Kristofer D. Layon

Today I received some very pleasant news about a project that my class did last semester: a poster that we designed won first place in its category in a national competition. To quote the email I received from our printer:

Good news! We entered the "Dollar Redesign Poster" in the 2007 In-Print Competition, cosponsored by the national In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) and In-Plant Graphics magazine, and won Gold (First Place) in the poster category! More than 550 pieces were entered in the competition. Five judges scrutinized every piece, inspecting the quality, using loupes to check for poor registration and imperfections. We are thrilled to have won a printing award but I'm certain the interesting design of your poster captured the judges attention and contributed to our success. Thanks!

While I am proud to have facilitated this project and consulted on the design and pre-press processes for the poster, my congratulations go out to the 19 students in the class who did the fabulous dollar bill designs for this project—without these, we would not have had a poster to design! Also, my profound thanks to our printing consultant Joe Sobota, who provided us with excellent customer support, a generous 2 hour tour of his facilities, and the printing expertise that enabled the project to win this award.

Enlarged view of the poster.

One of my areas of focus is project management, which is the process of making things happen by working with ideas, leading teams of people (and dealing with politics), organizing processes, and managing schedules and budgets. To better facilitate this in my own practice of design, I am currently doing two things:

1. Starting to use Copper Project, a project management web application, and
2. Reading The Art of Project Management (Scott Berkun)

I have just started reading the book but think it is great already. One nugget of wisdom that I particularly like is the idea that we need to try to keep things simple...but that simple does not always mean easy. And that the various aspects of project management (or management in general, I would guess) are tasks that any of us can and should do. But to do them all, and do them all well so that the overall project experience for everyone involved is pleasant and relatively trouble-free (that is, simple) is not easy.

I look forward to documenting my experience with this book and the Copper project management software. I am hopeful that they will both serve to help me do project management tasks better.

In early February our office launched a new faculty recruiting web site for the University, and the results have been fun to track:

• 2,224 total unique visitors, who made 5,432 visits to the site


• 41% of the visits have been made by UMTC staff visiting the site from our campus network


• New off-campus visits originated from several other university networks including: Notre Dame, MIT, NYU, Michigan, OSU, Toronto, San Diego, North Carolina, Dartmouth, Stanford, Rutgers, and Wisconsin


• 7% of visitors are international


• Top 10 sources of international visitors are: Canada, China, Korea, India, the U.K., Spain, Germany, Taiwan, France, and Australia