Alice Packard Design

Entry 0001 THR, September 28, 2017

After a whirlwind spring and summer of graduating, scrambling for a job, finding a part-time gig at my favorite pizza place in DC, then landing a full-time internship at Vox Global (still hanging onto the pizza job), then getting a fb message from my college buddy Tyler (who got hired into JEL Creative via his senior spring semester internship with them) that JEL is losing their lead designer Chris Sledge to Booking.com which requires a move to Amsterdam and in the process of re-branding and just doing lots of introspection as a company they’re looking to staff up they invited me to return as a full time designer, I am NOW, truly, doing the work I’ve always dreamt of at a place that I really love.

With loads and loads of downtime between graduation and looking for jobs around DC I decided to design my own custom graduation announcements. After sending them off to friends and family I had the idea to turn my digital files into templates that could be used for other people’s grad announcements. This is my first real undertaking as a pre-built freelance project, and for now I’m just having fun with it. It’s a nice vehicle to practice things like small-scale marketing on social media (I’m only using instgram at the moment) and doing fun things with my camera like making stop-motion gifs, making my own mockup templates, and exploring product photography with homemade light-boxes.

At the moment no orders have been placed, but I can’t expect this to be a hot item at the end of the June. For now I plan to just keep doing little posts here and there to build up my instagram, and then really hit the streets with this in October to snag the December graduates. I’ll start small at American University (since I anticipate I’ll still be living close by) and see where that goes.

Know someone who might be in the market for custom grad cards? Tell them to bookmark my etsy listing!

System Design Project 1

September 8, 2016

September 3, 2016

What I worked on

The "quick” overview:

Duplex Diner

Pridefund.org

SaveOMT.org

SallyLevie.com

NOF.org

NeuBeam.org

Pride Fund

Pride Fund

Sally Levie

JEL Creative

Things to check for

Why it matters

Tools to use

What was difficult

This is always the hardest section to write / think about for anything. I could talk about all the little road bumps I ran into on specific projects and tasks all day long, but no one wants to read about Illustrator woes and alignment struggles. Here are some more office/work related hurdles I had to work on jumping:

So JEL Creative has a drop box folder structure that goes hella deep. Folders on folders. And it all makes sense, but it took me a good week to really get comfortable the patterns and naming conventions that were in place. At one point I kinda got sloppy with Pride Fund and all the collateral we were making for them, and Chris, thank goodness, rightfully called me out and said, “yo, we gotta clean this up.”

We had a client meeting with Sally Levie, a DC local / amazing artist who worked in oils, and the plan was for me to present the branding and logo work I had done for her and get her feedback. She, however, was under the impression that we were just re-doing her website and spending a minimal amount of time on her branding. Basically, all the work I had done became irrelevant. Chris saved my butt and took the reins for the rest of the meeting—bless his heart—and it was awesome to watch how he quickly re-routed the conversation and kept things running smoothly despite our brief moment of “????”. We came out of the meeting a little shocked, but at least we knew we were all on the same page with Sally.

Don’t use design jargon. It is worth it to take the time and do a mock meeting / “practice speech in the mirror” and either record or somehow document what you’re saying, and then go back and swap out industry language for vocabulary that someone in the general public will understand. That means no crazy acronyms, giving brief definitions when needed, and also providing good examples that people are familiar with! Like, if you’re explaining a “light box” to someone, a good example might be “you know when you’re on facebook on a computer and you go to make a post, you click in the box and the rest of the screen goes dark? That’s a lightbox. It helps focus users’ attention on a task.”

DON’T CRITIQUE THE CLIENT’S IDEAS! BE NICE! At one point Jason had a question about changing a specific element on one of the logo directions. He ended his idea with “what would that look like, would that be difficult?” I knew what he was proposing wouldn’t look good right off the bat, and went into “critique mode” when I responded with “Well, I’m worried that if we did [what Jason suggested] it would make X illegible. I’d be happy to mock that up so you can see, but I just want to make you aware of that before I do so.” To Jason that probably sounded more like “that’s a shitty idea, and I’m willing to mock that up only to show you how shitty that idea is.” So I messed up on that one... It’s so so important to be gentle with clients ideas, and it’s not because they need to be babied: it’s because what you’re working on is their baby. They should absolutely be involved in the creative process! They’re the ones who are on the receiving end when the project is over, and they should feel satisfied with what the end results.

