Nates Internship Blog

I’m Probably About to Step on Some Toes

This is what pisses me off haha

thegraveyard:

and I’m a little behind the times on this one, but the circumstances in Haiti have been chewing at the seams of my mind lately, which has been full to bursting. I’ve simply been waiting for a moment when I could find the time to do my thoughts some small bit of justice rather than unleashing a hurried rant. Although this may turn out to be just another rant of mine as I have no concrete idea of where this will go and we all know my abilities (or lack there-of) when it comes to writing. So here goes…

First of all, please allow me to acknowledge the tragedy in Haiti. I won’t claim, to any extent, to be an expert on the event. For that matter, I’m not even well informed. But the destruction and devastation experienced, witnessed and endured by the country is clear and undeniable. My sympathies, condolences, thoughts and prayers go out to the earthquake victims, both the lost and the injured, and their families.

My bone to pick is not with the innocent and helpless victims in Haiti, but with the many Americans that are so quick to be the first on the battle lines in response to tragedies of such an internationally recognized intensity. We rush to the aid of the victims, but how soon do we forget? How soon do we move on?

Seeing the piles of rubble on the news and watching as families struggled to save their own because they knew there was no time to wait for rescue crews, I couldn’t help but be reminded of 9/11. I was in eighth grade. This September will mark the passing of 9 years since the attacks and next September will mark a decade. How often do we remember that day? How often do we stop and think about the national crisis that we endured? My generation has grown “fat and lazy” so to speak and has been desensitized (perhaps by the media) and there is no measuring the lack of appreciation that has begun to drown out good old-fashioned respect, reverence and general kindness. While generations before ours lived with the threat of invasion on our soil in the World Wars and the fear of Red spies and nuclear attacks during the Cold War, we have grown complacent in the nest of the U.S., shielded from reality by its international power.

When we respond to a tragedy, when we attempt to meet the need of another, how are we responding? And why are we responding? Again, let me remind you, I have no desire to undermine the circumstances in Haiti. Those in Haiti need our help and are no less deserving of our commitment than anyone else. But as we set out to lend a helping hand, if we choose to do so, can we do it with no thought of self-gain? No thought of boosting our reputation? No feeling of self-righteousness? Can we do it simply because we see a gaping need and hope beyond hope that if we ever find ourselves in a similar situation, another might lend a hand to help us back to our feet? And when it is all over and done with, can we remember the effort it took? Can we remember the collective efforts of strangers drawn together by a common cause? Can we maintain a grasp on our renewed thanks and appreciation for all we know and have in this country?

Or will we turn our backs and walk away, forgetting the tragedy and forgetting those who worked night and day in an effort to rescue and rebuild, returning instead to our sense of entitlement and continuing to take life itself for granted… again?

I have been tapped on the shoulder by guilt more than once since I learned of the earthquake in Haiti. Especially by the realization that a donation does not have to be any grand amount. I believe that even a small donation of ten dollars can and will help. Have I made a donation? I have not. Each time I have that conversation with myself, I realize there are those in this country, perhaps in my own backyard, that need my help. And as I cannot afford to support every cause and effort that touches my heart or wrenches my gut, I have decided that the next time I am made aware of a need in my own community I will do my best to be of some assistance.

“At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebearers, and true to our founding documents. So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.” ( http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/obama.politics/ )

Perhaps you remember those words. They were spoken by President Barack Obama almost one year ago during his Inauguration. No matter your opinion of our President, you cannot deny the truth that the prosperity of any group, community, nation or people is a collective responsibility, it does not rest simply on the shoulders of those in power or the financially able (even if those two happen to be one). It comes down to us, the people, and depends on our day to day efforts. If we each focus within our communities, those communities will become strong and will hopefully cue the ripple effect.

I have gotten off track now and I have lost my initial intent in the pursuit of a much larger topic so I will sign off for now. In essence I guess I was attempting to say by all means, support the efforts in Haiti if you can afford to do so but please only do so out of genuine good will. And when things are resolved please do not take the privileges we know, for granted. And perhaps most importantly, just because “small” issues within your own community do not make headlines locally, let alone nationally and internationally, please do not consider them any less worthy and deserving of your attention.

Please do respond with your own thoughts, comments and opinions. Even correct me or critique me if you wish, but I ask that you please do so in an intelligent and respectful manner, as I have tried to do the same. I have made these comments fully aware that I have been amongst the ranks of those I am critiquing, more often than not.

What do you think?

