Aug 5, 2011

What would ya say, ya do here?

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OK, so I don’t get ‘bobbed‘ @ work, but it does come up at various gatherings of family and friends and indifferent peoples. I also wanted to talk about my underlying lesson in interface design and usability.

I do have kind of a weird job. Well, weird as in difficult to describe. “I never understand what you do or how you make ends meet Wes, can you fill me in?” Now, I’ll be able to direct them to this blog post, write it on a post-it, and walk away. Also thought it would be kind of neat to post what I work on for 40 hours a week for 5 years of my life. An attempt to make my day-to-day interesting and public.

My company sells security products. We make them and ship them. We don’t sell direct, we have relationships with resellers across the country. You can get blank or custom products. Custom is where I come in.

Let’s stand back a few

Here’s the flow of work regarding my 2 person graphics department.

Many customers aren’t as “computer friendly”, as I aspire to be. When I started, the fax machine was still amazingly prevalent, especially to our buyers in the boonies. When designing these, our team was very conscious that the proofs needed to be understood, fast.

Below is an evolution of what has changed in our proofing templates over the time I’ve been here. It’s box #2 in the chart above.

2005: The production facility and office were next to each other in Burlington, MA. We were still a privately owned company. We’d literally hand this proof to the dude/gal who would print it.

2007: China printing facility acquired; more information was needed. We had to please the customer and the printer….and aesthetics, of course. 3D image added. Actual photographs of parts added.

2009: 3D image realistically upgraded. Made simpler for domestic jobs.

2010: Domestic and outside production proofs purged. All parts redrawn to vector.

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