Catching Up: Week Two

Having finished looking over the document from week one, things slowed down a bit. I was given a nearly finished book to search for orphan and widows (which was an interesting conversation as two of my supervisor and GTA both forgot which was which). I found a total of about 50 or 60 of them. I was then given the task of seeing if I could fix them using minimal changes to character width and character spacing. Out of that number there were a total of three that I could actually fix.

This revelation shocked me for pretty much the rest of the day. I felt like I had accomplished absolutely nothing, but looking back I realized that I was productive. I found the problems and tried to fix them. It wasn't failure on my part, just the problems couldn't be fixed without making bigger problems.

The next day I was given the task of making a site map for the redesign of the WVU Press website. I pretty much had to re-teach myself how to use Adobe Illustrator which I hadn't used for nearly three years (which was also two versions ago). But that's not the most interesting part of the day. My supervisor was sick so I was litterally by myself for four hours. I mean there were other people there, but I was in a room by myself.

It felt weird. I'd only worked for about ten hours at the Press and I was on my own. So I worked for four hours on the site map (which is a lot harder than it sounds mind you). It was a bit frustrating given that when I had questions, therewas no one to ask.

My next work day I found out that a lot of the work I did was wrong. I had made it too complex and while I understood how it worked, for others at first glance it was very confusing. So I completly redid it. Luckily this time I was able to ask questions and get feedback before I went overboard with things. I probably should have remembered my mom's old adage: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).

I spent the rest of the day working on the sitemap and came up with a much better (and much easier to read) version.