My Worx Week

Hello, everyone! I am deeply saddened to announce that this will be my final blog entry as an intern…but although it’s a sad moment, it’s been very hard to feel down. I have just graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with my Bachelor’s Degree, and I just happened to celebrate my 22^nd birthday! So many great things have happened in such a short amount of time and I couldn’t be happier.

Recently, for school, I had to write an evaluation for my internship with Worx, and so I thought it would be very fitting to include the reflection of my time here in this final entry:

“This semester, I was the graphic design intern at Worx Branding and Advertising in Prospect, CT. I can truthfully say that interning at this company was entirely successful and beneficial.

Not only did I pick up technical graphic design skills along the way, I also learned about the ins and outs of branding. I sat in meetings with my fellow “Worxers” while they were pitching ideas to their clients.  I learned about different marketing strategies, and how much research needs to be done in order to brand a company properly. Despite the size of Worx, they have great drive and produce exemplary work.

When I first started, I helped the designers come up with some concepts for logo designs. Some of their clients need to be completely re-branded, whereas others maybe just want a few changes, so I was able to see logos constantly modify.  One of my ideas didn’t become a full-blown logo, but the team decided to incorporate one of my ideas as an icon within the identity! Anytime I had questions, or needed opinions, the designers and the art director were always willing to assist.  Because of their expertise, I learned how to operate the Adobe Suite programs much more efficiently than when I had started back in January.

I also worked on my very own website design for a non-profit organization based in North Carolina. It nearly took me the entire semester to get designed, but it is currently being developed and will make a great piece in my portfolio.

Although the website design occupied me the most, I still dedicated my time to help the designers with other projects such as layout design and other website elements.

In conclusion, I greatly appreciated my time at Worx and would go back in a heartbeat. I learned so much this semester, and I only wonder how much more I could learn and improve if I stayed longer.”

And on that note, it is now time for me to enter the real world! With what I have learned at Worx, I feel very confident that I can and will be successful. Even so, I will always keep my connections with the fellow “Worxers”, and I’ll stop by again with a guest blog entry to fill you in on my endeavors!

Until next time! :)

-Nadia

This week my band ASTON released a cover of Katy Perry’s smash hit single, Firework. The video can be found by clicking here. We recorded our version of this song this past summer at Silent Owl Studio in Orange County, New York. Silent Owl Studio is owned and run by two former members of the band The Ataris, Paul Carabello and John Collura. We also recorded a 6 song EP with them last year called HOME. You can listen and download the album on iTunes or by visiting our bandcamp. Recording at this studio with these guys is something that is very exciting to us because The Ataris are one of our biggest influences as a band. We all grew up listening to the guys that we now are able to consider friends. It’s just really, really cool for all of us and we appreciate every minuet that we are there hanging out with them and learning from a couple of guys that have seen it all in the music world. 

Long time no see, everyone! A lot has happened since I have last updated and I am very excited to inform you all about everything I have learned.

My Spring Break for Southern Connecticut has already passed, but I took the opportunity of available time to put more hours in for my internship here at Worx. I am only able to intern two days a week during the school semester, so this was the perfect chance to come in and work on projects.

My lack of updating (shame on me!) would be due to the fact that I have been rigorously   working on a new website design. For the past few weeks, Evan and I have been working on our very own “intern” project. A non- profit organization based in Wake County, North Carolina contacted Worx about redesigning a website and we happily took on the job. Evan took on the role as account manager and worked professionally with our client while I redesigned their entire website.

Although I have dabbled with some website design projects in my classes, I must say that I have learned much more behind these orange walls than at school. The biggest challenge I encountered with this intern project was the amount of time we had. Luckily, we were working with a very patient client that didn’t have a strict deadline, but our general timeline was about 4-6 weeks, which sounds like plenty but not quite so! When I unexpectedly got stricken with the “Worx Plague” (a sickness that effected the entire building, mostly) I even took the project home with me just so I could finish things up.

Although I had a very clear and aesthetic vision of how I wanted the website to look in my head, I had to go back many times to change things around. It was also my first time working with Shae Apland, the technology manager, who was in charge of writing the code for the site. He and I worked together to develop layouts that would be easy to slice—and that is where the “problem solving” task of a graphic designer had to come in.