Party set-up and X-acto wounds

Today was another day like yesterday but more on the extreme side of us being “Public Relations” rather than “Graphic Designers”.  It was the day when we had to scramble and gather everything for the big Christmas party tomorrow morning and set it up in the Clark Auditorium, which is essentially a big function room by the main lobby. First off, I had to use an x-acto knife and cut foam core to mount the signs I made, which started terrible since I sliced my finger open on the cut. I recovered though, and finished those in about 20 minutes. Next, I had to wrap a bunch of giant boxes in wrapping paper to make them look like big presents. Now, if you have ever spent a Christmas with me, you would know that I am terrible at wrapping presents. The first one I did looked like a 3 year old did it, and Tony laughed at it while I shook my head in shame. I improved as I went along and the last one was almost acceptable as a fake present, as long as you didn’t look too closely. Next, we gathered a bunch of hand sanitizers, a tv/vcr, and a few dry erase boards and loaded them onto a cart with the presents and signs. At around 3:00, we started parading all of this ridiculous looking stuff up to the function room and started setting up. The only real design work I did today involved fixing a few technical errors on my final internship book/portfolio with Tony and sending it to his favorite printing firm, Red Mill Graphics, so they could fire that out by the end of the day. Thank god for knowing people with connections.

Christmas Party Signage

I spent today creating a batch of signs to put up at the holiday party on Saturday. Tony told me to just be fun, creative, and play with some vector art if I wanted to, so I did. And boy did I play with it. Every poster had some weird vector image of santa or elves doing something ridiculous. Needless to say I had a lot of fun making them because the imagery was pre-made for me so I just had to fix the colors, give it a background, and compliment them with a nice type treatment. I did all of those three things and bam. 8 posters ready for the presses that everyone loved.

I got a new project today as well that I was introduced to a long time ago, but wasn’t revisited or elaborated on until today. I get to create banners for each “Pillar of Excellence” in the hospital for them to be hung permanently outside on light posts along the side of the road. This will be cool because it will be the one things I’ll have done that won’t be seasonally updated or replaced at all for that matter. This will be my lasting mark on this building, and something for Tony to show to future interns what kind of fun things they can do if they are up to the challenge.

Last Monday In Lowell…

Its crazy that we only have two weeks left in the semester and that I won’t have to wake up at 7 am on a Monday for almost two months after today. Knowing that time was running out, I worked on finishing up the Nursing Annual as fast as possible while Sue slowly fed me more text piece by piece. I have put so much extended time into this stupid project that if it isn’t at least 99% complete by the time I’m done here, I’ll be pissed off that I spent all that time to not finish it. Needless to say, I spend most of the day fixing it up, trying to adhere to Sue’s wishes while staying loyal to the rules of design and layout. Most of the content is in it now, which means it is finally time to start having fun with it and making it look good, but of course that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Double Post.. Monday Friday combo!

Day 42 (11/20/09) Site Visit day

Today was the day professor Farrier came to visit, so the morning was spent just preparing for that and figuring out what work to get done after we got back. We had a meeting in the morning and then I just put in some more text edits to the newsletters until Professor Farrier arrived, at which point we went up to a conference room and had a nice long chat. All of my coworkers did their best job embarrassing me, but in a good way. They all praised me like I was heaven sent and even told him that they made me a theme song, which isn’t ENTIRELY true since its more of a bad jingle. Overall the session was a good one and listening to two designers talk about working Inhouse, and their personal experiences was educational for me and made me feel pretty good about my internship experience. I do enjoy working Inhouse because I feel like it fits my style of working more than working for a design firm does. I mean that in the way that being an In-house designer, everything is more reaction than brainstorming which is how I do work as it is since I like to just get right to the computer and start on an idea. Working out-house involves more concepting and thinking, and time spent on the designs. I definitely want to try working for a smaller firm to see what that is like and if that is where I want to be, but as of right now, I like the feel of the insanity and business of things because it makes me work and focus instead of being somewhere with slow business where I would probably surf the internet all day if I only had one project to do at a time.

Day 43 (11/23/09) Mondays Stink

I stayed up until almost 2:00 am watching the movie Role Models, which was a terrible idea, but well worth it because that movie is hilarious. As a repercussion for my decision, I was absolutely dead to the world at 7:00 am today, and even a coffee just brought me back to a normal mornings pre-coffee state of being awake.

We had our daily meeting with a few other departments, where we had a strange, stupid fun! activity day where we had to make a “thanksgiving tree”, which involved tracing our hands onto paper and cutting them out, then writing what we are thankful for on them and sticking them all to a drawing of a tree. Mine said “ I am thankful for free lunches at LGH so I don’t go broke by December”. That lasted a good half hour, so it was almost 10:00 by the time we got back to our office, so I just got to work on the two documents that I have been working on, plugging in yet another three page word document full of text edits and new ideas to try. I worked on those until about 12:30, when I passed them to Tony to go over and print and critique for me.

