YI Meets Digital Media, Graphic Design, and Marketing Staff
Jul 24, 2013
Hilary Greenbaum, the Whitney’s Director of Graphic Design, shows YI students a recently redesigned tote bag, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
When you think of museum jobs, what comes to mind? Maybe security guards, tour guides, curators. . .Well, how about digital media or graphic design jobs? On July 24, YI met with three women who work behind the scenes at the Museum. The first was Sarah Hromack, Director of Digital Media. Hromack was an art history major when one of her friends who liked to code got her started with her own blog. That blog eventually led her into the digital media field. Now she works with two other full time staff, some interns, and ten to fifteen people outside of the Museum. When asked what advice Hromack had for anybody going into this field, she said that it’s important to learn computer science because it will help you in the long run, and to always keep looking for opportunities to work with various mentors in the digital space.
YI gathers around the graphic goodies, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
Next we met Hilary Greenbaum, Director of Graphic Design. The Graphic Design department is in charge of making calendars, invitations, tote bags, t-shirts, and so much more. Their biggest project was overseeing the redesign of the Whitney’s logo and graphic identity.
Marketing Associate Sarah Meller talks to YI students, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
Next, YI students met up with Marketing Associate, Sarah Meller. A marketing associate’s job is to assist with the planning and execution of marketing campaigns. She showed us the posters that the Marketing department designed for the Whitney’s Hopper Drawing exhibition and explained how they came up with the tagline and image after a lot of discussion.
Working on poster designs for a Marketing activity, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
As she discussed her job and what she does, Meller told us that online marketing is also important—at the Whitney, marketing campaigns focus on Twitter and Facebook as well as print and posters to advertise. When Sarah finished speaking, she asked us to make a poster advertising the YI Summer Intensive program to other teens. The activity was difficult for us, because we didn’t know which image would go well with the poster text.
YI participants display the YI Summer poster they created as part of a Marketing activity, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
Learning about Marketing at the Whitney was very interesting because we never knew there was a job that required you to create blog and Facebook posts, or go to parties with famous artists and take photographs of them. But the job also involves hard work!
By Ashley and Adam, Youth Insights Summer participants