As I mentioned in my 3^rd entry, I had to extend my internship period because of this class, so I used to have a supervisor called Pamela Glaser who is a very sweet person, and now I have a different supervisor called Ronnie Coleman, who is a very nice guy too. But I still work with both on anything they need me to do. This week Pam had something for me to do, It was concerning the “ABC’s of Housing” booklet that we finished printing last week. I have to mention that Pam was my supervisor during the time I was designing the booklet project. Pam doesn’t have – like most of the employers here – any knowledge of how to use the Adobe InDesign software. She told me that she received an email from the person responsible of the “ABC” project that we need to make a spread pdf version for each of the translations they just made for the content of the booklet in Korean, Créole, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Dutch and Spanish. The email contain attachment of the InDesign files of all the languages, So I opened them and I can’t explain my feelings when I saw the devastation made in those files! They took the final English version of the design I made, and just replaced the text with the translated ones without fixing the design, and they were ready to print it! As we all know different languages have different font size and spaces; for example a paragraph in Chinese take a lot less space than a paragraph in English, so you can imagine how much empty space there was in the whole design. So I had to tell my supervisor that I don’t accept that it will be printed the way it is now because it looks horrible! And she promised to ask the responsible to give me some time so I can fix all of them. I hope that they will accept and I’m waiting for the answer next week.

In my 2^nd entry, I mentioned that the “ABC of Housing” booklet was ready, and sent to the print shop to print. I was so excited to see how the work is going to look when its published, yet I was a little concerned, because last week I couldn’t be here, and they had to make a couple of changes to the text before printing. So when I arrived to the department, I went straight down to the print shop to check the work. Once I got there and saw the type of paper they were printing with, my concern increased ten times. I was afraid that if they used this paper, it will definitely affect the legibility of the text. When I saw the booklet, I didn’t want to open it because they definitely approved my concerns and used the thin see-through paper, but my excitement got over my concerns and I opened the booklet and started going through the papers. The design seems to be the same until I noticed that the changes they did to the text affected the proportions that I was working so hard and precise to perfect them. The thing that I noticed the most is that in some pages, they had to bring the text so much to the bottom of the page until it nearly touched the page number. I found a lot of visual mistakes that a designer would notice, but the normal reader wont. I wasn’t so happy with the result of this project that took 6 months of design and redesign based on the constant changes they had to make to the content, but I am happy that I learned a very good lesson, that a designer shouldn’t let anyone touch his work because it will change the whole vision of the project, and always keep track of the work personally until it is printed.

“HPD” or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development is a government agency that monitors the actions of the owners and tenants throughout New York City. It receives all the complaints that owners or tenants have in a certain apartment, building, or any legal unit that a person can live in (basement, cellars, etc…). For example, if a tenant has a heating problem and they notified the owner about it but refused to fix it, the tenant calls 311 and speaks to the HPD department, where they file a complaint. Then the department will look into the complaint and investigate if the complaint is right. In that case the department will contact the owner and force him to fix the heat. But if the owner didn’t comply with what HPD says, the department will send people to fix it at the owner expense. Same thing goes when an owner has a complaint about a tenant behavior in an apartment, such as breaking a window or a door intentionally, without paying to repair it, the owner contacts the HPD department which will go through the same steps that I mentioned earlier. HPD is one of the most important departments in the City of New York, which ensures that owners and tenants are behaving under the law. This is a brief preview of the department that I’m interning in. I started my internship here six months ago, but I had to extend it for this semester, because of the internship class.

This week was a very busy week at work; I was putting my last touches on the “ABC’s of Housing” which is like the book of rules in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), that they deliver to owners and tenants, in order to inform them about their rights. I faced a couple of problems designing it; the first was the lack of creativity, where the responsible of the magazine informed my advisor that they want it as simple as possible. The second was that there was too much text and lack of images, nearly no images at all just some small icons. The third problem was that there are 5 different lawyers reviewing the content of the magazine at different times, so if someone had a problem with one paragraph, and after I fix this problem, the second lawyer finds a problem in it so I had to constantly keep changing stuff and content in it because of the separated review of each lawyer. It was a very boring project overall but I managed to overcome all the obstacles and tried as much as I can to have fun designing it. It was a stressful day today because I had to change the whole design 2 times because of the different reviews, but I learned to be patient and complete my task whatever the cost. It is my second week of the internship and I am looking forward to see how the booklet will come out printed next week.

I started the internship with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) last semester, and since I am taking my internship class this semester, I requested to expand my internship and it was accepted. There is no graphic design department here, actually there was one but they decided to get rid of it right before I come here. So it is me and another girl called Caroline that comes on different day, we are the only designers in the department, where each take different tasks. The supervisors are so nice around here and you don’t find that strict work environment over here. You see everybody is chatting, laughing working together. This really made me comfortable and broke the fear/uncomfortable wall that I had in the beginning. I got to know everybody right away and everybody was so nice to me. For this week I had to do couple of things, continue working on the ABC’s of Housing booklet, designed a couple of flyers of events that were happening this week, but I finished working so fast so they told me that they have no more task for me for the week, so I had to do extra work different than graphic design, such as excel or word projects, I even went to the print shop that they have in the building and helped them over there. I am happy that I am gaining different experiences working here, I will definitely be delighted to add them to my resume.