I’m back again! Hello Marywood University Art community and friends! I know you all missed me and my blogs during my 2022-23 senior year as a graphic design student and writer/editor. First and foremost, I am SO honored and excited to be welcomed back (shoutout Sue, you’re the best) as an Alumni writer. Back in the day (2022) I would always say to myself, “I know I’ve made it when I’m invited back for an Alumni highlight or Alumni stories…” and well, I don’t exactly know if I’ve made it quite yet, I sure as heck am proud of myself for everything I’ve learned and accomplished after graduation.
To sum up my job broadly, I am a recently promoted graphic designer in the world of professional sports. Our graphic design team is responsible for maintaining the visual identity of 4-5 different brands in addition to working with performers touring through the venue to adequately resize and properly market the creative material they provide. With all of that, my daily projects range from email campaigns, to billboards, to package designs, to game-day social graphics, t-shirt giveaways, promo items, and so, so much more.
As someone who grew up with a passion for sports and a passion for art, I truly love what I do and I am grateful that I get to marry the two in my career everyday (who would have thought?). Even though I entered the corporate world after I graduated, Marywood plays a huge part in my early success as a designer. The graphic design program at Marywood made me well equipped for the real world not only through it’s small class sizes and in-depth explorations of the Adobe suite, it exposed me to local artists and businesses in and around Scranton, PA to get first-hand experiences of the design world with real clients.
My average studio class at Marywood at a minimum of 6 students and in a full class, about 20. While we would all be tasked with the same projects, we were the captains of our own vessels sailing along side each other with the same destination on the horizon. This was nice because we had an understanding of what was expected of us through each class and could count on one another as sounding boards for ideas or issues, as well as grasping the complete work load from our other 3 studio classes. The transition from student to designer here was an easy leap to take as I saw many similarities now working on a design team with 5-6 other artists, sitting along side each other, bouncing ideas, critiquing and problem solving. Our projects are different, sure, but were all working towards the same end goal. Success for one is success for the whole team. Just like my days in college, I find myself bouncing from one project in Illustrator, to another one in Photoshop and InDesign and so-on and so-forth.
Marywood also helped me identify and develop my strengths as a graphic designer, it fed my interests and allowed me explore them through tailoring projects specifically towards sports design. If we had to create a typography poster, I made a schedule for the track team highlighting their matches. My first project coming into my senior year was an environmental design project, Kindness Lives Here where we needed to design sticker decals to be placed around campus in a location of our choice. Through scouting our locations and getting approvals of our spaces, I knew the athletic center is where my project would live.
Through the Kindness Lives Here project and many others, Marywood provided me with first hand experience into the world of design. I had the opportunity to work with both internal and external clients around the community, getting my feet wet as a budding professional. My professor, Sue Jenkins, had set me up with the tennis coach to get some action shots during a home tournament, which led me to make some graphics for the athletic department including the track and volleyball programs, then to working for the university in a work study as both an editor here for the blog and creating more graphics for the art department as a whole. All of these little things helped me land my internship with Lackawanna College Football, which is a Junior Division I program right up the block in Downtown Scranton.
While there were many things Marywood did to set me up for success, there are a few things no one could have prepared me for:
- Working 52 weeks a year. 8 hours a day. No summer break, no winter break.
- Can’t wear sweatpants :/
- Remembering to pack lunch (EVERYDAY)
- Remembering to eat lunch
- Taxes, 401k, health insurance, etc…
- Adobe crashing and losing all my Creative Cloud Libraries (cried so hard that day)
- Gritty