 I just finished with the design, and it is currently in the process of being developed, and I’ll get a screenshot up for you soon! And although we have all been working hard, we always make sure to take a breather at noon with a catered lunch by D’Amelio’s of Waterbury! Here we are eating away:

 Until next time! :)

-Nadia

Nick and I became celebrities today after the Boston Red Sox tweeted a picture of us cheering in a Fenway Park 100 year anniversary collage. The tweet said “Thank you to America’s Most Beloved Fans #Fenway100” so I tweeted back “YOU ARE WELCOME!!” Both of us instantly told everyone in the office and posted the link to our Facebook and Twitter pages. My mom didn’t believe that it was real at first, she thought someone in the Worx creative department photoshopped it! A few minutes later a friend from home informed me that the picture took up a full page in The Boston Globe. I thought the twitter shout out was awesome I never imagined I would be in my favorite newspaper cheering for my beloved baseball team.

            The picture was taken at last year’s opening day game at Fenway Park against the Yankees, which turned out to be a great game ending with a 9-3 Sox victory. My brother and his girlfriend are at this year’s opening day game today with my parents for the 100^th anniversary celebration. I got a text from my brother shortly after he got there saying “Your pictures all over Fenway in every bathroom!” This was when I realized the picture was much more than just a fun tweet, it is the official 100 Year anniversary poster that will likely hang inside my Cathedral on Yawkey Way for the rest of the season and in my house for the rest of my life.

We are the second picture from the left all the way at the bottom

The Tweet The Boston Globe Inside Fenway Park

Wow college flew by! I only have a few weeks left of school and it’s onto the real world for me. Thanks to Worx, I got a little taste of what means to be a professional and do important work for clients. As my time and experience here have increased so have my responsibilities. I am interacting and working with clients more than ever and it is a great experience.

I’m excited for senior week beginning May 9^th.  We will be staying in the freshman dorms just like old times which will certainly be nostalgic. There are many events and activities planned such as a formal dance and a trip to Mohegan Sun. My school rented out a nightclub and many busses to safely transport everyone to and from the casino. I personally don’t care for gambling unless it’s a March Madness bracket but the atmosphere and company will definitely be enjoyable. It is going to be a bittersweet week of last hurrahs and bonding with all my college friends. I will undoubtedly miss everyone and everything about college but at the same time I am looking forward to commencing the rest of my life!

Goofing around with my friends while attempting to take a “Christmas card” picture freshman year in our dorm. I am lucky to remain very close with most of them to this day.

       Hey there! I just got back from Naples, Florida where I spent my spring break with my parents. The weather was perfect apart from a few sun showers that came and went. My parents are looking for a place to retire and my dad’s mission is to find a community with a “playable” golf course. By playable he means wide open so he doesn’t lose a ball out of bounds on every tee shot. We played 3 rounds at different community courses and it took about 2 ½ rounds to get my swing back. We also went to the beach one day which was perfect until my pale Irish skin began to fry. I had to take cold showers for a couple of days and couldn’t carry golf clubs on my shoulders if Phil Mickelson asked me to caddy for him.

        As we drove around looking at houses I was getting excited for my parents and kept joking that I was following them to Florida and moving in with them. They told me I can move wherever I please as long as it’s not in their house. I don’t know what I’m going to do when they are 1,200 miles from me! I guess I’ll have to visit a lot. I find it interesting that I am entering the corporate world just as my dad’s leaving it. He’s experienced a lot and has good advice for me when it comes to my career but not so much when it comes to my golf swing.

Next week is Spring Break for Sacred Heart and I’ll be heading back to Massachusetts. This will be a much-needed break in my last semester as an undergrad. While most of my friends are traveling over this break to places like Punta Cana and Aruba, I decided to have a more relaxing vacation back home with my family. I plan on helping out my uncle a few days next week at his fishing tackle manufacturing warehouse. He bought the company Zing Products two years ago and whenever we can my brother and I like to go and help him out. It is a fairly small company so all of the lures are handmade. Hand making lures and other fishing tackle might not seem enjoyable for most but for someone who loves fishing like I do, it’s very interesting to see the process that goes into making the lures that I use every summer.

