I have a new job!

Ladies and gentlemen! I have very exciting news!

Starting Monday, Dec. 14, I will begin my new full-time job as a technical writer at ERC!

Of course, I will be very sad to leave my friends at my current job at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, but this is a very important step for me. I've been applying for jobs since I graduated with my Bachelor's Degree in May, and now I finally have a job that's related to my degree. Without going into too much detail, the pay and benefits are far more than I was expecting for an entry-level job, and I am more than grateful for this opportunity. As an added bonus, everyone at the office seems really nice!

I have a lot to learn about technical writing, but I'm eager to get started. Here we go!

Hand Czech

I diddled a doodle. And then I practiced drawing hands. And there's a Czech proverb for no extra charge.

I'm trying to get in the habit of writing or drawing for 15 minutes a day. Ideally, I'd do both for longer periods of time, but I get awfully busy during the week, so this is a good start.

Practicing Foxes

I practiced drawing foxes last night.

I used to doodle during class all the time in middle school, and cartoony foxes became one of my specialties. Last night, I tried to summon that ancient fox drawing power in order to work on some concept art for my big final graphic novel project. It took me a few tries to get to where I wanted to be. I started out just trying to draw foxes like I used to in seventh grade, but that particular talent seems to have gotten pretty rusty. I decided to try drawing a model.

Using this adorable stuffed animal as a model helped me to get going in the right direction. After a while, I combined my realistic-as-possible drawings of the plushie with my fox style from way-back-when and eventually got the two foxes at the bottom-center of the page. That will probably be what the fox character looks like in the final project.

I wish I had a fox drawing from eighth grade to compare with the new design. If I happen to find one when I go home in a few weeks, I'll post a side-by-side comparison just for the funsies.

The Chapbooks Are Finished!

Yes- at long last, the chapbooks are done, and it is a wonderful feeling. Not only are they done- they're awesome. They're bound together with string at the spines. I used a needle and thread to do it- that's dedication, right there.

My only real regret is that I couldn't get the cover to cover the entire cover page. And don't think that I didn't try. I tried every button I could see and printed every which way and researched everything and did all I could do. It's just a combination of Microsoft Word not being Adobe InDesign and my printer not being a professional printer, I think. But I care very little about it at this point. I'm very proud that I figured out how to get the document to print like a booklet, with the pages matching and front-and-back and all that. I used the "book fold" setting in the page layout area and printed it on both sides with it flipping on the short side. Worked like a dream. Folding and binding were different stories. But now it's done!

And now that that's done, I can finally focus on studying for my American Lit final, which is going to be exponentially harder.

Technical Difficulties: The Conclusion

Over the last couple of days I've been blogging about the difficulties I've been having trying to make an advertisement for my French class. Here is the conclusion.

My problem was that I was trying to use my Wacom tablet and ArtRage Studio to do this project. ArtRage is a wonderful little bit of software and I love it, but it's really meant for drawing, I think. Perhaps some people have had better luck than I editing photos with it, but from now on I will use it only for drawing things from scratch.

(Unless I stumble upon an excellent tutorial that will show me how to use ArtRage Studio for editing photos. Anybody? There's a comments box...)

I love my Wacom tablet dearly, and I was very excited that I could use it for a school project. However, my insistence on using it led me to create a product that was much less professional than the one I had envisioned.

Also, I was trying to do it at 1 A.M. and I don't think I need to tell you how successful projects are at 1 A.M.

So today I happened to be in the library and have some free time because all my classes were cancelled (inclement weather, but that's another story) and I found an unoccupied computer in the Digital Production Area. It was a Mac and it had a really cool keyboard.

(Random note: I really prefer Windows over Mac, but I absolutely love the way Apple keyboards feel and look)

The cool keyboard was nice, but the important part of this computer was that it had Adobe InDesign installed on it. While I am not that great of an artist and am relatively new to ArtRage Studio, I have a lot more experience working with InDesign. We used InDesign to put together our literary magazine in high school (click here if you'd like to see it) and as I sat down and began to play with it, a lot of stuff came back to me. I even began to have FUN, which is the polar opposite of how this project was going on Monday night.

Why was it going so much better? Well, working on it during daylight hours helped, I'm sure. But InDesign is exactly the kind of software one should use when one is trying to make a one page advertisement. Yes, there are less expensive ways to do this, like PowerPoint and such, but I feel like stuff just looks shinier when you do it on InDesign. I dabbled around on Adobe Photoshop a little as well, trying to free my bottle of barbecue sauce from its prison of black. The crop job is a little messy, but honestly, it's not bad for someone who had to Google how to do it.

So this is what my advertisement looked like when I rage-quit and went to bed on Monday night:

And here's what it looks like now:

It's no professional job, that's for sure, and there's a lot of potential for someone to think I spent about five minutes on it (I SPENT AT LEAST AN HOUR ON IT, YOU JERKS), but I'm really happy with it. I even caught a spelling error in the logo and was able to fix it. I hope I get more opportunities to play with InDesign (or, you know, an editing internship) because I really, really like it.

As I should have explained earlier, "Apportez LE BLEU chez vous!" translates more or less to "Bring home THE BLUE!" "Les Biftecks Bleus" (The Blue Beefsteaks) is the name of the imaginary steakhouse/hamburger joint chain that my partner and I made up for our Commercial French class. It's a swanky place, y'all. The food isn't actually blue (that would be gross), but The Blue is the overall experience you have at the restaurant. We're now selling our signature barbecue sauce in grocery stores so that everyone can Bring Home THE BLUE! And now there's an ad for it.

And they all lived happily ever after. The End.