Graphic Design Production & Documentation Intern

Ideal Start Date:

5/12/25

Ideal Time Allotment:

Part-time, in-person at Los Angeles Office

3 days/week (Tuesday through Thursday)

5/12/25 through 8/3/25

(this can change if needed, but this seems like an ideal starting point)

Handbuilt Description:

Handbuilt is a graphic design studio and part of NAC, an architectural firm specialized in design for education, healthcare, and other civic projects. NAC is a national firm with over 230 employees working in offices in Seattle, Spokane, Los Angeles, and Columbus. Handbuilt provides graphic design services within NAC as well as pursues its own educational, civic, cultural, and artistic projects. We collaborate with space-makers, educators, designers, and artists to provoke civic and cultural experiences.

Ideal Candidate:

You are a detail-oriented person who excels at organizing creative work. You are interested in finding smart ways to present visual ideas. You are experienced with object photography and video and postproduction enhancements. You might still be in school or just out, but you’ve already started building your own creative point of view. You’re curious about how design intersects with space, community, and culture — and you’re excited to support those ideas through production, documentation, and archiving.

Position Description:

We are looking for an intern to work with us on production, documentation and archiving of our past projects in preparation for a new portfolio website and to enrich our archive. An ideal candidate would be organized and detail-oriented with experience in both graphic design and portfolio photography. We’d love to work with someone who can follow art direction for these items and provide their own perspective and ideas on how to achieve a common goal. Applicants should be current students of graphic design or photography, or up to 1 year of professional experience after graduation. Additional professional experience in graphic design, web design, photography, video, or image enhancement is a plus.

Primary Duties:

• Following production steps to create and format case studies for past Handbuilt projects for use on a portfolio website, parent portfolio InDesign file, and general archiving
• Preparing images and text for website including retouching, resizing, and organizing existing project photography
• Photographing and/or scanning existing print projects and processing those images
• Creating some new Illustrator or Photoshop files to help to tell the story of a project. These could include an image that displays all shapes used in a project, or an image that collages multiple images together to share the concept of a project.
• Uploading case studies to new portfolio website
• Training on Craft CMS platform
• Training on Open Asset platform
• Working collaboratively with the Handbuilt and NAC teams

Skills Experience Needed:

• Portfolio/project photography and lighting
• Photo retouching and color correction
• Lightroom basics
• Photoshop basics
• Illustrator basics
• InDesign basics
• Some experience in simple video editing, color correcting and animation (such as trimming and exporting video in Premiere Pro and creating GIF animations in Photoshop)
• Some familiarity using CMS system such as Craft CMS, WordPress, Squarespace, or similar.

What You’ll Gain:

• Hands-on experience building a professional portfolio
• Mentorship from designers with backgrounds in education, cultural, and civic design work
• Portfolio reviews and guidance on presenting your work
• Exposure to the inner workings of a design studio and architecture firm
• Paid internship
• Training for Craft CMS