When people ask me what it is my job entails, I always find it almost impossible to explain to those people who aren’t in my business. People generally don’t have a clue as to what goes on in creating a lot of the materials they see everyday.
The truth is a lot of my job is based around preventing bad things from happening. Making sure documents, presentations, components are created correctly and error free. It sounds like it’s shouldn’t be all that involved but the truth of it is the only way you can be sure that things are error free if you haven’t created them yourself is to go through them with a fine tooth comb.
Also, since most of this work is performed at the end of the process, it’s the step that is often allotted the least amount of time. When a deadline looms everyone can be late EXCEPT for production. It can resemble a game of hot potato as well, the person touching something last getting the blame if things go wrong.
So, you can see where it can be a very high stress, low reward situation.
Sometimes though, you get a chance to work with good people, people who are talented and who recognize the contribution you are making to the success of something. In general work can be thankless for a lot of us but if you do get a thank you it can make all the difference in the world.
In this case, below is a project I was involved with and fortunately I was working with good people who knew both how labor intensive the assignment was and the tightness of the deadline and consequently specifically wanted me on the project because of their faith in my abilities.
This job was 40 panels... huge file sizes. This is a fence wrap currently up around the World Trade Center site. Every single piece of art had to be checked, resized, in some cases bleed added and because such big moves were being made on the art it had to be done in a very specific way to insure that the art would look good (and not pixelated) when it finally did go up. I had to scale everything and make sure it lined up from panel to panel and that everything was set up and packaged in such a way there would be no possibility for error on the part of the vendor.
And of course throughout the whole process I’m correcting things others haven’t caught along the way.
I got the files late Friday evening (the weekend before Thanksgiving) and worked from late Saturday through to Monday afternoon with only three hours sleep to get everything done. Fortunately I was able to do most of the work from home which made putting in those long hours a little easier. At the end of everything it all was uploaded and when it did finally go up everyone was both pleased and amazed with how good it all looked.
Elliott, the designer on the job, went down and watched the installation (to make sure it was done properly) and made a short film of it. I have to say I walk away pleased for my part in it all:
The truth is a lot of my job is based around preventing bad things from happening. Making sure documents, presentations, components are created correctly and error free. It sounds like it’s shouldn’t be all that involved but the truth of it is the only way you can be sure that things are error free if you haven’t created them yourself is to go through them with a fine tooth comb.
Also, since most of this work is performed at the end of the process, it’s the step that is often allotted the least amount of time. When a deadline looms everyone can be late EXCEPT for production. It can resemble a game of hot potato as well, the person touching something last getting the blame if things go wrong.
So, you can see where it can be a very high stress, low reward situation.
Sometimes though, you get a chance to work with good people, people who are talented and who recognize the contribution you are making to the success of something. In general work can be thankless for a lot of us but if you do get a thank you it can make all the difference in the world.
In this case, below is a project I was involved with and fortunately I was working with good people who knew both how labor intensive the assignment was and the tightness of the deadline and consequently specifically wanted me on the project because of their faith in my abilities.
This job was 40 panels... huge file sizes. This is a fence wrap currently up around the World Trade Center site. Every single piece of art had to be checked, resized, in some cases bleed added and because such big moves were being made on the art it had to be done in a very specific way to insure that the art would look good (and not pixelated) when it finally did go up. I had to scale everything and make sure it lined up from panel to panel and that everything was set up and packaged in such a way there would be no possibility for error on the part of the vendor.
And of course throughout the whole process I’m correcting things others haven’t caught along the way.
I got the files late Friday evening (the weekend before Thanksgiving) and worked from late Saturday through to Monday afternoon with only three hours sleep to get everything done. Fortunately I was able to do most of the work from home which made putting in those long hours a little easier. At the end of everything it all was uploaded and when it did finally go up everyone was both pleased and amazed with how good it all looked.
Elliott, the designer on the job, went down and watched the installation (to make sure it was done properly) and made a short film of it. I have to say I walk away pleased for my part in it all:
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