This is my Internship Report. I presented it on Wednesday July 23rd 2025 in front of donors, supervisors, and other interns at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. My goal with this presentation was: optimal storytelling, minimal information.
Design is all about taking content and visually explaining it. You would be amazed at how much it cradles everything around us. And from a young age, this idea of conveying images alongside text fascinated me. (I was adding a column system at age 6).
Skipping a couple of years (13) I applied to the Graphic Design program at Appalachian State. I was one of 16 selected to advance on. I then got a summer job interning at FineBooks under the Art Director. It was there that I received two pieces of career advise; join a club that you can do more publishing work at, and apply to intern at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I went back to college and became the Creative Director for The Peel...and also developed a secondary design interest; Album Design.
The first year of The Peel Spring 2024 edition won an Apple Awards at the CMA Conference. Myself and Abby Fritsch (Visual Editor of The Peel) attended as Peel representatives. I started a punk rock band (GRLBND) with Katherine Baloga (lead singer). The second edition of The Peel was created with myself and the design team Mason Mccaffnney and Eamon O'Maile. During which I applied for this internship and was incredibly excited as it is a huge stepping point for...
My Goal.
Here are some fun photos of me at The Smithsonian Hazy Center back in 2013. If you had told me at 11 I would be professionally designing at that museum I would have taken off like that plane.
My Boss at FineBooks has a Friend who is also an Art Director. She went to a conference at one point and met Ted Lopez and really liked him. She said "he would be fun to work for". Ted has a degree from Penn. State University in Graphic Design and has been doing Design at various other locations before coming to NASM. He is now the Creative Director for Air & Space Quarterly and works under Communications doing all sorts of projects.
I was able to learn many lessons..some as big as how to communicate progress on projects and some as small as 72 dpi.
At the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, we are constantly designing for unusual sizes. Web ads, stickers, headlines. Each requiring different communication priorities.
I must have made 15 different web ads before arriving at the final two on the right. Why? Rules such as photography location, colors, and font size had to work in order for the design to make it out to the wide web.
I showed this slide to all of the interns...just to showcase the issues with designing for such a small size. Text needs to be legible at such a small size while also conveying all the required information.
After going to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center after being assigned to design a series of brochures of military artifacts..I got to experience what it was like to try and find these artifacts with a dosant. Getting that experience helped me to create a design that was as user friendly as possible to ensure these artifacts were in fact accessible to find.
This is the mock up of the design. There are three different guides for the 3 different parts of the military Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center carries artifacts from. The brochure is 9 inches long and has an inch removed on the front to showcase images of the artifacts and encourage the foldout of the map inside. The plus sign is part of the branding guidelines...and the colors are part of the NASM secondary color palette.
