partners + napier
Dunwoody, Georgia
April 2003 - April 2004

The graphic designer position with partners + napier (p+n) is what brought me to Atlanta in 2003. p+n is a design studio based in the "Queen Building" located just outside of the Perimeter. They were originally known as Wolf Group Atlanta Studios until March of 2004, until a corporate employee buy-out of the company resulted in p+n coming to fruition. p+n's primary client was the Eastman Kodak Company, and was responsible for a large allocation of Kodak projects.

My role in the company was one of ten other designers in the firm that worked on primarily Kodak materials, ranging from box art, collateral materials, and other printed pieces. However, I brought some web knowledge with me, and was tasked with the coding aspect of particular projects in collaboration with designers who designed the look, and me who made it work.

The reason I left the company after just a year was the commute - I was living in Peachtree City at the time, and the total 103-mile daily commute through Downtown as well as Sandy Springs proved to be too much.

Duties:

• My primary duty was the creation, editing, or updating of Kodak collateral materials, from project packaging, signage, and other PoP merchandising.
• Entrusted with the Kodak brand, and maintaining that all projects worked on adhered to the strict and infallable brand guidelines. This was more difficult than simply policing font sizes and margins; depending on the market, line of business, or target audience, the colors could be required to be different to the images being used in the example photographs.
• Responsible for many internal materials, such as company newsletters, and customized email templates.
• More than once we had a few web-related assignments, and I was the only designer with adequate knowledge of HTML to understand how to manually change something in the coding, when the still relevant Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape Composer were still the standard in web design software.

Accomplishments:

• Never once had any of my projects come back with violation of brand guidelines.
• Undertook increased workloads upon the departure of other designers, with the company not replacing them; but the cumulative output of the agency did not fluctuate lower.

Computers and software:

• Macintosh G4 OS 9.6.7, upgraded to Mac G5 OSX Tiger
• QuarkXPress (4.2, upgraded to 5.0)
• ADOBE - Photoshop (7.0), Illustrator (10), Acrobat/Distiler 6.0
• MACROMEDIA (now Adobe) - Dreamweaver, Flash (2.0)
• Microsoft Office (2003 editions, Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint)
• Microsoft FrontPage