June - August 2022
Money Her Way
UX & Graphic Design Internship
ROLE
UX/Wordpress Intern
TEAM
Grace Ho
Sydney Howard
Anastasia Karol
SKILLS
Brand/Logo Design
Graphic Design
Web development
Accessibility Assessment
TOOLS
Wordpress
Adobe Illustrator
Role Expectations
• Use WordPress to edit, update, and refresh webpages to company website and other digital platforms/websites
• Assist with form-building on our WordPress site
• Ability to think independently about how the website UX should work and make recommendations for better user experience
• Build campaign landing pages
• Connecting website page back-end reporting
• Use Screenshot Pro to create PDFs of full web pages, and ability to mark them up with comment functionality
• Review marked up PDFs of webpages and execute changes indicated
• Test/manage links
In 2022, I worked at Money Her Way as a UX/Wordpress Intern. Money Her Way is a small startup currently based in New York. It is a financial advice blog specifically tailored to help women get the resources they need to become financially literate. It is run by a mother/daughter team and is connected to Halliday Financial, a family run financial firm.
Before our team began working, we conducted an evaluation on the website to see what our client and stakeholders wanted to be changed and developed further. From that evaluation, we divided up tasks based on our strengths. Because I have experience with graphic design, I worked on many of the visual projects.
Project 1: Logo Redesign
Using Adobe Illustrator, I redesigned the logo with vector graphics to be more recognizable as a financial company. Previously, the logo was the company's initials, but there was no indicator of what the company did. Because of that, I wanted to use easily recognizable symbols, such as a dollar bill or a piggy bank. I then implemented the new logo into the website.
Project 2: Website Graphics
I used Adobe Illustrator to create new vector graphics for each of the website's pages. This was done to establish a consistent style between all of the pages. At the same time, I also utilized the opportunity to include more diversity on the website since it was previously dominated by depictions and photos of white women.
Mini-Project 1: Infographics
I worked on the collaboration between Money her way and The 411k, another financial advice company. I used Adobe Illustrator to create two infographics to convey information on retirement.
Takeaways
From this experience, I learned how to communicate and work in a professional environment. I had never used Wordpress before, so I got to learn how to use a new tool for web development. This summer also challenged my graphic design abilities to make bigger and more complex graphics, and I grew to find a passion for vector graphic art. However, in the end, I think what I benefited from most was simply seeing my academic work become real work in the professional world. This internship is the first stepping stone of my professional career and I'm thankful for the opportunity to learn more this summer.
Project 3: Increased Accessibility & Website Organization
I used custom CSS to try to reduce the animations on the website for those who have the preference of reduce-motion active on their browsers. I also added color contrast between fonts and backgrounds to make the website readable. I was also working on making the website more responsive for mobile users. Additionally, I reorganized the website to be more intuitive for desktop users. Instead of displaying the articles in a slider that didn't have enough signifiers, I change the display to a gallery that could show users more articles at a time.
