Feb-Mar-Apr → Internship with Hao Wei Tu Studio
Summary
Remotely with an Australia-based graphic designer Hao Wei Tu (haoweitu.info)
“D&AD New Blood”
D&AD New Blood Awards
For the applied context master, an internship is required, and it should connect to the master project in medium, discipline, or research approach. I originally looked for a local print studio in Belgium, but the replies were slow, and as the deadline approached I reached out to Hao Wei Tu, a designer whose workshop I had joined before. He agreed to supervise me, and we worked remotely from February to April — two meetings a week, the rest over Teams, across a time difference.
The work centred on the D&AD New Blood Awards. We chose the brief from Penguin Random House and Monotype, which asked how typography can help people connect with words. I developed a project called Set the Scene: a typographic reading folio folded into a Penguin book and unfolded before reading, using type to mark the shift from daily life into the world of the story. I handled the typography, mock-ups, and presentation. The style was more commercial than my school work, but the process turned out to be closely tied to my research.
The project followed the British Design Council's Double Diamond model — diverging and converging through discover, define, develop, and deliver.
My first direction was somewhat off-brief. I adjusted it gradually, kept to the schedule, and worked toward the deadline. But even on the final submission day, I was still editing the same design until the last minute, trying to make it as good as possible. If I opened that file again today, I would probably still find things to change.
This was the same condition my master project had been investigating, only now inside a commercial, client-driven context rather than a self-directed studio one. The Double Diamond suggests a project ends at "deliver." My experience suggested that "deliver" is just where the revising is forced to stop, not where the work is actually finished.
This internship is part of why I later decided to focus on a single poster (Bare Minimum) for the studio project, rather than remaking several series. Working through the competition made one thing concrete: every revision represents working hours, a designer's accumulated experience, and often an ongoing negotiation between the designer and the client. That negotiation, more than any final file, is where completion is actually decided.