For the most part, the projects I have worked on were done by me with no teamwork involved. I would get a project, I would do it, I would email my supervisor the finished piece and if there were revisions to be made, I would make them. There is an exception to this and that is the Resource Guide. The Resource Guide is a 68-page booklet that has information on museums, parks, food markets and libraries all across New York City. It’s going to be sent to every child care provider under their wing so they know where they can take the kids they care for.

It started back in 2015 where two interns at the time were working on it. One intern was gathering all of the information while the other intern designed the layout of the book. From then, it was taken over by another intern and passed on for three years unto me and one other design intern. Because this has been passed down from intern to intern, each one had a certain way of doing things or didn’t know to do things when it came to saving and packaging a file once it was done. Because of this, by the time the file reached me and the other intern, there were over 50 links missing and the file itself was damaged. It took a long time for it to save, make a PDF and respond to anything we did to it.  We thought we finished and sent it in a few weeks ago. It was around this time that the other intern completed her time and left the organization, leaving me with the work that suddenly sprung up with this project. First, one of the images were missing even though it was in the file when we sent it because we packaged it. Second, as I explained in the previous blog, there was a creep problem because we had the name of each borough lined up close to the edge of the paper and the creep would cut the name.

After I fixed those problems and send it into the printer, I thought we were well on our way to getting this guide printed. The printer sent a proof to the office the next week and I looked through it. The creep worked but it did look like it was folded and cut a little unevenly. It was more of a printer’s fault that happened than ours but y supervisor found another problem with the guide. Because this project has been ongoing since 2015 with problems and revisions needing to be fixed and completed, she forgot to add contact information for most of the venues we listed in the guide. Now, you would think that all I would have to do was go into the InDesign file and add the information. Unfortunately, the printer said that he wasn’t going to accept any other updated InDesign files and instead would make the changes on his end. All I had to do was make a Word document, indicating where the changes needed to be made. I made a 15 page Word document explaining what needed to be added and what needed to be changed. Going through the whole document again, I saw a lot of errors and even addresses wrong on every Staten Island Library branch in the Guide and I made these in the Word document.

It took two days to do but once I was done, I sent it to my supervisor and believed to be done. Come the next week where my supervisor’s boss found even more errors with the guide and sent down a printed PDF of the guide to make changes to. The font and font sizes were inconsistent so my supervisor told me to compared the printed PDF with the InDesign file and look to see which fonts needed to be switched along with fixing the sizes and write it on the printed PDF. She also said that we should just send the printed PDF to the printer so add all the changes I put in the Word document into the PDF. This project is still ongoing but I am almost done transferring all the changes I put in the Word document onto the printed PDF. This project has helped me grow as a designer in catching mistakes so less time is wasted on corrections and more time is dedicated to working to my fullest potential and printing out the Resource Guide.