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 Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:34 pm
Silver's Portfolio
Welcome to "a day in the life of a graphic designer". This is my portfolio thread, but its organized a little differently. I have sections about different aspects of my job, that I update periodically, and then sections about the other things I do when I have time and energy I'm not spending doing work stuff.
This thread is meant to help me stay sane, as well as give some insight into a job related to graphic design. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it helps you in some way! Thanks for reading.
First of all, my job. I work at a real estate company here in Boise, as an "advertising assistant". I pretty much design (or just put together) ads all day everyday! Its fun!
But it is also crazy. Everyday is one day closer to one deadline or another, and I feel like everything just rushes by! It always helps me feel a little less crazed if I just write stuff down, like my thoughts and my rants.
Then there's the rest of my life. That pretty much comprises of weekends and a couple hours every night. I have an ambitious list of things I'd like to do, but who knows if I will be able to do any of it. Maybe if I write it down here and keep track of it!
Updates
Mar 28
Updated the happy thought/complaint thread. biggrin
Mar 12
I'm going to make this a more comprehensive topic, covering the stuff that I do outside of work because I've been working on a couple different projects. I also have a lot of things I'd like to do, and hope that by entering them into my little thread, it will inspire me to do it.
Mar 9
Added some more stuff...
Feb 12
Posted the final ads and did some updating in the info bubbles... info bubbles??? I guess that works.... gonk I tired.
Also changed the main text up there at the top.
Feb 6
Thank you for your help guys... wow. That was intense trying to get those done. I will post the ads we settled on and started improving. Feedback on those would be great too.
Feb 3
HELP!!
I need help on my Spring Home ads... I posted what I have so far.... gonk
Feb 1
Filled in most of the fields! Yay! And I'm up too late! Must sleep.
Jan 26
Holy Moly I deleted the first post in this thread! I meant to click edit, and I must have hit the X, and then it asked if I wanted to delete it and I said no, and so it says "message successfully deleted"!!! Arg! But Hizzahn had it open on his screen, and he sent me the text from the post. Thank you! And luckily I added that last spot "for good luck" cause I used it. Phew.
Anyway, I added coworker info, and complaints and happy thoughts. I will elaborate on "the project" soon. I need to go finish my articles for AnimeFringe. eek
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:35 pm
The Coworkers
There have been some major changes in the ad dept... namely, the two other people quit, and it was just me! But then we hired a guy who's just great to work with!
Clayton - Started working at the beginning of May, and we just work great together! He has a great sense of humor, and doing team projects is easy. One of us can start something and ask the other to finish it, and there's little to no "ego" about whose project it was. Having two people who work fast has enabled us to tackle some big projects.
Kim - its hard to know what to say about Kim. She's a very nice person, but she has very high expectations, and doesn't take excuses. She's kinda in charge of the whole dept... though she's given me a lot of responsibility. She has so much to do, so its hard to really talk to her... she's always running off to do something else. She is going to be gone from June 11-27! That's so long to go without her backing me up when I tell the agents that they can't advertise one house in three different places! And things like that.
Cody - she is our hired freelancer/consultant who is helping us re-brand the company. She comes up with color schemes, layout designs, and I guess lots of other things that we don't know about.... she meets with John (the owner) a lot, and I'm not sure about all the things they plan or whatever. She's a nice girl, and has become more reliable now that things are a little more calm. We meet every Tuesday and discuss projects!
The Agents and Other People
Real Estate agents are a funny bunch of people. We have about 208 working for us, and that means that every possible personality type is represented. Mostly agents are very nice and understanding of the time it takes to design things, and also that there are certain limitations for the things we can do for them. Others are a little harder to get along with and that's where Kim comes in. She's great at arguing! smile
The main interaction with the agents is the weekly newspaper ads. We developed a program for the ads called the Ad Manager (database that stores all the listings agents enter, and makes them more responsible for editing their ads) and it has really paid off. It saves us a lot of time because it creates XML that can be imported into InDesign, and poof! All the formatting like bolding and justification are there already! Its awesome. It took awhile for agents to get used to it, and some still "resist" but overall I think they like it a lot.
