Begining of Career Options Discussion

For my portfolio review, I am required to share how my career options have changed as I have progressed through the Internet Technologies program. Looking back, I am amazed at how things have changed in such a short time.

I had aspired to secure a position in the art department, and after a lot of time and effort, I achieved my goal.  Working as a production artist wasn't bad work, but by the time I was 28 I was maxed out in pay and position; there was nowhere I could go in that department. The new head of the quality department wanted to modernize the quality systems, but had no luck with the IT department so he came to see me about database development. After our initial discussion he offered me a position that was a great leap forward both my career and my finances.

My new boss suggested I pursue a college degree to continue progressing in the company, and I decided that the Internet Technologies program offered the best combination of art (given my background in graphic design) and programming (a skill I always wanted to develop).

I appreciated the structure in the quality department, and really enjoyed developing new systems that improved quality, but a restructuring in the company saw me reporting to new supervisor. He was a great boss, but not nearly as forward thinking as my previous one. Several of my ongoing projects were cancelled and I ended up doing more of my work with paper and pen rather than a computer, so when the head of the IT department came to see me, I was ecstatic.

Next, my move to IT...

New Projects

I had a meeting today to discuss some new responsibilities. I will be working with an outside company to develop a customized RIP for our printer, currently in development. This is a great opportunity to make sure the printing software interacts perfectly with our art files.

Profiling the Printer

I spent all day profiling the printer, making sure I will get the best prints, because I was just informed that a potential customer / partner will be here tomorrow to check out our facilities. I have been asked to print various samples ASAP.

Eye-One / iMac

The Eye-One colorimeter and the iMac arrived today. The Eye-One will allow me to profile the printer to achieve more accurate color. The iMac will allow me to use the image expert software to quantify the print quality.

WoodGrain 3

While researching our printing options, I came across information stating that the bitmap conversion in Photoshop has the screen option I need to get the proper frequency and angle to print the woodgrain pattern. I ended up selecting each channels separately and changing to bitmap mode using the necessary settings. I then save the resulting image as a tiff, imported into illustrator, added the cornermarks, crosshairs, and art tags. This turned out to be a great way to accomplish this, because now the frequency and angle of the dots are rasterized into each image, rather than being subject to the RIPs interpretation.

WoodGrain 2

The decision was made to pursue the woodgrain pattern via traditional screenprinting techniques. I was able to take the CMYK image, convert it to a multichannel document using existing colors for the separations. I am working in Adobe CS3, so when I called our production art department, we ran into an issue. While I could send images to the RIP/imagesetter using the screen options in Photoshop, they could not. It seems Adobe removed these options from the print dialog in CS5. Tomorrow I will work with the art department in Sidney to get these printed.

Marketing board

I have been asked to print boards for displaying some of our finishes. I have never printed on foam core boards before. Aside from adjusting the head height, I didn't expect any differences, I was wrong. The board was slightly wider than the metal blanks I usually print on, so the vacuum did not hold it to the belt on one end. This caused some head strikes. I added the additional vacuum chamber, but this time the paper that sandwiches the foam started to curl at a corner causing some head strikes. After cleaning the heads a couple times, I finally got the boards completed for the marketing group.