During my second week at GNYPCC, we had another client meeting about designing mail pieces.  I didn’t participate, I just took pictures of the event and ate pizza for lunch. After that we went back to the office, and Wai had a few things for me to update on the site, nothing major. On the events page a few things needed to be reworded, and a PDF flyer needed to be posted in an event. Also I had to upload photos to the photo gallery from the last event and this one and update their members list. They don’t have a lot of work for me to do, I am their first intern so they are finding stuff for me to do and I’m helping them do so. I hope to design newsletters or something soon, so I can add it to my portfolio.

I started interning for the Greater New York Postal Consumer Council, located at 380 33rd St. It is a subsidiary of the USPS. The mission of the GNYPCC is to help business mailers who send out large bulks of mail save money and time. The board at the GNYPCC are older and aren’t familiar with the latest trends in technology. They want me to manage their website and update its content daily. Also they want me to communicate with their web developer who they hired to design the site, so I can help improve it by telling the web developer what needs to be changed.

On my first day before my interview, they invited me to a client meeting so I could observe and get to know the company a bit. During the meeting I met business owners and people of all types, from Con Ed, from the United Nations, to a start up print press from the Bronx.

My boss Michael is pretty cool, he told me to network with his clients so I can find more work and make connections. I basically already had the position before I got there, but they wanted to meet me. So the interview included Michael, and four other people from the board, and of course myself. One of the board members graduated from the same High School as me, it was funny because he approached me and asked if I went to John Adams, and he was pretty excited we were both alumni.

For the rest of the day I was with Wai Chow and Migdalia Cabrera, who are basically my supervisors. I answered any questions Wai and Migdalia had about the website because they needed things to be explained. They told me when they told the web developer to do things, they would do it their own way and not the way they asked. So I will be their translator for the web site. We had a conference call with their web developer Parker Webb, I found out the info I needed such as if the website was designed using Word Press, and if Google Analytics was set up. I then had Parker Webb make me an account for Word Press and Google Analytics ,so I would have access to update the site.

I had a pretty good first day.

This week I had to continue the Council District reports that I was working on last time. So I was done with the fiscal year FY 2013-2014, and I had to start with the year 2014-2015. I was a little surprised because it was from July 1 2014 till Feb 28 2015, so technically it wasn’t a full FY but still considered as one, because there are certain times that they should send the reports to the officials for review otherwise they won’t review them. One thing I noticed Is that these reports are categorized in five folder, each is made for a borough. As I mentioned before Manhattan is number one, I had to do twelve reports for it, then Bronx with twelve reports too. Brooklyn is number three with eighteen reports, then Queens with fourteen reports and finally Staten Island with only three reports. So I got curious and asked my supervisor why does Brooklyn have the most reports although it isn’t the biggest borough in size? He said that in Brooklyn, there are a lot of buildings that are old and deteriorating, not to forget that it is the number one when it comes to population. Plus, he added that there are a lot of led paint poisoning in Brooklyn, and that is because little kids eat the peeled paint, which has a sweet taste like candy, so at HPD they receive a lot of led paint poisoning reports from Brooklyn. I am happy to learn new stuffs about the boroughs from this job, it gets more and more interesting with time.

For this week, my supervisor had no graphic for me, so I told him that I don’t mind doing any other office work. So he asked me to make “Council District Report”, and showed me the right way to do it. At first I didn’t understand what I was doing exactly, so I had to go to my supervisor and ask him to explain it to me in a brief and simple way. So he said that Council District Report is a research using various computer systems within the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) building, to obtain data on housing violations within the five boroughs (Manhattan considered borough one, Bronx number two, Brooklyn number three, Queens number four and Staten Island number five), through one fiscal year. So I was working on the report from July 1 2013 till June 31 2014. The system they use in the department is an Oracle database system, which is a server that allows multiply users to access concurrently a large amount of stored data. It is a very important system to use in big data departments. And the software I used to make the reports is called Crystal Reports, which is a software used to make and design reports from a very large data source. Once retrieved, the data is submitted to various government officials to review the department of HPD’s plans for that fiscal year. I am happy that I was involved in that kind of work, which is new to me, because I learned about Oracle servers, Crystal Reports software and how mixing both together is very needed in a large data retrieving process.

