Most people think of internships as summers spent fetching coffee, answering phones and daydreaming of faraway beaches.
So Tucker Fitzgerald, how did you spend your summer internship at Martini Design?
"I was amazed to be assigned webpage layouts, for a company like Nintendo, in my second week," said Fitzgerald, a design student at Lake Washington Technical College, and one of the first-ever interns at Martini Design, a five-year-old Seattle design firm.
"Between handling characters like Pokémon and Kirby, and brainstorming solutions for Microsoft projects, Martini really gave me a chance to dive in. They were a large enough firm to allow me to work on nationally visible projects, yet small enough that I could get senior designer feedback and support while I worked."
Martini's internship program was spawned from a seemingly inconsequential dinner conversation this spring between business development manager Nicole Bahr and two representatives from Lake Washington Technical College. Realizing that both Martini and the college were seeking to develop ties between design firms and students, the idea of an internship took shape.
For Martini, the intern program was a way to give back to the community after five years of successful growth from a two-person operation working out of the home of its founder to a large, thriving firm housed in a 4,500-square-foot office in Seattle. Specializing in Flash websites and demo development, Martini Design continues to attract both new clients and the need for great designers. A community internship program was the solution.
"Our goal was to give the interns a slice of real-life experience; to have them witness, and share, how business is conducted in a busy design house," said Project Manager and Internship Coordinator Fiona Robertson Remley. We are not about junior designers or small projects here. Everyone matters, and everything we do is a team effort. We want our interns to be a part of that team."
The program was so successful, in fact, that Martini Design hopes to expand it in future years to include students from other Seattle-area schools.
"We've always hired locally," said Martini's chief financial officer, Doris Quan, "and we liked the idea of bringing in people with potential and passion right out of school."
The students who formed the inaugural class of interns at Martini-after going through a rigorous interview process-were considered full team members. Among the projects they completed were developing comps for Nintendo e-mail campaigns, working on page layout projects that received direct client feedback, prepping more than 200 Pokémon characters in Photoshop and designing user interfaces for live websites where their work was posted alongside that of senior designers.
"It's an eye opener to have their fresh ideas and opinions adding new perspective to each project," said Martini senior designer Tabitha Holmquist. "At the end of their stay here they have a whole set of friends and resources to propel them into their future careers as design professionals, and we have the satisfaction of knowing that we've helped someone on their way to reaching their goals and becoming a part of our greater design community."
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