What I accomplished

Major refresh on HTML and CSS best practices

Wrapped my head around Javascript on a conceptual level (shout out to Danny)

Learned how to use Squarespace and hack my way around some themes with custom CSS

Got introduced to Bootstrap. Current relationship status: I’d go for happy hour with Bootstrap but I wouldn’t go clubbing with it.

Found my new favorite messaging platform: Slack.

Got friendly with Asana and Harvest

Discovered how to automate InDesign paragraph styles through both Word and XML files which was H U G E.

Got REAL familiar with Section 508 and am a huge fan 💖

THE BIG ONE: crafting an entire brand from scratch—splash page (made with Squarespace) included—in 4 days flat.

What I’m looking forward to

Sharing all the cool stuff I learned with my design buddied at school

Putting Pride Fund in my portfolio website

Planning and building my portfolio website with all the organizational skills I’ve picked up from JEL

Visiting my JEL fam over the semester because I’m gonna miss them so freakin’ much

Sappy goodbye

In an attempt to not follow the standard “last day at my internship :(” post, I wanted to give some shout outs to my small but mighty office crew that I love and adore:

Josh: hats off to this guy. I think a lot of students who aren’t sure where they want to eventually end up in the design industry will all, at some point, consider running their own little freelance business. After watching from a distance all the planning and coordination and just everything that has to be done financially to set up a project... I’m gonna pass. And, like, Josh is literally the epitome of “get you a man who do both,” because he knows the ins and outs of Creative Suite, and front-end stuff, and the creative side, but he also has his head wrapped around the business end too. So 👏👏👏👏 because, man, I can’t even imagine. And despite a 100% packed calendar he still is the nicest guy around town <3

Jayme: such a great project manager. Whenever I finished up a task he always had something for me to move on to when I couldn’t think of it myself. And also so so easy going when I had stupid questions that were answered with “did you check your email?” Jayme is a total sweetheart, and he always gives me great feedback on my work.

Danny: SO great at explaining front-end to me! He’s phenomenal. Any time I got stuck I could count on him to not only fix the problem, but walk me through the solution and explain best practices as he went. Danny also keeps me in check when it comes to tidy HTML (which makes life easier for eveeerryone). And even though he’s “just” our developer (although I can argue that no one is “just” any one thing at JEL) he’s got a great eye for color and composition.

Chris: our resident meme lord and kick-ass designer. Chris has been homie #1 for a few reasons, but I think that having taken a few design classes at AU and knowing exactly what kind of experience/training I’ve had really helped shape what I’d be doing and learning this summer at JEL. Plus he’s got a killer sense of humor and his Dad level is through the roof, which made office life so prime.

What I worked on

I actually wasn’t in the office too much this week because I had a friend visiting, so Tuesday and Friday were remote days for me. But, all in all, it was a productive week for both Duplex and Sally. We’re getting really close to closing out both of them I think, or at least I can say that with confidence for Sally’s Squarespace site. Jayme also had me do a sort of “internship write up” to summarize my summer here. It ended up being a bulleted list of the meatier projects and then what I learned / practiced by doing them. I’ll be posting that along with some other closing remarks on my JEL Experience in a post sometime after next weekend. My final day is August 20th! It’s coming up so fast! We’ve already begun the hunt for a new fall semester intern. Check out the cute little picture we attached to our facebook post:

That’s us! Small but mighty. And even though I won’t be involved in the interview or hiring process (just because most of the interns are AU students and we want to keep all bias far far away from decision making), I’m really excited to know who scores this position. I’d estimate that I’ve had at least 10-15 people reach out to me, but there’s no way of knowing how many of them will actually apply.

