Work Placement Journal: Xpand International — Day Two
Today (01/03/16) we began by checking in to the Attendance Slack channel as this is a crucial part of the day, for allowing James/Helen to know what time we have began working, what tasks we are working on for the day and also for checking how many hours of work we have actually done.
As you can see from the above channel post, I was working today on the designs and structural layout for the NIFX website, you can see below how these have turned out…
Improvements have been made from yesterday’s design window for the about page, and I feel as though the feedback from the team is promising and they really like the design so far.
I felt as though that was a pretty good design for the About section, so for the rest of the afternoon I began to work on the design for the Index page… I only had an hour or two to work on that as we had a few client meetings this afternoon. This is where I was able to get to today with the Index page design…
Meeting with Wendy (Windrush Cuisine) — 1:30pm
The first meeting of the day was with Wendy from Windrush Cuisine (a Caribbean/ Jamaican Style Restaurant). We spoke with Wendy about things to do with promoting her business and her current online presence. We listened to her visions for her business online in the coming months and figured out that she needed to update her existing website to make it more modern, unique (like her restaurant) and also to make it into an
e-commerce site (to enable her customers to go online and pay for a booking into her cookery school or to enable people to buy them as a gift for somebody else).
We spoke to James after we had discussed what had went on in the meeting over a Google Hangouts call.
He made a great point to us which we had taken on to the next meeting in the day, and is also something which we could use in future client meetings. He had asked us whether or not we had asked Wendy if she had any other projects or things she was working on that we could potentially help with or even tell us about. (This was a great point as it is pushing the client to express any other projects/ideas that they might have but may have been keeping quiet because they were not ready to discuss it with anybody, but by allowing them to speak about it to somebody else, we can then start to generate ideas for this project, talk about potential ways in which we could help them, and hopefully the end goal being more work coming your way from a meeting that was about something entirely different from the initial meeting talking point.)
Meeting with Patrick Sanders (Illustrator) — 4:30pm
As soon as we were finsihed the Google Hangout call with James, Patrick arrived and we began straight into another meeting discussing the various needs for Patrick. We learnt a lot about Patrick himself as a person, about why he was doing what he was doing and also what inspired him to begin creating the illustrated children’s book.
We found that by talking to him that he was extremely passionate about the work that he was doing and he was determined to see it going one step further and being properly published and made into some sort of real, hard-back book.
His drawings for the book/computer scans were great and Michael and I were super excited to be working on something like this as we hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.
We found out at the end of the meeting that Patrick wanted us to piece together his book, make it better looking digitally as there may be some slight colour issues within the scans he had provided us (some Photoshop touch-ups required here and there) and the essentially putting it into a 20x20 square book. He also asked us to create some mock-ups for the book to see what it would actually look like on a shelf or just as a hard-back book.
After what was a long day we left it there when Patrick left and went home about 5:45pm.
Until next time…