Design Intern

This internship will provide a meaningful sense of life at a strategy and design company – that means contributing to real work for real clients, participating on a dedicated and diverse team, and showing up hungry to learn and support the team each day. 

Interns will work with teams to tackle real project challenges, supporting the conception, exploration, creation, and production of iconic design work–for clients big and small, established and new-to-the-world. Day-to-day tasks could include cultural, image, and typographic research, crafting and setting type, curating and editing photography, creating mockups, developing and refining layouts, or building and tightening presentation decks. You will also participate in team critiques and feedback sessions, brainstorms, and meetings.

This internship is an opportunity to learn about the design process as a whole, from research to exploration to execution, and to develop real world experience. In addition to learning by doing, we offer a rich curriculum of learning sessions, work shares, and 1:1 mentorship. You’ll also be invited to our team events, game nights, coffee chats, etc., while soaking up all that an in-person office experience has to offer. 

PROGRAM DETAILS

• When: June 1 - August 7 (10 Weeks) 
• Where: New York City working from our office 3 days per week (Tuesday through Thursday), with the option to work in-person or remotely on Mondays and Fridays.
• Compensation: While designed primarily as a hands-on learning experience, this is a paid internship at $20/hr.

CANDIDATE CHARACTERISTICS 

We’re looking for candidates with a dedication to craft, demonstrated by a high-potential portfolio of work. We are not looking for people who have necessarily mastered the skills below. Rather we’re looking for folks with big imaginations and a hunger to learn: people who are eager to work across categories and challenges, bringing ideas to life with passion and attention to detail.

Importantly, we’re looking for folks who have a desire to improve across these areas over the course of their internship.

Requirements:

• Proficiency in the Adobe suite (Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) 
• Experience with Figma is preferred
• Interest in or experience with After Effects & Cinema4d is a plus

Ideal qualities: 

• Deep Curiosity
• Ambition to grow and learn
• Cultural IQ
• Creativity
• Empathy
• Strong communication skills
• Egoless collaboration
• Proactivity
• Resourcefulness

APPLICATION PROCESS

Timing

There are 3 stages to our candidate selection process.

• By Feb 13: Apply through our career page and share your portfolio of work, or website.
• Feb 28th & March 3rd: Final round candidates will be invited for an interview to get to know you.
• Mar 6: Receive our decision over email

ABOUT SYLVAIN 

SYLVAIN is a strategy and design company that makes new human and business value for the Now, Novel, and Next. Dissatisfied with the status quo, we collect unorthodox perspectives and uncommon ways of framing the future. By seeking better answers, and pushing for more purpose, we’re solving the most consequential business challenges of our time—always inspiring, inciting, and provoking progress.

Founded in
 2010, SYLVAIN is a member of kyu Collective, a group of independently-led companies that share a similar mission.  We have offices in New York City, Richmond, VA, Los Angeles, CA, and Amsterdam, NL.

Learn more about us at our website, or follow us on Instagram. And check out more of our thinking on our weekly newsletter: Progress Report, and our podcast: Critical Nonsense.

DIVERSITY AT SYLVAIN

SYLVAIN is committed to building and sustaining a culture that celebrates our diversity and is rooted in community. We recognize that the collective sum of individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, innovation, self-expression, and talent that our employees invest in their work represents a significant part of not only our culture, but our reputation and company’s achievement. 

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we embrace and encourage our employees’ differences in age, race, ethnicity, disability, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, natural origin, religion, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our employees unique. Lending such an array of qualities to our work ensures a human-centered approach to our way of doing things and treatment of each other.