|  Connection
Newspapers
McLean, Virginia
January 1999 - November 2002
Started as a high-school co-op,
doing a variety of tasks such as physical cutting and trimming,
waxing and placement, back when manual dummy pagination
was still around. After high school, I transitioned into
a part-time role while I went to school, and did my primary
work on a computer, building ads, photo manipulation and
color correction, and then electronic pagination. When one
of the long-time full-timers decided to retire, the position
was given to me, where I was given more responsibility,
designated with several accounts to be the primary designer
for, and a steady schedule. I left the company in November
of 2002, when my cost of living began to increase, and I
was forced to seek higher-paying employment.
Duties:
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Creation of advertisements for over 100 businesses,
large and small, ranging from real estate, car dealerships,
to local doctors and other miscellaneous businesses,
used in thirteen different weekly edition newspapers,
serving Northern Virginia, Washington D.C., and Potomac,
Maryland every week. Readership numbers at the time
were 250,000 households weekly.
-
Photo manipulation and color correction of photography
taken by beat reporters, and around-town photographers
used in editorial, advertisements, and covers. Customized
cropping, clipping paths, and color saturation level
correcting were primary objectives.
-
Creation of physical mock-ups and dummies, so that those
who needed visual representations of ideas and plans
could have excellent visual representation of what we
were trying to accomplish. It's an obsolete skill, but
I also was tasked with manually trimming ads and pasting
them onto physical dummy papers, which would be sent
to the printers as whole.
-
Entrusted with responsibility of the pagination of nine
out of 13 of the weekly newspapers. Utilizing text and
photographs from editorial, importing in tables and
matrixes from classifieds, and ensuring the correct
and proper placement of all ads, as well as enforcing
correct usage of spot and 4-color inks. Subsequently,
odd-hours were nothing out of the ordinary, especially
every Tuesday press day.
-
Trained interns every summer, from high-school co-op
students, to college students to create ads, and get
their feet wet in the production department.
Accomplishments:
-
Took photographs that appeared on the covers for the
September 11, 2001 editions of the McLean, Vienna and
Oakton Connection Newspapers
-
My multi-talented contributions afforded the company
to let go of a part-time production artist, and a full-time
retoucher
Computers
and software:
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