Going down in a blaze of glory

Posterboard session for co-workers presenting at a conference this week. I think what I liked best about this project was that my co-workers were excellent in their direction of what they wanted, and we were all ecstatic at the end result.

Created in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. September-October 2011.

Each silhouette image was taken from stock photos, redrawn by hand/Illustrator into silhouettes. They were even all named (from left top to bottom, then right top to bottom): Lena, JohnD2Socks, MarthaJ, WildBillH, SethB, Charlie, and WyattE. Actually, Martha’s image (with horse) DID come from a photo purported to be Calamity Jane, and almost didn’t make the poster. But I think she fit right in.

The boards in the background were drawn completely in Illustrator. The poster paper was designed with a deckled edge in Illustrator, as well as the paper coloring, burnishing, and textures (in Photoshop).  The rusted nail heads were completely designed in Illustrator as well.

There are a total of 4 typestyles (not including those in logos) on the posters — 2 (Mesquite and Birch) on the main WANTED poster, and 2 (Candara and Goudy Old Style) on the other 6 posters.

The whole piece was put together in InDesign, and when it went to print, I submitted 2 files: the background, and the whole thing (requested 2 copies — just in case). Years of scrapbooking experience filled in the rest of the project.

And from what I hear — we had a success.

SEO and the average webmaster

 It took me the better part of the day to decide how I felt when a fellow webmaster asked if I had been contacted by the IT department about an SEO plan for the website/s that I maintain.

At first, it was, NO — they didn’t contact me! What? Am I doing something wrong?!?! What did they say? Are they going to make us start all over from scratch? Is there going to be a huge meeting? Are they just pegging one site at a time? Am I next?!?

Then my co-worker comes to visit me, and gives me a copy of what the IT department gave her. A simple checklist of the following:

Then I took a breath. I’ve already been implementing everything on the list.

But then it occured to me that other webmasters of the same entity that I work for do not implement those things. In fact, my co-worker had a reason why she didn’t like using the H1 and H2 tags — they make her page look funny. I told her that I was the same way — but forced myself to utilize CSS to make my H1 and H2 elements look decent.

I admit it. I did not go to school for my profession. I have a several certificates of course completion under my belt — but most of those classes were very basic for me — aka “boring”. More times than naught I usually coached the person next to me, who was struggling to keep up with the lesson. 

How many times over the past couple years have I felt that I’m not doing enough — I could be doing better — I really ought to go to school for webdesign… many times. I have not updated this site as often as I’d like to, and I’ve also turned down potential projects and clients — more for the reason of lack of time, but also for the lack of confidence.

I want to get a degree, don’t get me wrong. However, I also happen to be in the job that I would be striving for even if I did have a degree. Sure, I’m probably paid less than someone with a degree — but I also don’t have the $$,$$$ worth of school loan debt.

So, today was an ego-boost for me.

samanthacr tweets

But it should also hold as a reminder — obviously my daily trolling of web designing blogs and websites does some good! Consider that my personal investment of Continuing Education. I’m an avid reader of http://boagworld.com/, http://www.designm.ag/, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/, http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/ and more. There are hundreds of wonderful resources out there — of experienced voices, willing to share their knowledge.

I realize that there are webmasters out there who don’t read these valuable sources. Some of these webmasters have degrees, I’m sure of it. And if it weren’t for these sources, I guarantee you 100% that I would not have had the knowledge to implement the above mentioned SEO guidelines, and would have rightly been freaking out over doing my metatags and H1 headers all over again on the websites I work on.

So, I continue on. And I feel fine.

Documents and Scanning…

An old article, written Summer 2010 for an in-house newsletter.  –wns

In the Digitization program, we work with digitizing documents for archival and web access purposes.

One type of document that we process are historical documents, such as the Verendrye Tablet publication (http://e.library.sd.gov/SodakLIVE-Docs/history/VerendryePlate/SDHistoryVerendryeTablet.pdf) This document, which has a library date stamp of October 2, 1942, is a detailed analysis of the Verendrye Plate, including full sized images of the tablet, front and back; a history of the plate and the Verendrye brothers; and a full translation of the French inscriptions that are found on the plate.

We also scan other media, such as articles and photographs. One current project involving images is the Regional Reference Program – Huron 1965. This scrapbook is comprised of documents, photographs and articles, and has been added to over the years. The covers of the book are wooden boards, and is bound together by leather strips. This project has been challenging as some newspaper articles included the full page of the newspaper, and as it has been added to over the years, the pages numbers and sections no longer match up properly.

When a document is scanned, each page is essentially an image to the computer. We take that image and run it through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. This software “reads” the image and picks up any characters such as letters or numbers. These characters must be reviewed so that the image now reads as a document with words and paragraphs. One can imagine that this is a time-consuming process, as well as requiring an eye for detail.

We will then compile those scanned pages, and rebind them digitally in a Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) document — which is an open standard file format. PDF files are viewable and printable on virtually any platform, and sharable with anyone who has, at the very least, a free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. PDF files can retain the look of the original document (including graphics and layout), and can be text searchable.

Another process we perform, is to take these PDF documents, run them through accessibility tests, and then once completed (and passed) we will post or link them through our e.library website.

Accessibility tests, you ask? Yes, we test the PDF files so that they can be read by those who require special software (text to speech). This means that every time there is an image in the document, we select the item and give it a description called “alternate text” so that screen readers can describe the image to the person accessing the document.

An ideal completed project will include: 

• All pages scanned at 600 DPI, saved as images, in either grayscale or full color, document pending
• A working copy of those images saved down to 300dpi — these are used for the OCR and PDF process
• An accessible PDF replication of the document
• A full text version of the document (stripped of all imagery but includes alternate text of the stripped images)

Another kind of document that we are currently processing include born digital documents — meaning that they were created in Microsoft Word (or similar) and are simply being PDF’d and posted to the servers (example, the agency’s web server). We typically will not scan these documents in depth as the historical documents, but we still review each document for accessibility.

So, why all the hassle? It’s all for you. Now you (and anyone else who cares to) can learn the names of the kids who discovered the metal plate in Fort Pierre and how much they almost sold it for.  You can read the original article as it was written, and as if it were in your hands. But the magic, is that it’s on your computer, and available to the world.

This might be useful to some of you…

my typical browser session looks like this:

Now. that’s all fine and dandy until IE crashes on me, or when my computer does it’s automatic Windows Vista updates. (what do you mean I’m supposed to turn OFF the computer every now and then? huh-what?!) — and that twilight banner was a total coincidence.

So, thanks to Paul Boag’s post (wow this was work related browsing hitting my other internet life!!) I’ve discovered Instapaper. It’s a simple little bookmarklet that you can install in your firefox/safari and while you are browsing, you can click “Read Later” and it will give you a twitter-like page of all your URLs! 

it’s archives your links, you can read from your iphone (if you had one, which I don’t)  and even turn your list of unread articles/links into an RSS feed.

So, i’m sharing this out there for any other fellow blog-readers who live and breathe thanks to multiple tabs — there is an alternative. 

We’ll see how long I can do this!!

–sammy

updated site with portfolio

Isn’t it the old saying/theory that the shoemaker’s kids never had any shoes? Well, it’s true — the designer has hardly had any time what-so-ever for her website…

I’m pleased that I FINALLY updated most of my portfolio — some Graphic Design projects I’ve worked on over the years. Go take a look!!

Hopefully,  my next tackle will be too work on this wordpress theme…

Cheers!

–Wynn