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:36 pm
The Projects
Agent Postcards
I have finished two of the agent postcards I've been working on. One was pretty simple. The other has a Wizard of Oz theme (there's no place like home, haha. And her name is Dorothy) so I ended up making a yellow brick road leading up to a house.... I think its pretty neat.
Ad Manager
This has saved my life! It makes it so easy to put the ads together. The agents enter their information, and the XML Hizzahn coded makes it come out all nice and pretty, and I don't have to do anything to it except format it to fit in the columns!
Spring Home Festival
We just wrapped up our work on the Spring Home Festival. Its this magazine my company publishes every year, and the ads in previous years have been not very good. I feel like we've done very well this year! Its going to be really cool.
Update on this.... we had SO many last minute problems with this thing!!! Arg. Agent photos were RGB and not CMYK (and general bad quality, I get to scan them ALL again "when I have time"), agents quit, there were mistakes still.... ack. And we had to work on a couple Parade of Homes ads too.
Re-Branding/Image Redesign
The company is trying to re-brand itself for their 25th anniversary, so we're just changing everything!!! We are trying to make it all cohesive and modern looking, instead of just outdated!
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:37 pm
The Weekly Monotony Known as the Newspaper
Readers are the black and white ads you see in the paper, pretty much glorified (or not) classifieds. Distinctive Homes are the houses we list that are over $400,000. Since we've got some expansive foothills, there tend to be a lot of houses up there that have incredible views, and likewise have a huge price. Lots can be as much as a million themselves! Then we have subdivision ads for the subs we market.
Recently we implemented the new "Ad Manager" that we've been building and testing for a long time, and have been doing training for about a month. Before, agents filled out a form with all the info for their readerad and hit submit, and it sent it to my email. I'd take that info and enter it into a program, and at the end of the day I'd download a page that had all that info in it arranged in columns, etc. Problem with that was it spit out a Pagemaker file, which I got fed up with long ago, so I'd paste the text into InDesign and go from there.
We thought we could probably stand to skip the step where I enter the info given to me, and just have the agents fill out the info in the program. So we created a program (with the help of a great programmer) that would allow agents to enter ads, edit them, and otherwise give them more control (and responsibility for what the ads look like). I can see already that the agents might not hold up their end a lot of the time, expecting me to edit their ads still. The week the program came out, I had to edit the ads a lot. I took all the ads that were too long (we specified a character limit, but most people didn't take heed, next week there will be a actual limit placed on that field so they CAN'T go over! mwahaha) and made them the right length, edited all the mistakes because agents can't be bothered to spell and punctuate properly. This week it went a little smoother.
We're working on developing some XML that will allow me to pull the information from the Ad Manager into InDesign so I don't have to format it with bolds and italics and stuff.
I also work on ads for an agent named Dave Kallas. He does his own half page ad every other week (sometimes he just up and decides he wants one on a week he wouldn't have had one, like this last week, and I have to put it together last minute...) and then sometimes ads for condos and a subdivision he markets. I talk to his assistant Gwen about what Dave wants, and she's a real sweetheart. She always tells me how much she appreciates what I do, and she's even said that life is so much easier since I take care of this ad instead of.... Martha. wink
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:38 pm
Happy Thought of the Day
March 28 - I'm getting a new computer!!!!!!! At home AND at work. Power!!! So much power!!
Complaint of the Day
I have been compiling a list of words/phrases that drive me crazy, and I thought that would go well here. Here's the list!
