Ever experienced being an intern in a startup company? If yes then I guess you know how it feels — even though we have different experiences, there are some things that are common to all startups. If no then enjoy this beautiful story. Well, I have being working as an intern at Senpai Creative Agency for about two weeks now and this is my story so far.
Get to know a little about me
Looking for a job was not difficult for me especially because I am a freelance artist and I have done illustrations for a couple of companies. I really enjoy being a freelance artist cause i get to do things at my own pace and time at the comfort of my home. This brings up the question, why look for a job?
I am sure the above description made you think I’m some chilled 23 year old artist living in her own house, well… Let me describe myself a little better again.
I’m not in any way 23 years old, I’m 18 (soon to be 19)— yeah, even though I act like I’m 23 most of the time. I’m an artist who is still in the university studying computer science. I still very much live with my parents so when I say my home I actually mean my parents’. I’m currently in my third year and in my school — I don’t know about other schools, it is mandatory for some specific courses like computer science to do six months internship at a company of their choice during the omega semester.
I’m guessing you now know why I needed to get a job — not voluntary but mandatory. Now the question is why a start up? why didn’t I just go to one of those huge companies that have been in existences for more than 5 years? The answer is very simple — I didn’t want to. I have worked for a design company before (like around 2016) and to be sincere my experience wasn’t bad but I just told myself I never wanted to do something like that again.
Senpai
Senpai is a creative digital consulting agency that uses technology to create and design beautiful digital experiences for people and businesses. In simple terms, it’s a design company with other sweet stuff attached. It was founded by Henry Ikoh — my very chilled yet annoying boss — in 2016.
The Senpai experience
Even though I’m an artist and people expect design to be easy and straight forward for me, it’s not. Sometimes I get confused as been a graphic designer — actually a lot of times. Like I said before, I have worked at a design company before but it just made me not want to have anything to do with anything design or design-related like typography and anything involving illustrator.
When I got to Senpai, I was told that my ‘feelings’ for design would change. Truly I didn’t believe that cause like said I never really saw myself doing anything design related. Well as you must have thought my ‘feelings’ for design changed within less than two weeks.
On my first day, I was welcomed by a cheerful boss who told me all about his plans for this year so as to prepare me for the journey ahead. For my first task, I was given a couple of videos to watch to welcome me into the wonderful world of design. Some which included the first episode of The Abstract: the Art of design. After watching a couple of videos, I was given a task to create an illustration using illustrator — a pretty nice way of making an artist fall in love with illustrator. I had to watch some videos to teach me more about illustrator. It was a great experience cause I got to learn new things about illustrator that I didn’t know about when I first learnt design.
Within a few days I became pretty good at doing illustrations on illustrator aside that my love for it grew that when I tried doing line arts on my normal drawing app — Paint Tool Sai, it felt different. I actually felt like using illustrator at that point.
After a wonderful success at introducing me to illustrator, I was introduced to design proper. I had to learn things like Typography — which I wasn’t a fan of, Visual Hierarchy, Color Theory and so on with the special aid of DesignLab. I had to finish a two weeks course in a day — Thanks Boss. It wasn’t easy taking in so much information but nonetheless I enjoyed it. Getting to learn new things about the topics I knew before was one of the best parts. Like the way Typography was shown really made me rethink my dislike for it. I was so amusing seeing what just letters could do to an entire information.
In one of the courses, I had to recreate a webpage prototype with Illustrator. At first glance I wasn’t sure I could do it — since I had already gotten used to using Illustrator for artworks — but I guess all it required was for me to first start it. I tried it out and I ended up not following the exact thing that was given — added a bit of my creative side. To my surprise it came out better than I thought. Plus my boss was really impressed — who isn’t happy when their boss is impressed by their work?
Preparation for the main work ended with the courses, other things I needed to learn I learnt it on the go like Writing a proposal, Using MailChimp, Creating TypeForms etc.
The real work began with creating a User Flow for a project we are working on called Shoply — This was just like my 6th day at Senpai. Designing the User Flow was quite easy for me because of my programming knowledge from school so it didn’t take much time. After that, I had to sketch a low fidelity wireframe then transfer it to illustrator.
Currently, we are working on the medium fidelity wireframe. We still have a big project ahead and I’m so excited.
The thing that surprises me the most is that it has just been two weeks and I have learnt so much from Senpai.
That’s my journey so far.
I will keep you updated about my journey at Senpai.
Thank you!
Dami.
