3 Weeks Internship at HK Magazine - Hong Kong

Every summer for the past 3 years I have managed to take a few weeks and saved up for a trip to Hong Kong. This year hasn't changed, except for an opportunity to work as an intern for Asia City Publishing, which is a company that specializes 'in providing city living and lifestyle content and marketing solutions' in Asia.

Being the first to pioneer the idea of free distribution publications in Asia, one of their main products was HK Magazine - a free weekly english magazine in Hong Kong that offers discussions on social issues as well as entertainment, music and restaurant listings and recommendations on the latest trends.

During the 3 weeks, I was put into the position of a Graphic Design intern in the production team who were in charge of Hk Magazine. The work varied from editorial design to idea generation. Some examples of work produced during my stay there://

The first task that I was assigned:- draw the map of Hong Kong island that would be considered to be used for a new brochure aimed at tourists to Hong Kong. I've never really drawn maps before so this was pretty new to me. It wasn't too hard, just tedious and required so much patience! The only difficult thing was researching and deciding which roads to emphasise more and which ones to just ignore. The colour scheme was also quite frustrating, I was told to come up with a new colour swatch that they would use for all their maps in the future, the tricky thing was that it needed to fit in with the prototype brochure, which restricted the designs. Anyway, these maps took me AGES, but looked pretty good in the end i guess.




Some visuals on idea generation for a a re-brand on another magazine called The List - a free monthly publication aimed at the female population.



Illustration for 796th issue of HK Magazine://
During the 2nd week of my internship, I was assigned to come up with ideas and visuals to respond to a piece of text that was titled 'Hong Kong Fairytale'. I found the task rather broad to start with as I could have done anything for it. They had no specification to start with other than the fact that it needed to have a 'cute' look to it and that it visually reflected the text. I therefore decided on working with bold shapes and colours on Adobe Illustrator. In comparison to the work done at college, this was rather challenging in a way that it has been a long time since I had to design something simply for it's aesthetics. I came up with the final illustration anyway, and was quite chuffed that it had been published in one of their issues. Although it doesn't really flow with my usual work, it was still a change and quite fun to work on, until I got told to alter almost everything about it, which was quite frustrating and gave me an insight of designing under a team of people rather than for yourself.

Anyway, final full colour print on an A2 slide on news print://