This week is the week I finish my 120 hours required for the class. The start of the week has been quiet and it was just me and Ivan working on spreads for the magazine. The last day of for my hours the team worked on mailing out as many holiday cards as possible. Inside the envelope is a holiday card, a “save the date” for International Women’s Day this March, and a message from WPC which included an additional envelope for the receiver if they want to donate to WPC. Me, Ivan and other volunteers finished preparing 100 envelopes and we drove to a nearby post office. They purchases stamps, put them on and mailed them out.

After lunch Lisa held a staff meeting and talked about various things. First topic was that today was International Human Rights Day, and explained examples of how Cuba has a more refined system than the US. Cuba lacks poverty, uneducated people, homeless and other things because of their social, political and economic systems. Lisa also announced WPC’s move to the Bronx in the coming months. She explains how this move is very good for WPC because it establishes a base of operations as well as the Bronx being a good place for WPC to collectivize the people. There were those who were upset because of how far the Bronx is from our current location but there are those who are thrilled because many live there, as well as their organizations who’d like to work with WPC.  This marked the 120+ mark in my hours.

To start off the week I had to make new volunteer cards for WPC record that signed up during an event this week. The event was a screening of the film “The Power of the Weak” that I had watched with WPC last week, and it was in a church’s elderly program.

Next day Kim, me and another intern worked on WPC’s annual holiday card mail-out. It was a little troublesome because the message on the inside of the card as well as the addresses had to be hand written. However, Kim and the other intern wrote these because I didn’t feel my handwriting was good enough for the job. So, I worked on looking up the person’s card in WPC’s files and updating them to tell they got mailed the card.

The last day, all the interns scheduled to come in this day had a press printing training session. This also involved other new volunteers, so training started from the beginning; which was boring because I knew most of how to operate the press. We worked on printing at least 500 good copies of this year’s holiday cards. I had to leave before they were all completely finished.

The first day, I continued to work and refine layouts for various articles after receiving feedback from others.  While for the rest of the day Ivan and I sorted through piles of last year’s WPC’s holiday cards. They planned to use the same design again for this year. We sorted good ones, okay ones, and bad ones. The reason they have variations is because they were all printed on the office’s printing press and not all come out perfect. After the sorting the biggest pile turned out to be the bad ones, which have smudges, faded ink or little dots that swarm the paper. The next biggest was the okay, but not sure, ones, which are sometimes not ideally dark enough. Smallest pile turned out to be the good ones.

The last day we viewed a film that WPC screened at City Tech as a first location in the US called “The Power of the Weak”. It’s about a disabled Cuban boy named Jorgito who, despite his birth and thanks to the superior and free healthcare and education system of Cuba, he became normal and lives today as a symbol of hope and Cuba’s advancements in medicine and education. WPC hosted several screenings of this film and toured several locations in the US with Jorgito to spread the word about Cuba, of which most of the US is ignorant about because of how the media often withholds or never reports information about Cuba’s free healthcare and education (This is because of the bad relationship between these two countries). They did the tour of the US earlier this year and even moved on to tour Europe after its success in the US. The film was very inspiring and heartwarming; for a disabled boy to live a normal live while treated as so and to stand as a revolutionary in Cuba.

During the first day of the week I worked on the editing WPC’s Fall 2016 magazine that was just printed. I edited and replaced text with German words. The reason for doing this was we had a European correspondent visiting us for a month and this was the week she was returning to Europe, so she wanted a German version of the magazine.

For the rest of the week Ivan, Kim and I worked on test layouts for an article for the next issue of the magazine that tells of WPC’s press printing capabilities and such. We also worked on refining designs for other parts of the magazine as well. It may sound like I didn’t do much but going into the details might drag this entry out, and the designs we are working on were mentioned in previous entries.

During the first day of the week I worked on more volunteer cards. The volunteers signed up with WPC during their table set up at City Tech’s Black Solidarity Day. This continued to my second day, but I worked on cards that belonged to people in contact with someone associated with WPC. But during halfway through the day I was partnered with Kim and Ivan to work on a spread that can go with an article that will go in WPC’s Winter 2016 edition. I had to leave before we finished.

During the last day our boss wasn’t in the office because she had business outside the office. Therefore, Ivan, Kim and I continued our work from the previous day but had to stop at a certain point because we needed some kind of approval, or an “okay” sign, to continue refining our idea. So we moved on with another project we’ve been assigned a while back that involved imagery for another article for the magazine. Again, we worked on sketches, refinement and such but we needed Lisa for any feedback or approval. So I left work with ideas that hopefully Lisa would see.

This was the week me and another City Tech intern, Ivan, worked on refining the sketches for the WPC holiday cards. After Lisa has decided on which of my card designs she wanted, me and Ivan began working on it in Adobe Illustrator. Ivan had to help me because my Illustrator knowledge is rusty. He scanned the sketch and blackened the image in illustrator. We smoothed out the sketch, refined it and printed it out for Lisa to hand to her boss for approval.