 Next week will also be the first time I’ve seen my family since starting here at Worx so I’m sure they will have a million questions for me about the life of an intern. I can’t wait to tell them about all of the new people I’ve met and the projects that I have worked on so far. Both of my parents are teachers so I will have a lot to tell them about the world of branding and advertising!

Here’s a fish that I caught last summer using one of the lures that I actually made myself!

Hello, all! My name is Nadia Baz and I am the new design intern at Worx. I am finishing up my final semester at Southern Connecticut State University as a Studio Art major with a concentration in graphic design. I’ve been working here for a few days, and I cannot stress ENOUGH how much I’ve enjoyed being here and how much I am learning about the ins and outs of branding. 

On my first day here, I was introduced to everyone on the team and I helped the designers get some material ready for a presentation that was scheduled to happen later that afternoon. Even more exciting, Marysia, the Worx Art Director, asked me if I wanted to sit in on that meeting to take some notes on the presentation! I couldn’t have been more excited to have the chance to sit in on a real meeting and get to meet our clients, especially on my first day.

The client, a car-parking management company out of Massachusetts, had come in to see the process that Worx had made on their company’s branding project. During the meeting, I was completely in awe by the professionalism displayed by the Worx team and how they presented all their material, and I could tell the client was too! I was so absorbed into the presentation that I didn’t even realize that my hours were up and I had to head to class! I feel like I have learned so much about this company in such a short amount of time. I feel honored to be part of this team, and I am looking forward to working with the designers to come up with new ideas that could really make a difference.

For now, the designers and I will do some color exploration and work on some concepts for the parking management client’s new logo design. I can’t wait to see how much more developed the branding will become! I can already tell that in the end it will turn out spectacular because the designers (and everyone) in this building are incredibly talented and passionate about what they do.

As far as the blogging goes, I also really look forward to continuing to share my Worx experiences with all of you. I have already gotten my photo taken and I’m currently working on my bio, so that, I promise—soon enough, you’ll get an even better sense of who this intern is writing from behind these orange walls!

Until next time! :) Nadia

Last week everyone here at Worx pooled some money together for a fewlottery tickets, unfortunately we didn’t win, so I’m back here writing another blog! This week has been great! I started working on a new project withMichael that involves Google Analytics, which is a new program to me. Throughout this week I’ve been becoming more and more familiar with the program and can really see now how useful it is in analyzing website traffic and other metrics that we can use to optimize a website.

            This week I also got my picture taken for the blog. The photo shoot with Steve, who is the Worx photographer and a web developer, was really fun; I had no idea that he was such a talented photographer. I brought in myacoustic nylon-string guitar that I just got for Christmas this year as a prop for the photo shoot. We tried many different poses with the guitar, but the best one was of me jumping and really rocking out so that’s the one we used! Maybe its even right to the left of this blog post right now!

Hello everyone! So last Tuesday I was in my Consumer Behavior class and my professor was going through a PowerPoint lecture and I noticed a Worx client was on the presentation and then he proceeded to ask the class if anyone had heard of company. I had done some work for them when I first got here so I raised my hand and told him what I knew. He seemed delighted and asked me how I knew so much about them. I told him, “I’m an intern at Worx Branding & Advertising…” and he stopped his lecture right there to tell me the story of how he was connected to Worx.  We talked for a few more minutes and he had some really nice things to say about our agency that really made me proud to be a part of the Worx team.

It was my dad’s birthday last weekend so I thought I would surprise him by going home and showing up at the restaurant where my family was celebrating.  When he turned the corner and saw me sitting at the table he looked a bit confused but thrilled at the same time. The surprise was awesome but it almost didn’t go as planned. Earlier in the week I told him that I was going to try to come home until I talked to my mom and we decided to tell him something came up (“a group meeting”) therefore I couldn’t make it home anymore. Apparently once he heard that I wasn’t coming home anymore he decided he wanted to take my mom into New York City to have a nice dinner and see a Broadway show. This plan may have sounded appealing to my mom but she had to think on her feet and come up with an excuse to keep him home. She settled on complaining that it was too cold to walk the city in the winter and they should wait until the spring for that.  Unbeknownst to my mom at the time, my siblings and I got him tickets to the Broadway show “Magic Bird” in the spring for his birthday present. It’s nice when things fall into place. You can call it coincidence in both instances but I like to think that you can make it easier on yourself by paying attention and connecting the dots.