What was difficult

More weird buggy things were happening with Duplex. We had a team meeting to go over the entire site as it sits right now, and there were some relatively hefty visual changes that needed to be made. We have these “flip cards” on the home page that use a hella simple script that essentially rotate a <div> 180 degrees on click, right? Well we decided it wasn’t apparent enough that these items were clickable, so we wanted to change it so the animation fires on hover. I changed “click” to “hover” in the .js file, which according to Danny should’ve done it, but no dice...

Working from home! Wow! So conceptually I love working from home: close to food, don’t have to get dressed, comfy couches, snacks...etc. But no. It’s really difficult. I hate not being in the office where I can just spin around in my chair and ask someone a question. Plus it’s hard to know how deep everyone else is in their own work, and I hate feeling like I’m bugging someone when I @ a channel or specific co-worker on Slack.

What I accomplished

Got some major Reviews from the team on both Sally’s and Duplex’s sites. Yay critique!

Answered lots of facebook messages from prospective interns

Did some accessibility checks on NeuBeam and made a list of some funky things that I couldn’t access from wp since they were hard-coded in.

What I’m looking forward to

Jayme made us a sweet/savory homemade pork jelly spread so that’s awesome

What I worked on

Another slow week compared to previous ones. The biggest things I worked on included sorting through and re-organizing a massive google doc that Josh shared with us a long while back. It was basically a brain dump of JEL’s entire project process. What we’re looking to get out of this is essentially a master checklist and 3,000 foot scope of a general project pipeline. And because JEL does web and print and all in between, this is a lonnnnng list, y’all. Thankfully Josh’s bullets were really well organized <3 it was mostly a matter of me going through and moving big chunks around and then applying headings to the chunks. The structure looks somewhat like this now:

official paperwork things

getting the team on board

prepping for the start of the project

getting shit done

pre-flight checklist

launch

profit

de-brief

blah blah blah

...etc.

send proposal to client

meeting(z)!!!

Discovery meeting with clients

Organize stuff

getting

shit

done

Are you actually using paragraph styles?

508 complient?

Does your mark up have hilarious and helpful comments?

*zoooooom!*

😎

“this is a safe circle we encourage you to share your feelings.”

There were also some tiny little updates for Sally Levie, Pride Fund (where I got to dive in to the custom CSS panel of Squarespace and that is a scary place, friends, I gotta tell you), and Duplex. Oh, and on Friday I also made an infographic! It’s section 508′s birthday on Sunday, August 7th, and to celebrate and educate the team and I decided we should put together a cool infographic with some statistics about the people who directly benefit from it! Check it:

What was difficult

There were some really nasty cross-browser issues Danny and I ran in to with Duplex :( basically what happened was I was using “border-image: url{’...’)” in CSS when I should’ve just stuck to <hr> tags. I had NO idea those even existed?? They never once came up in class... but I’m glad I know about them now! They’re kinda ugly though, so I want to look in to doing some styling research on those suckers.

What I accomplished

fixed a weird responsive issue in Duplex’s pre-footer in 15 minutes flat RIGHT when I got in to the office on Thursday 😎

What I’m looking forward to

What I worked on

This was a big week for the Duplex Diner website. I spent an ass-ton of time in the menu page implementing a logical tag structure. Basically it went like this: <section><div><div><h1><ul><li>...etc. and the all the closing tags of course. The sections were in place to make collapsing massive parts of the menu easy and understandable whether you’re in Sublime text or the dev tools of a browser. The two divs had to be in place because of some bootstrap stuff, and it should be noted we would have an occasional <h2> in there. Brunch is a great example of that actually: So <h1>BRUNCH</h1> and then <h2>Omelettes</h2>, <h2>specials</h2>...etc. And then of course those, along with the dish names, prices, and descriptions, all go within the <ul>. It felt SO good to clean that up.

I also managed to find a solution to the darn flip cards on the home page! I used this solution from a very helpful code-pen. Crazy straightforward, and the java was as readable a messy ex who cheated on you with someone who’s a major downgrade from you.