As I have mentioned before, one of the main responsibilities as an intern at Faculty Commons is to take photos at events at City Tech. Last week I got to go to the Brooklyn Museum to photograph a Living Lab event. I was really exciting to get to leave the school to take pictures, especially to go to such interesting venue. I had been to that museum before, but it was very nice to go there as an employee. I arrived before it was open through the back entrance, at 8:45am. Professor Goodlad was the one who invited me to be the photographer, and she was there to welcome me.

The first part of the day was at a conference room on the 5th floor. It was a cloudy day, which means that the light coming into the room through the window was great for photographing. The view from the window was so beautiful, by the way. Since the museum is located right next to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, that window outlooked countless trees and you could see as far as Staten Island.

The event was for faculty from City Tech, around 20 of them. At first, they were all sitting in the conference room and I would go around taking pictures of them. An hour later, we headed to another room in the museum. This time, we got to walk around the public part of the Brooklyn Museum. It was so fun to get to be in the museum around those amazing pieces when no one else other than the rest of the people from the event.

We went to this room which they call “visible storage”. That’s where they keep some of the pieces who are not in show in the museum, but you can still see some of them. We were there for this activity which Matthew, who works for the museum, put together. It was a group play moment where people would go around drawing certain pieces for one minute, then another person would come in an finish that drawing. It’s always fun to see professors in a classroom-type situation, where they’re put in students’ shoes. This particular part of the day required a lot of agility from me, since I had to go around taking as many pictures as possible in a spam of a minute. The room was kind of dark, but thankfully the pictures came out great.

After that, we went to another part of the museum where Matthew told us a bit about the history behind the pieces, which varied from vintage chairs from the XV century to other objects dated back to pre-historic periods. This room also provided a lot of interesting angles and exciting situations where people were looking at the pieces and talking about them.

We then headed back to the conference room for a closing discussion of their day in the museum. Everyone was really nice and only one person had a problem being photographed, which was easy to manage. This experience is really rewarding and I’m glad I was a part of it.

The internship is getting busier and busier. Having to design the Tech Day @ City Tech poster and event program was quite the challenge–but a rewarding one. The program was especially challenging because of the large amount of copy I had to deal with in a constraint space. I was given a brief with the information needed for the brochure, and it was a lot; something like 5 Microsoft Word pages.

At first I was trying to figure out which format to go with. There were the options of having a trifold and bifold brochure, and I chose the latter one due to the need of needing extra horizontal space to work with. There were concurrent events and I had to figure out how to make it clear that those sections were going on at the same time in different rooms.

Prof Jordan helped me out so much. We sat and tweaked things for hours until we got a satisfying result. There was so many details that required special attention, such as the correct way of calling professors/doctors, the specific order certain information should appear, and the hierarchy to be used. After Draft #16, we were finally able to have a final version to send out to be printed. Since I work at Faculty Commons, I was able to have a color test print done in less than a day in the basement of the Atrium building. The colors came out great, so I sent out to print 100 copies of the program. That was my first print job done for the internship, and I was really happy with the results.