The next day was me and Ivan once again together working on imagery that can go along with an article that will go into WPC’s next issue of their magazine. I had no solid ideas for the article because the topic was complicated, so I helped Ivan sketch out an idea he had, while he worked on another sketch. We scanned each of out sketches and brought it into Illustrator to trace over. Sadly, Ivan and I were not personally satisfied with images because, as artists, we can’t help but put detail such as shadows and color, but the image would ultimately be black and white in the article and the level of detail me and Ivan wanted can’t be accomplished in Illustrator, and not in any other program without a drawing tablet artists like us use.

The last day of the week we had visitors associated with WPC come from New Jersey to get training working with a printing press to print a flyer of theirs. Lisa headed the group but the interns had to hang back because of other jobs. Ivan and I worked on making cards for volunteers that WPC managed to pick up during an event that happened at City Tech during the week. We joined the group from NJ after we were done sorting the cards we made. Apparently Lisa had problems at the beginning but it went smoother later on. Unfortunately, I had to leave before they finished.

During this week, me and WPC continued mailing out copies of their magazine. Nothing exciting. We mailed to individuals, organizations that support WPC as well as people from various colleges that have associated with WPC such as Brooklyn College, Kingsborough and even City Tech. I’ve even prepared the envelopes that went to various people of the communication design department such as Prof. Biel, Prof. Goetz, and, the now retired, Prof. Mason. At the end of the week, during a staff meeting we prepared around 500 mail outs. The end of the week was the self-imposed deadline of our mail out, so it was a relief the week was over considering how dreadfully repetitive and boring mailing is.

During this week I’ve had to take a day off to visit my counselor and work on projects for another class. During the days I came in I showed Lisa my sketches for WPC’s holiday cards. Most had a winter theme to them, with snowy landscapes, fireplaces, person clothing up, with messages of happy holidays and staying warm. However the one that was picked by Lisa was of a pen writing down “Happy Holidays” with a ink carton on the corner, all from the perspective of the viewer. She liked it because it corresponded with what her organization was about and what it does. The text was adjusted to one Lisa liked from a previous year that said “Tis the Season to organize, from Women’s Press Collective”. So I refined my sketch to a 100% scaled card, which was small in size, with the cover reading “Tis the season to organize” and the inside reading “from Women’s Press Collective” with an illustration of the pen laid horizontally on the bottom side of the card. Another sketch that also caught her eye was of a scarf twirled around the paper. She suggested changing the scarf to paper that came from a roll that can be found in printers. I refined that sketch also and gave the same message.

The last day consisted of mailing magazines. After receiving the final version of the fall magazine in mass numbers from giant printers in New Jersey, me and other volunteers in the office helped mail out copies of the magazine to members. I got familiar with how they split up jobs for the process and record who was going to be mailed a magazine. I thought they had a very nice and thorough system of recording the activities of each person that has worked with WPC.

My second week was a bit on the slow side because no members of the Benefits Program came in with their projects to work on. So Lisa explains that helping members with their projects would be a big part of our work with them, however if there aren’t any projects present we are to work on projects with WPC itself, such as their magazine, Collective Endeveour. So during my second week at Women’s Press Collective I worked on sketches for holiday cards that WPC works on around this time of year and send out to its members. These cards are to be, at max, 2 colors because they will be printed in the printing press, and the nature of the machine makes it only print in one color at a time.

On the final day of the week we received another assignment which consisted of illustrations that needed to go with 2 articles that were going into the winter’s issue of the magazine. One article was about paper as a renewable resource and paper as an alternative for information storage than its digital counterpart, which are made of toxic metals and substances that are made by poor and low class workers in third world countries. And the other article is about secret trade agreements between countries of the Atlantic that can potentially affect the economy in a negative way for the middle class and lower. I’ve found that ideas for illustrations for these articles are lacking and I leave this week pondering for ideas.

I visited the Internship Coordination site on OpenLab and saw a post about an organization, Women’s Press Collective, that needs interns with a background in graphic design. I called the number and was told of an orientation that was going to happen tomorrow. I came to the orientation at 10 a.m. and was meet with 3 other people from City Tech with communication design majors. We were told of their work and background in helping low income workers as well as a history on inequality among working women with working men.

After the overview, the four of us got a chance to work with a printing press. We were told of the different mechanisms and functions of the machine and how it is an excellent choice for mass printing of flyers, business cards, cover letters and the such. The main part of working with a printing press is with set up. We did however run into many problems with the set up and caused us all frustration. Lisa, the organization’s head and tour guide at the time, was not the person in charge of the machine so she was sometimes as confused as we were. After the orientation I made a schedule with them, coming in Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

The coming days of the week consisted of introductions to the WPC’s magazine that was near completion and workings of the office. Me and one other student, Kim, worked together to adjust some images that was going into the fall edition of WPC’s magazine, Collective Endeavor. Another day, I was introduced to their benefit’s program where members of WPC can come in with their own individual projects and get help from their new interns. And on the last day, a member that knew the printing press the best was in and me and Kim once again observed and helped him make WPC’s business cards. And naturally with an expert, the process was a lot more smoother and pleasant.