Take Evasive Action!

This week, I emailed Lisa two possible designs for the “golden ticket” and we decided on one. I hand-delivered the files to printing services in Beering and picked out some gold card stock. I worked a lot on designing the banner and came up with two concepts that I will refine further. On Tuesday, I met with Lisa in her office and helped with a few final touches on the student-targeted section of the website for the Forum and talked to Jodi about stock photos. The CLA had a few images that could have worked if they were larger, but nothing was big enough to suit our needs, so I’ll be scouring the internet for the images we need. One of the stock photos I had grabbed a watermarked comp of from iStockPhoto really caught Lisa’s eye, and we may end up buying it. After our team meeting on Friday, we handed out flyers with the ambassadors in the lobby of Beering. The flyers were extra copies of the postcard; we had originally ordered enough for every liberal arts student, but only mailed them out to those who lived on-campus.

The only problem I encountered this week was that many students did not want our flyers. They employed various evasive tactics: avoiding eye contact, pretending to be on the phone, trying to sneak behind us… but the most disheartening were those students who just snapped “no” when one of us approached, flyer in hand. I didn’t take it personally, though, an I’ll need a thick skin to deal with criticism and rejection anyway. I also learned that sometimes you have to be more assertive to get people to pay attention to what you have to say, which could come in handy when promoting myself professionally in the future.

Going Digital

This week, it was decided that, to save money, we wouldn’t print any more materials and instead rely solely on email, so I converted the flyer I designed before into an email format and we abandoned the idea of printing full-color posters. At the Friday team meeting, we were wondering how and when to pass out the custom fortune cookies that Stephanie ordered. They said “Find YOUR fortune at The Professional Forum … CLA Career Development Presents a Career and Internship Fair – November 3, 2009,” and we all thought this would be a cute and clever way to get the word out about the Forum. I suggested, since Halloween was coming up, that we could do a kind of trick-or-treating thing on Friday, October 30 to hand out the cookies. Everyone liked that idea, and we’re going to pick up some lime green jack-o-lantern buckets to complete the look (since lime green has been the unofficial CLA Career Development color). I designed the “golden tickets” for our invitation-only networking event at the Forum, and Lisa gave me a new project as well: a seven-foot-tall standing banner for the Career Development Office! This banner would stay around for years, and Lisa put it entirely in my hands, declaring me the “project manager!” Many academic programs and other departments in the College of Liberal Arts have this kind of display banner, and I met with associate dean Barbara Dixon for information on how to design the banner while keeping with the visual style of the existing departmental banners. I began work on designing the layout and looking for stock photos. I worked for ten and a half hours this week.

I didn’t encounter any real problems this week, in fact, everything seemed to be going my way. I was a little nervous meeting with the associate dean, but I acted confident and the nerves soon went away. I am very excited that Lisa has given me so much responsibility with this banner project; she really wants to make sure we work on meaningful projects and get experiences that will apply to our futures. I will likely be completely in charge of a project at some point in my professional future, so this will definitely apply!

Allow me to introduce myself...

I’ve learned that when meeting new people in a college environment, you basically get boiled down to three little tidbits of information: your name, your name, your year, and your major. These are apparently the most important insights into a student’s inner being, which leaves undecided seventh-years without names in a tight spot when it comes to making new friends. I, however, face a different problem. When I say, “Hello, I’m Angie; I’m a junior in Visual Communications Design,” I often get a blank but polite smile in response.

“Oh, yes! Visual… communication… what?”

Oddly enough, when I reply, “It’s Graphic Design,” everyone knows exactly what I mean. Whatever you want to call it, design is what I do. I take a message and present it in a visually pleasing way that complements and reinforces the content. The title of this blog stems from that very idea of taking the message, the “talk,” and giving it substance—backing it up with solid, beautiful design—and I’m going to use this blog to chronicle my journey through the professional design world.

I am currently working as a design intern with the College of Liberal Arts Career Development Office here at Purdue. I’ve been working with two other interns in Communications to market a big new event for the College of Liberal Arts, “The Professional Forum.” The Forum will combine a career fair with panel discussions and a professional networking event, and it’ll be the first big liberal-arts centered career event Purdue has seen! …I’m pretty excited about it.

Working as an intern has been an eye-opening experience so far. It’s my first real job as a designer! I’ve been picking up a lot of general office-type things as well. The more people involved on a project, the more chances there are for something to get lost along the way! I’ve really started asking more questions to keep up to date and CC-ing my colleagues on emails so we’re all on the same page. I’ve been working on a few designs for the Forum, but the first real wave of satisfaction hit me when I sat down for a couple of hours to put address labels on the postcards I’d designed. They’re going out to every on-campus liberal arts student; this wasn’t the sixteen classmates in A&D 332 or the half-dozen people who happen upon my website, this was page after page of sticky labels, and when the lower-back pain set in there was still quite a stack left to go.

That thrill of creating something that’s going to be seen by thousands of people hasn’t really worn off yet.