created by me in Photoshop using the existing mockups. I tried to make the bottle small or blurred, since the final product will not have the exact same design.
Instagram Story
Screenshots of Instagram story for Kickstarter
However, my excitement ended there. The campaign has so far only gotten one backer who has pledged 1 euro. I believe that a big part of the problem is that it is not enough to just share on their Instagram account. The audience for the Kickstarter is very different, and therefore it needs to be shared in places such as investor networks. When I discussed this with Rasmus, I was largely dismissed and he himself said he really didn’t know how to give the campaign any traction. And it is beyond the work of a person in the multimedia design field (in my opinion) to also know about investment networks and financial matters.
So, since the launch, I have felt like I haven’t had any meaningful work to do. I have felt like I haven’t had much direction. Indeed one morning, Rasmus asked me to do a task which he himself said was most likely an irrelevant task: inputting prices and so forth into an Excel spreadsheet and then applying some mathematical equations to it.
I straight up refused, as this is A) not relevant as a content creation and design intern and B) I would find the work tedious and frustrating since I do not like working with numbers. I was very annoyed that I was asked to perform such a task. I think it was this moment that caused me to really feel like I had to confront Rasmus about my role at grums.
The discussion, however, turned out well. We agreed that I would start work on a social media launch campaign for the Kind Hand Soap as well as potentially an advertising banner for their website.
The only set back was the the bottles for the Soap had not arrived yet so I could not produce any content. So in the meantime, I worked on two things: a brochure and packaging design.
The brochure needed to be updated to reflect the fact that new products can be purchased from grums. I created two versions of the brochure so Rasmus had some different things to pick from.
Brochure: Version 1
Brochure: Version 2
The new products also needed labels. Even though this is something I am no expert in (since I did very little of it at BAA) I went about trying to create some labels and package designs for grums.
Label for coffee oil
Label for The Kind Hand Soap
Mockup for coffee oil box (work in progress)
The process of creating these was something I found very challenging. I was using both Photoshop and Illustrator and I got very frustrated along the way since there was no one to ask for help. However in the end it is something I would like to pursue more of in the future, since I really like the idea of creating something digitally and seeing it come to life as a real product.