Coming in to the internship I was met with a brief, “hello”. I was met by Al by the door and he asked me to walk to his office . He asked for the files to preflight the invitation then preceded to tell me that we needed a second rendering of the invitation. No problem ! I could do it . Al already had some sketches of how the second invitation should look so my duties were just to render it . The only problem with initializing this second project was the laptop I was using . Extremely slow and counter productive . I made the best of the situation and had the back and front of the invitation completed in about fifteen minutes .
Next Al walked up and told me we we were headed back to namm for another photoshoot . Which was neat because photoshoots make time fly by ! We ended up in the dentistry department of the Pearl building . We started setting up right away , but Al noticed that he was missing a piece of equipment I knew to be valuable to the shoot. The reflector was back at the studio. I offered right away to head there and pick it up for him.
I got there and back in about ten , twelve minutes. Al was already done setting up and all he was doing now was looking at the surroundings and setting up the right shot . We were shooting the chair of the department first . Like many of the chairs she was also nervous which is a little funny , it just reminded me that we’re all just people and even high titled personnel get nervous from time to time .
The shoot with her took about an hour , it felt a lot shorter , but she was extremely pleasant and photogenic. The set up was very simple, the set up was one a photographer would set up for a portrait shot. We had a Fill light , a snoot light and the reflector to redirect light as a third source . The pictures came out amazing and she loved them.
Afterwards we went into the laboratory were there were at least thirty stations all like the ones you would see at an actual dentist office. We had one of the students get fully dressed in the outfit she would be wearing if she was in the field . Then we asked one of the professors to sit down in the chair as a patient. This shoot took about two hours. And the set up was fairly simple as well . We had the light from the camera which had a sensor attached so the light can be flashed not from the camera itself but from the flash I was holding about 3 feet away. My flash had a small reflector attached to the back of it so it can act as a smaller source of fill light . Once the shoot was done which again was about two hours later we ended up walking back to the studio where I finished the rest of my day there working on the invitation, printing , and cutting it with an exacto-knife.

March 23rd -27th

On Monday March 23rd; I continued to work on my babybuggy.org app; laying out the design and placement of content and images. Finally I came up with a design that uses the colors and images, and content from their website. I worked on my concept for the rest of the day.

on Tuesday March 24; I completely changed my concept. I didn’t like the look and feel of how my app was coming out. Than after I trashed my idea I had a design block. I became frustrated and started panicking on the inside, and left the design blank and just added content from the Website.

On Wednesday March 25th;  I went to my internship class. Professor Mason had the class sit in a conference circle, and we had to go around and tell the class what wr are doing at our internship. It was nice hearing other students and what they are doing and the probleMs they have, and they came up with to solve the problem.

On Thursday March 26th; My supervisor and I came up with a great design layout and concept. I came up with the design when I saw ads from magazines that my supervisor brought in. Ads was of apple sauce to go, and I used a similar layout for a portion of my app. Than I drew a triangle on it’s side to show a modern look and separation of the top of the and the bottom. I also used the colors from the babybuggy website.

On Friday March 27th; I changed the design again and used circles instead of a triangle. And with the circles I copied it to make a double layer, than the two circles came out to form the letter B. Staying with the B letter I duplicate the B and placed on the first B so it looks like BB which represents baby buggy. I think Monday or Tuesday I will wrap up my app and publish, which make it available for IPhone and android.

Here are just some of the product shots that I have done for the fight shop. This was the winter line and also a short sleeve rashguard that was designed for the store. It still feels a little strange (in a good way) that my work is seen by the many (nationwide) that shop at the store. I do feel proud of my work and cannot wait for this seasons clothing line. It will be my first time tapping into this area of design, with this experience I aspire to someday have my own line.

So working at the airport has it benefits, but it also has its drawbacks. being able to skip security lines and discounts on airfares are some good things but the one and only draw back i have with them is the time restraints.  Snowstorms have been hitting NYC for the last 2 weeks and because of them i have been working 7 days a week. i haven’t been able to find an internship that fits what I’m looking for. I have found one at a local print shop that does promotional pieces for a lot of the companies in the neighborhood. I think that with my demanding schedule at the airport this might be a good fit for now until the weather clears up and i go back to my regular schedule at the airport. The main objective of the print shop is, well, printing but they do a lot of promotional flyers and posters for stores, clubs and restaurants etc.

Because of the snow, i have not been able to start the print shop job yet but i am hoping to start soon.