The other big victory this week was some preliminary social media research. I was really heads down in some surface level platform-wide analytics for facebook, twitter, instagram, and linkedin. Right now the process we have is as follows:

Check the google calendar for any “holidays” or events or Alice has marked as things we can post about on social media

Find articles / photos, or create the content yourself

Put the content in the social media Slack channel to get team feedback

Schedule post

Basically what Josh wants us to do is eliminate the “get team feedback” thing. He trusts us enough to know that we’re always going to be posting good content, but the problem I saw was that we’re not trusting ourselves with that responsibility. So that’s what I wanted to communicate through my power point: this is what works on each platform. I described each social media outlet as “outfit goals.” Facebook was brunch with friends, twitter was a tech convention, linkedin was clearly a business meeting, and then instagram was a very casual date.

I ended the presentation pushing for us to sign up for Buffer. Everything I read pointed me there over Hootsuite, and it sounds like, for the price, it’s well worth it. I also suggested we put in about 5 hours each week (as a company, not individually) to doing some TLC across all our profiles.

Oh my gosh, and the MOST exciting thing of the week? Finding out that InDesign supports XML and that the tags can be mapped to pre-set styles. Blew my mind. ALONG with the fact that the same thing can be done with Word docx: as long as the names of the styles in your InDesign document and the Word document match exactly (case and space sensitive) then you can save trillions of years of time.

What was difficult

Pulling all that info together for my presentation! I constantly felt like I was just flipping between articles and comparing numbers... it was easy to get lost, to say the least. I definitely want to have a more organized research attack plan for my next big show and tell.

What I accomplished

Those! Freakin’! Flip cards!

Killer Social Media 101 presentation

Awesome lunch with another student and past prof 😎

What I’m looking forward to

What I worked on

It was a relatively quiet week. Danny and I had a couple small changes that needed to be drummed out on the restaurant site; now we’re just waiting to do some internal review with the team after we hear back from the client. I’m hoping that will happen this upcoming week so we can keep the momentum going. We both had a lot of “wouldn’t it be so cool if X” when we were parsing through all the markup.

Another super fast “the deadline was 5 minutes ago” project landed in the office! We hammered out another squarespace website for a campaign to Save OMT. Danny did so much heavy lifting on it—they wanted him to iframe in these custom email thingies that let people send off a pre-written message to friends and family. Getting the styling to behave was the hardest part, and we went through quite a few shades of blue before getting the right one, but we got there. Definitely not as early as our project manager, Jayme, wanted, but we got there.

On Tuesday I was invited to a graphic design alumi happy hour at a bar down the street! I was a little unsure of how to feel about it considering I’m not an alumnus, but I mustered up the courage to go anyway. After finding my way through the crowds of various U street Office Squads I saw Ross Nover and followed him back to a table with about six or seven alumni. One of them being Cat McCarthy, my print design professor from last fall! She was an awesome prof, and it was great to catch up with her over margaritas (although we were shouting most the time because Bars(TM)).

The very last thing I did this week was take a small surveymonkey quiz from a freelance designer, Brian, who is helping us get grounded with a massive re-brand we’re doing for JEL. The questions were awesome, although I was sad I couldn’t answer the very last one about “which Beyonce speaks most to JEL?” because the images wouldn’t load :( no worries though! We’re doing individual meetings with him next Thursday, so hopefully I’ll have my chance to cast my vote.

What was difficult

Again, the extreme design limitations of squarespace + working under a hella tight deadline.

What I accomplished

I’ve been learning that you can “hack” your way around squarespace with Javascript (note: I have not being doing the hacking—it’s all Danny. But I’ve been watching/learning from him, which is cool).

Either I’m dumb or it’s bad UX, but if you’re using a squarespace theme that has a massive hero image banner type situation, you can choose where the image is centered with this little circle that you can drag around when you upload or edit the image! I found this out SUPER late in the game and wish I had known a helluva lot earlier. But whatever #Learning

What I’m looking forward to

What I worked on

This week was very front-end heavy for me! Wednesday through Friday was I doing strictly mockups and markup. Well, to be more specific, Wednesday was spent in photoshop doing mockups, and Thursday and Friday were straight markup days. The site I was working on is a flat 3-5 page restaurant site for a diner downtown that I believe all my co-workers are familiar with (except me, so I need to make it a point to go some time). The first hour or two I spent in sublime text felt a little rocky, just because I hadn’t really done any web projects for a solid year and a half, but after a while it came back to me and I was flying through it just fine.

