I desired to fill in my new vacant summer with a work experience that hopefully related to my future career in design. I reached out to many of the openings available in a traineeship program run by Millersville University and CareerLink. I heard back from a few organizations, but only felt drawn to one, and that was Lancaster Rec. The Lancaster Recreation Commission is a nonprofit agency founded in 1909 to provide neighborhood-based recreation and learning opportunities for youth and adult members. Our assignment was to research and create a social media style guide for Lancaster Rec to refer to for all of their social media platforms. The project was challenging as it required a lot of research and understanding of how to construct a brand on social media. My partner focused on the content as I filled in with some of the topics I understood and worked on the layout of the entire document. We used Canva, a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and other visual content, to design our final document. I had never used Canva before, but it was the best platform to make sure everyone had easy access.
The project took ten weeks to complete, and I learned more about social media branding and how to build a style guide. I thank my fellow intern, Elizabeth Wardwell, for sharing so much of her branding knowledge with me. I thought I understood the branding of an organization or a company on social media; however, my knowledge was only on the design or layout of a post. I learned about the target audiences, style tone, platform goals, specifying purposes of posting, and much more through this experience.
Contributors
Elizabeth Wardwell
Software Used
Canva