"I'm making a binder" - In "Martha's" case, this means printing out every single design for a particular ad for a subdivision or whatever and placing each one in a clear plastic slip cover. To give you an idea of how much this might be, she will make 3 choices for a certain sub each week! For some she just puts the ones that have been approved, for others its all of them ever designed. I've looked through one and couldn't find the difference between quite a few. Its probably some tiny thing "only she would notice" as she's said before. *breathe* In other departments it just means putting together useful information, but it gives me the heebie jeebies when I hear it.
archive(d) - On our daily writeup of what we did (yes, we each send a paragraph of what we did to one person and she puts it together and sends it to everyone on the staff... so pointless) we just kind of summarize stuff... but "Martha" will say that she archived various digital and physical copies of newspaper ads. Which means she moved a folder on the file server from one place to another, and put last week's paper in the drawer. I don't know, its just.... not... actually archiving and it takes two seconds.
"created various options" for this or that ad - just make one. That's all that's needed.
And finally (for now, hehe) is:
postcards - "how are we coming on those postcards?" and "do we have them off our plate yet?". Every day Sam asks me this, and oh my gosh... I'm sick of it. "We need to get those taken care of". Yes I know Sam, but when I get a second, I'll call the agents and tell them AGAIN that their postcards are ready. Its not my fault! Arg. And now we're making templates for agents to pick from, and Sam described what he wants, and it really makes no sense. Ah well.
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:39 pm
My Life Outside of Work
My Projects
R2K2 - I did his site for him a while back, and didn't like how it turned out really, so I redesigned it, and then again. I should get it uploaded soon, and I'll let you all know.
Jeff Stahman - Friend of mine who I'm doing a website for, to showcase his photography. www.jeffstahman.com
Guild Site Redesign - don't know if I need to say anything here.... wink
Redesign for my Neopets guild (website and layouts) - I have a guild about collecting avatars on Neopets, and I need to get a website put up for us. I have an old one, but that's a mess.
My "Spare Time"
-reading manga at the bookstore, reading fantasy books sometimes
-some drawing
-hanging out on gaia smile and other websites
-random bump images and stuff like that
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:41 pm
My Wishlist
As in, I wish I had time to work on some of this stuff!
-Draw lots more
-Update and redesign my website
-Learn Dreamweaver (as I redesign my site)
-Learn more about CGing line art, I wish I could do it a lot better than I can....
-Make my dang room look cool, and clean it up! I took a LOT of junk out, but its still a mess and I know that gets in the way of my creativity and energy and everything...
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Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 11:08 pm
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Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 5:39 am
D:
you are a busy busy woman.
i'm going to dread my future job. x___x school already gives me enough stress
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Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:50 pm
Man today was crazy. We launched the new ad manager program (for the agents to submit ads for the paper), and even though we've been talking about it and training for it for a month, there was an uproar of confusedness. I got so many calls. sweatdrop I am so beat... maybe I should go to bed.
The highlight of my day, actually, was when one of the ladies I talk to a lot about this one guy's ads told me, after I apologized for being way out of it, that she likes working with me so much and "I'm an angel in her eyes".... *sob*. That was so sweet.
I will add all the info in each of those sections soon! I promise. Hizzahn probably could fill out a lot of it! wink
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Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:44 pm
SilverVixen Hizzahn probably could fill out a lot of it! wink I don't get it cool
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Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 1:08 pm
Good thread, I am in college now, first year, for Graphic Design. There's soo much going on at once. Wow, working will be a challenge.
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 9:38 pm
HELP!!
I. Am. Stuck. I have these ads to do by next week, and I have no idea what I'm going to do! I've been so busy with the new ad manager thing this week, and haven't had time to fully flesh out my ideas. Here's what I have so far, and keep in mind that these are very basic, I've just put together the general feel and stuff. razz !
So if you have ANY ideas or suggestions, please let me know! Its so hard to find inspiration for print ads, as opposed to web stuff, cause its convenient to look at websites on the web! Wow. Crazy. biggrin I think I'll go look on DeviantArt for stuff, there might be some there.
Sam told me to pick a picture and then decide how to frame it with boxes and text and stuff.
OK. Here's stuff for three out of the four ads I have. The other one is just not even really started.
Thanks!!
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 9:40 pm
Clear Creek Crossing I like the ideas on this one the best, and I can use them for other ones too. 
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 9:55 pm
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Reply