Progress is slow but rewarding

Today, I spent my time working on the Nursing Annual Report and the company Christmas card. For the report, more information was slowly being trickled in to me one section at a time, so I kept plugging away at it. Tony reassured me that this isn’t how things usually work and that most of the time this process isn’t anywhere near as drawn out, so I felt a little bit better about it. It was starting to come together though, since I had just gotten a good amount of the photographs and graphs that have to go in there and about 80% of the body copy, so it is really starting to fill out and look more like a publication than a digital mock up spread. The Christmas card project just involves me “holiday-ing” the LGH logo for the holiday season. For that, I have two ideas going; One involves me stringing a row of Christmas tree lights around and through the elements of the logo, which has been fun to do because it’s easy and cheerful. The other concept simply is the logo with a wreath wrapped around it, which obviously wasn’t too hard beyond deleting certain parts of the wreath so it would appear to wrap around the back of the logo. Tony and I played catch with the USB drive all day, passing the projects back and forth for edits/revisions. I really want to finish this Nursing Annual Report because it has taken so long for no reason other than the fact that I still don’t have all of the information and the client keeps changing her mind about the style she wants, which ALWAYS contradicts the style of the company. Tough customer, but we both know that we can influence her to agree with our design in the end.

Also, I caught a spider today.

Can anyone picture me dressed as a 6’3” elf?

Today we watched a motivational video type of thing with a big group of people about a program or strategy called “Fish”. It is based after a Seattle fish market that is famous for its showmanship where they throw the fish around to each other in front of the customers, crack jokes, and basically put on a show. The symbolism behind it is that you have to make work a fun place to be. These fish guys decided to make their market special and unique by making it all about the service and they all make sure to have fun every day. Its a choice that you consciously make on your way to work, so you have to choose to make it a good day and have fun. The video looked like sesame street with all of its weird graphics and music, but it was somewhat entertaining, and it beat staring at my computer screen.

Other than that, I just kept chipping away at the same old projects all day. I got another 2 4 page word document of edits to make to the Nursing Annual Report, complete with a few graphs to remake in Illustrator. We also had a nice long meeting about the company christmas party, which I am looking forward to, but also worried about because they kept saying they were going to put me in an elf suit which would draw a lot of comparisons to Buddy the Elf (Will Ferrell in the movie “Elf”). That will be interesting indeed. I better hit the gym so I look good in green tights… If anyone wants to come help out on Saturday December 5th at 8:30 AM in lowell… just let me know!

Newsletter edits and Chicken Marsala

Nothing special happened today, as it was just another day in the office. I rebuilt a few signs for which the original file was outdated and lost, so we could print them out and hang them up. After that, we had a meeting with Sue about the Nursing Annual Report to figure out what her scattered thought process was trying to tell us as far as what she really wanted from us. That meeting lasted a decent amount of time, but it was ok because she had a nice bowl of candy for people who had to listen to her ramble about sweet nothings. I worked on fixing that document for her for the rest of the day, with a break for lunch (yes it was chicken marsala), which reminded me how lucky I am to get free lunch every day because that beats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich any day.

Friday the 13th and plenty of inspiration to get me through it

Today was a day of semi monotonous activities like the rest of this week. I had to keep making edits to the Nursing Annual and Community Health Newsletters sine for some reason, the people in charge of those don’t like to send the edits as a collective document, but would rather change everything on a day to day basis, making it more annoying and I cannot wait to finish these two projects. Luckily for me, I had just done my report for internship class and read a few articles about graphic design, which were very helpful in getting me through the day. The first article I found was from “HOW” Magazine and it was about feeling at home working for an In-house design team. I don’t want to write all about it because that’s what I did in my report, but I will highlight a few quotes that I found helpful and inspiring.

First, this is from the article about working for an In-house firm:

“It’s best to strike a balance between adopting the rah-rah corporate mindset and maintaining the “rebel with a cause” cowboy attitude.”

And then one from another article about creativity and developing ideas:

“Its incredible what happens when we let ourselves go in a hundred different directions before coming up for air. The key – and the hard part – is to stop filtering ourselves.”

There was plenty more to write about, but again, I do not want to repeat everything I said in my report, so I recommend you guys read the articles yourself. This is actually a very cool magazine with some insightful and helpful information in it. A lot of it is about self-promotion too which is something I know a lot of us are worried about in terms of looking for jobs after this year. I will lend out the magazines if anyone is interested.