Personal History (the rest)

As noted in this earlier post, I started a regular job while in the thick of doing a personal history.

And now it's done: adding a few dozen evenings and weekends to the mix has resulted in nearly 150 more pages, front and back covers, all final proofing and editing, and a very happy customer (she is happy with both the substance and the timing; the digital content made it to the printer in time for her to get finished copies to giver to her family as Christmas gifts).

Even though I based the formatting on what I had developed for an earlier book, this just-finished book was made as a a glossy paperback with perfect binding (rather than a stitched hardback with endpapers).

In total, the book has over 80,000 words spread over 17 chapters and complimented by over 650 pictures.

(An image with tiny thumbnails of the middle 100 pages is past the break.)

Company Business Overview Report

A multipage report made to provide a high-level overview of the company for select external partners.  As with the publicly-available press report [post forthcoming - available here in the meantime], this was designed to work both as a printed booklet and as an all-digital package.  Some design cues also taken from the capabilities report.

As indicated in the tags for this post, the project required a combination of creating new content, finding and adapting existing content, copy writing/editing, and then bringing it together into a cohesive whole.

The copyright on these images belongs to Novatek, and the versions posted are intentionally shown at a size that obscures the finer details, alas.  Though it's probably overcautious on my part, I've also blacked out some sections, just to be sure nothing even remotely sensitive is wrongly hinted at.  A further disclaimer: a period of time after the first drafts were proofed, the report was updated before further internal or external distribution, but what's posted here is the old, outdated content.

Personal History (first third)

Time to break a long drought in postings, not with a finished product, but with a snapshot of the reason for the drought: ongoing work on my last big freelance job.  I committed to it before starting full time with Novatek (see below), and I've been working on it in fits and starts ever since.

To date, squeezing in a few hours at a time has totaled in 108 finished pages (the first 100 shown to the right in miniature; a mix of fully-formatted text and just short of 300 pictures).  I've used the same basic layout that is shown here, and hope to be done before summer is over...

Novatek Capabilities Report

Copyright for this image belongs to Novatek.

A hybrid technical report and marketing booklet focused on the company's capabilities.  This started as a set of eight .pdf pages focused on existing and planned drill testing facilities, but it has since tripled in size to cover different production, R&D, and other areas.

The report also grew into a top-level page featured in the main navigation bar of the company website.  The image to the right shows a screen grab of the page, which I designed.

I was in charge of collecting all information and graphics, writing and editing copy, and producing, posting, and printing the final digital and print versions.

As shown in the graphic, the print versions were produced with formatting that took advantage of the medium by using mirrored layouts for facing pages.

Another Custom Family Calendar

Another very very very custom calendar - see this post for the 2010 version.  Again designed with full bleed tabloid-sized sheets and different layouts for every page.  Again printed and distributed to all adult members of the family for less than what it would have cost to make a template-based calendar of a smaller size.

(There are more than twelve pages in the montage because several February variations were considered, including one featuring a picture of a trilobite I found over the summer near Delta, Utah.)

Clean and Simple Calendars (2011)

Annual update.  As detailed in the post for the 2010 set, I started making these when I couldn't find anything suitable online (most blank calendars on the web are formatted one month to a page, and nothing that I could find with a full year on a page was as simple and straightforward as what I wanted).

As always, federal holidays and paydays are shown, useful for planning and budgeting, especially if you're paid every other week on Thursdays.

Web Graphics for Novatek, Inc.

I started working for Novatek in June of 2010 doing engineering research and analysis.  In September I was internally recruited/promoted into the Information Systems department.  One of my first assignments involved prepping for a soon-to-launch website redesign.  The majority of the effort was focused on updating dozens of placeholder images, but there was also a fair deal of copy work (production and editing), and even some tweaking of the site design.

All of the material is available on the site itself, so clicking on the image set below will take you directly to the Novatek domain.  Note that I did not take the pictures or do the rendering or the modeling – what I did was sort through the available images, pick the best ones, improve them as needed, and then give all the different labs and projects a consistent look.  Note also that Novatek owns the copyright for these images.