The Beginning

When I first arrived at the Saratoga Springs office on Friday, September 18, I had a pretty good idea about what I would be doing that day. I knew that it would most likely involve working in the Adobe InDesign computer program, since Gael Fischer had me do some practice runs a couple days before (using my own artwork).

I was right, and I began by working in InDesign. I was editing some college advertisements that had been made previously by somebody else. Some of the information needed to be changed--simple stuff like dates and locations. This information was given to me on "spec sheets", and I took what was on those and put them into the ads. I also had to increase the "design integrity" of the ads, or make them look more pleasing to the eye. I adjusted the locations of images, text, frames, graphics, and whatever else was on the page. Basically, I lined everything up, made things even, and did that until it looked good to me (Gael called it having an "eye for design"). I then printed these ads in black and white and placed them in peoples' mailboxes in the office for approval.

On that day and other days, I went through a bunch of finished publications that Gael had designed and offered my suggestions on what I would change about them. We reviewed them at a later time and, for the most part, she liked what I had to say. It was quite a learning experience to go through them and try to figure out how she did things. I also shadowed her and watched her work on a design for a little while, too.

During many of the following days, I was color correcting photos in Adobe Photoshop. I came to the internship with a lot of experience in Photoshop, so this was easy for me. People send photos of themselves to be put in the college publications, and most of the time the picture quality is not so good. I resized, enhanced colors, sharpened, converted to CMYK (the colors used for printing), saved and often times placed the final images into the page layouts. Some things are printed in black and white, so some images needed to be converted to grayscale.

After placing the images into the layouts, I had to apply a text wrap to them. This literally allows text to wrap around an image, so that it does not overlap it. There are also minor adjustments that can be made to the text wrap, such as the amount of spacing that appears around the image.

I also had to fine tune a lot of things in the text with InDesign (one of the files was about 75 pages worth of layout). I believe this was for a booklet called All About Mentoring, which contained profiles and stories about a bunch of mentors at Empire State College.

In one of the booklets, there were also poems written by students, if I recall correctly. The person in charge of how they look wanted the text alignment and justification changed, so I had to do that. One thing I did was create a custom tab setting (this determines how much space is made when the "tab" key is pressed) and moved each line of the poems to a different location on the pages.

And finally, one of the most fun things I have done so far was some photo manipulation. Somebody had designed an advertisement, called How to Deal with Difficult People, and had inserted a black and white photo of a man with a funny expression. He had red eyes and big red devil horns. The higher-ups did not approve of this, so I was given the task of completely removing the horns and making it look like he had hair and skin in those spots. I also converted the image to grayscale to get rid of the red. I definitely think I was successful with this, and made it look like those things were never there. I tweaked the ad a little bit, printed it, and put it in a mailbox for proofing.

That is basically how the first 5 days went. In the next posts, I will try to include some pictures.