I had the opportunity to intern with Local Life Magazine on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina for several months. Local Life is a monthly lifestyle publication that focuses on living, wellness, fashion, and other related areas within the lowcountry, and the magazine is quite a hit among the locals!

I worked closely with the full-time designers and editorial staff to create eye-catching informational graphics that fit into the clean, geometric aesthetic of the brand. For these graphics, I utilized additional research to ensure that all the information was accurate, pertained to the local area, and appealed to the target audience.

For the March issue, the overall theme was anything relating to wine. I was asked to create an illustration to show which wine pairs best with a specific seafood dish. From the start I wanted to go with the concept of a washed-up letter inside a bottle, and the letter would include the wine & seafood combinations.

seafood sketches

The May issue of Local Life discusses all things produce! I was tasked to create a harvesting calendar for local fruits & vegetables. While looking through multiple sources, I decided that it would be important to include when to sow and transplant seeds too; the harvesting calendar thus turned into a broader local farming calendar.

I originally wanted to include illustrations to frame the chart, but as the project progressed, it was becoming more & more visually cluttered. In the end, I went with a simple calendar chart with illustrations of specific seeds and produce to indicate the planting periods.

Right before the March issue was sent to print, I was asked to rework a design someone else had made. The publisher wanted me to redo a “wine cheat sheet” so that it would better fit the aesthetic of Local Life, and I only had a day or two to complete it. For the newer design, I decided to use the same framework as the original chart, but I took away a lot of unnecessary elements and textures that subtracted from the main components of the “cheat sheet.” It’s essentially a graph of 4 different wine characteristics, and so I didn’t want to complicate the design by adding more visual weight.