Winding Up My US Design Internship Experience

Hello. My name is Maiko. I’ve been working at btrax as a design intern since September, 2010. (I wrote a post introducing myself in the past, but it is written in Japanese…)

On March 4th, I’m going to leave btrax in order to return to Japan. My goal as a web designer was to provide web solutions to clients from a global viewpoint. Now, after 6 months, I think btrax is exactly the place I was looking for as it best suited my needs. I learned a lot from btrax as a web design intern in a multi-cultural environment.

Brandon, CEO of btrax, and my co-workers helped me a lot and I really appreciated it.  Let me share some of my thoughts and insights about my internship.

Work at btrax

My role was helping to design visual elements as well as front-end coding for websites. Since I didn’t have any experience as an web designer (I didn’t even have graphic design or coding skills. I used to work as a book editor in Japan.), I became impatient with the fact that I progressed slowly and at times seemed overwhelming.

My co-workers helped me all the time and afforded me the opportunity to learn about web design. btrax has many unique, creative, multinational designers so I always had the opportunity to be exposed to several new ideas. That was an amazing experience.

I also had the opportunity to learn about other web tech like SEO, online marketing etc. This knowledge is also helpful to a web designer. I still have many things that I have to learn, but at least I have acquired the basics to build the solid foundation.

One impressive thing I learned from working at btrax was to “keep thinking about the reason for the design even in your private life.” One of my mentors told me, “it will help you to design in order to meet client’s needs, making things look better and simple.” After receiving this advice, I’ve been exploring “why?”, and I have found designing is the process of making solutions for the problems. Designing is not only thinking about the visual elements but also the structure or the balance of the information.

Fun Company

In addition to the nice work environment, one thing I’m going to miss from working at btrax is the “people”. They are all creative, nice, and also very fun to be around. We celebrated everyone’s birthday with a lunch & message cards fulfilled with illustrations, photos, and warm messages. We also had a going away party every time someone graduated from btrax, and we went on company group outings as well. I think this kind of friendly attitude in a company is unique.

I think that the creativity and team spirit in our work came from this sense of fun. Anyway, I had a great time in my working and private life because of btrax members!

Because San Francisco is a Mecca for the web industry, I was exposed to many different aspects of the industry. Meeting creative people in the San Francisco Bay Area gave me a diversity of inspiration for my work.

Keep in touch!

Lastly, I launched my personal website making the most of what I learned at btrax. Please take a look at www.maikotheworld.com. I’d be happy to hear any feedback from you.

This intern experience at btrax will definitely be a great asset for me. Thank you again for the great times at btrax. See you in Japan!