STEFINITLY
Everything looks better smaller
Baby kimono sewn out of repurposed fabric from men’s button down shirt.
January 2011
6 posts
A very frugal Christmas
Before December began, I updated my 1920’s Singer sewing machine with a newer
Molly and Chris get married.
I designed invitations as a wedding present on a budget and inspired by the 1920’s.
Technicolor life at Bloomies
I was like Dorothy going from Kansas to Oz when I started this turn. I didn’t have any idea how to work a new program called InDesign when I started with Bloomingdale’s but like fashion marketing, I picked it up pretty fast. The customer was highly varied from newly engaged couples, international visitors, children, men and the main base of fashion consuming 20-something woman. Color, illustration, sparkles…these are not things I used on a regular basis at my previous financial publication experiences.
Promotional mailers, wedding event materials and gift card packaging.
San Fransisco store newspaper advertising.
Concierge magazine advertising.
Odds and Ends...
I’m always on the hunt for creating new storage solutions in my home. I have a hard
My first job at The WSJ
Mutual Fund Research Survey Cover.
Mutual Fund Research Survey inside detail.
I attended a medium sized college in Virginia with a modest sized graphic design community. My favorite professor, Trudy Cole-Zielanski was always funny, honest and very down to earth. One of the most traumatizing and extremely informative exercises she had the students run through was “The two-hour logo design”. Now I realize Trudy kept this project close to the end of graduation because had students understood that this would be asked of them in the real world, they would of become business students instead. I can’t say I even remember what my logo looked like, but I was just a little inkling closer to being ready for a real job.
The fall after graduation, I landed a junior design position with the in house marketing group of The Wall Street Journal becoming not Stephanie Lee but the “new Julie” for the previous designer who had just been promoted. My cubicle was positioned amongst a couple research analysts, which turned out to be an asset in education and focus. During my time with the Journal, I created a variety of packaged research studies for use by the ad sales team plus promotional materials, flash based websites (when it was the hot new thing), advertising, trade show booth art. My coworkers, from the research analyst to my right to the 30 year old design veteran to my left, taught me to have fun with stuffy projects, print production, diplomacy and to always ask, “Who are we targeting with this project?”.
Research Resources Broaster cover.
Research Resources Broaster detail.
Perhaps it may not make sense to mention the other ways this particular job shaped me as a person, but I would feel amiss not to. The feeling of family was something that I’ve not been able to recreate any where else. The friendships I made while working at The WSJ are long standing and continue to this day. We worked together on September 11th, watched colleagues walk into our offices recounting horrors they witnessed on the way to work and those who needed to leave their Battery Park homes because the air was full of dust. The days of hoping for one of our own reporters, Daniel Pearl, would come home and trying to give support to his wife and child while waiting to hear news. Maybe it was youth or living several hundred miles from my parents that helped create these bonds however, these people equally adopted me as part of their lives as well. It’s 4 1/2 years that I’ll always be grateful to have stumbled upon.
