Three months at DBYFO

I joined DBYFO Studio as an intern in 2022. They had been commissioned to develop the visual identity and launch imagery for FIET LOOP CORE, an AI-powered wearable sensor. My title was Visual Design Intern. My role, in practice, was the smallest hands on the project.

I want to write about what that role actually looked like, because junior designers do not get many honest accounts of what an internship is.

For the first weeks, I was mostly watching. I sat in on briefings, watched files being passed around, and tried not to ask questions that would slow anyone down. The studio was small enough that I could see every conversation happening, which was useful, and busy enough that nobody had time to teach me anything formally, which was also useful, in its way. You learn how a studio actually works by watching it work.

When I was given real tasks, they were precise and slow. Image editing on product shots that needed dust removed, highlights pulled down, skin tones evened out across multiple frames. I was much slower than the senior people. I tried to make the work count by being precise.

The shoots taught me the most. I had spent a long time reading lighting diagrams in books. The diagrams are written for a generic product on a generic day. The shoot in front of you is for this product, in this light, with these reflections. The gap between the two is the work. Before DBYFO I treated rules as scaffolding to lean on. After the first shoot I started treating them as a starting position, something to move past as soon as the actual subject demanded it.

My contribution on FIET, honestly, was support. I helped with photography, did the second and third passes of retouching, and worked on adapting final imagery across packaging, web, and campaign use. The studio developed the visual identity. I did the careful, slow work that made the imagery consistent. The project received the iF Design Award, the Red Dot, and a CES Innovation Award in 2023. That recognition belongs to the studio. My name was on the project because I was on the team. I am proud of having been there.

What I took away from DBYFO, beyond the technical skill, was a sense of how a small commercial studio actually runs. Clients want certainty quickly. Studios negotiate with that by producing rough work early and refining ruthlessly later. The senior people decide where to spend the time. The junior people execute those decisions and learn to recognise, in retrospect, why they were made.

There is a version of this story I could tell where I claim more. Where I talk about leading the visual direction, or owning the photography. That version would lie about work I would rather tell honestly. I was an intern. I did intern work. I watched senior people do senior work. That distinction matters because it is the only one that produces, over time, a real designer instead of a confident copy of one.

If you are about to do your first internship, I would tell you this. Pay attention to what the senior people do when they do not know what to do next. That is the actual job. The rest is software.