One of the odd things about my internship is the sheer level of power that I’ve been given. Even though I’m technically an intern, I have administrator access to HSE’s CMS, and I have permission to jump in and make changes for production on the fly. This has been amazing, because I can make hotfixes as I see fit, even if I’m not in the office. Granted, my supervisor expects me to report back on which changes I made and why. But even so, I have been mostly at the helm of how the website has been iterated upon.
In this sense, my supervisor and I are closer to partners rather than a boss-employee relationship. It’s an odd thing to navigate as an intern. How do I know if I’m being too needy or asking just enough? How do I know if I’m being too forward and think I know better than others? That ambiguity has been legitimately hard for me to grapple with.
With that said, I have been using that ambiguity as a weapon, taking the freedom and using it to implement my own ideas and prototype my own design patterns. If there is an unaddressed problem I find, I’ll implement my own solution and show it to my supervisor to see where she stands on it.
She loves directness, so I have been very up-front about what is possible and what is not with the software we have. Being a developer with a programming background, I have a little bit more insight into the intricacies in the development process than my supervisor does as a project manager. Elementor has a lot of power, sure, but ultimately it is just WordPress. I can’t automate nearly as much as I would if I could code my way through. There are some ideas she has had where I had to outright say “this is not possible without over a month of time investment”. She understands that, and moves on to a different solution. It’s been very give and take.
While I do get tasks at times, they are very vague. It’s more of a “hey could you look into this for me?” type of thing rather than a command. For instance, I’ve been tasked with creating a new consistent design language for the website. Making sure the buttons are the same, the switches are consistent across all pages, et cetera. This might seem like a fairly simple task, but this website has over 50 pages, all of which have both English and German versions. Coming up with a solution that will fit the variety of content they have to display is difficult and requires a lot of creativity.
They are a health and safety firm, so there does need to be a level of seriousness to the design language, no doubt. They’re dealing with people’s lives, after all. But their attitude is so friendly and laid back that I want to show that approachable aspect in their design language. These are things that I need to decide for myself that may impact the types of clients they attract in the future.
For example, buttons and symbols with rounded corners can signify an almost childlike playfulness. Look at brands like Nintendo for example. Their primary audience is children, so most if not all of their interactive elements have rounded corners. Cards, buttons, icons, they’re all rounded and have little bouncy animations to them. This attracts people who know them for that playfulness. It’s part of their brand.
Additionally, there’s plenty of red. Red is their primary logo color, and red is the color of Mario’s cap. It’s a key part of their visual identity. HS-Experts uses Mint Twist as their identifying color [#95c6bb]. Their logo is green, their merchandise has this green, and their social media posts feature this shade of green. However, their website has a smorgasbord of colors, some of which being that identifying green, some other shades of green, and a few strange uses of primary colors. I plan to unify all of their interactive elements under this green color, and pair it with strategic use of white and black to make them pop.
The strategic part of that point holds a lot of weight. If clients ever need to print the website, they will likely need to print in black and white. When RGB colors are converted over, lighter colors tend to mesh together into a single blob. I imagine you’ve seen this before if you’ve ever printed a colorful doc with text that’s yellow or light grey. This means that I have to make sure that there is enough black in frame to create enough contrast. Tools like Pika really help with this.
All in all, I’m very grateful for the freedom I have. The ability to not only suggest my own improvements but also implement them at will is a huge privilege. While it comes with responsibility, I’m glad that my internship is giving me proper experience with a real-world product in a way that formal education can’t.
Bis später!