Then there was the Pride Fund Rally at the Capital on Thursday. Pride Fund and a bunch of other anti-gun-violence organizations all banded together to do a sort of sit-in on the west capital lawn. They had a ton of different speakers: lawmakers, and victims, and eye-witnesses—really, really powerful. My mom and little brother happened to be visiting me for the weekend in DC this week, so I invited them to come to the rally with me. Mom was the first to spot all the Pride Fund shirts and signs, and it was so cool to see something that had only existed on a screen in people’s hands. Like, they were holding my work. The only thing I wish I could change is the campaign posters: the url is currently on the bottom edge, and now I think it would be better positioned on the top (much like the table banner). I didn’t realize people would be holding these up at rallies! I figured they’d be posted on lawns and up on walls for press conferences.

What was difficult

Working with Bootstrap on a real-life client project with zero experience with bootstrap before. Thankfully I had Chris to wheel over to my desk and explain their column system and give me a basic run down. It wasn’t as bad as I thought! Just scary—it felt like some large uncle picked me up and threw me into a pool that was a little colder than I would’ve liked, but it all ended up being okay.

There were some tricky classes and that I had to wrangle with, and I had Danny help me figure out why some things broke and why others didn’t. There’s definitely some restructuring and re-naming of classes that I’d like to tackle on the menu page this week, but I know I’m going to have to walk on egg shells so I don’t break anything by accident.

What I accomplished

Got familiar with Bootstrap

Refreshed my memory on basic HTML/CSS rules

Learned some above-the-fold best practices when it comes to content+hero images

What I’m looking forward to

Getting the site more organized this week on the menu page

What I worked on

Pride Fund has asked us to do a bunch of collateral mock ups for them! It’s my first time really doing business cards, t-shirts, letterhead, postcards, stickers…etc. It was really neat to get into the meat of a branding system and present materials to the client and explain how it all worked. Putting as much effort as we did into the logo really as saved us time with branding. I didn’t expect it to all come together as quickly as it did, especially under (again) tight deadlines. They’re really pushing to get this material out in the world as fast as they possibly can. Of course, there’s still follow up on the collateral next week, but we made some serious headway with it. We even got to meet with the client in person to give him a short presentation of drafts of each piece! That meeting was really helpful not only for branding, but we ended up making some changes to the logo! That never would’ve happened had we not all sat down together to chat about it. And the change was so simple: all we did was move the pride flag to the right-hand side. It was a matter of flipping the colors, and the entire mark improved. A great example of how everything has room to grow and be better. Plus this gave me the opportunity to do one more run through on anchor point clean up, which I noticed we desperately needed to do (after publishing the first logo, of course).

Besides that I got to make some minor copy changes to a conference booklet that JEL has been maintaining for a few years now. Although it was a bit annoying to put up with, I was happy to see that hardly any proper styles were set up in this 10 page document. Now when I have free time I can go in there and really clean things up! It’ll put them in a good spot for next year and really make things easier. I might even do a show and tell on that.

I also got some serious studying time in with Mr. Duckett and his jquery book. I asked Danny to explain New Arrays in relation to old ones and he told me I really don’t need to use them, it’s just too complicated to be worth it. Normally I’m not one for not learning something just because it’s difficult or complicated, but Danny explained that New Arrays tend to not behave in the way you’d expect, and can really dirty up code and have potential to be time wasters. He said since I’ll be using jquery mostly in a web design context, my efforts are better spent on plain old Arrays instead of the New ones. Really glad I opened up that can of worms with him.

What was difficult

Illustrator was giving me attitude on Friday. Whenever I went to duplicate an artboard, the vectors that were sitting on it wouldn’t copy along with it, which… kind wasn’t cool? I also couldn’t find an answer as to why this was happening or how to fix it. If anyone knows please point me in the right direction, I’d really appreciate it!

What I accomplished

Collateral drafts for Pride Fund: business cards, t-shirts, table banners, campaign posters, and laptop stickers.

Major copy edits on the conference brochure

What I’m looking forward to