Words of Wisdom from Coptix

On Tuesday, October 14, Josiah Roe and Melinda Taylor from Coptix, a leading integrated design firm here in Chattanooga, lead our Web Media class. Josiah is full of energy and enthusiasm on anything relating to design. He spoke of his background, his position at Coptix, how he feels about design, and how he acts as a mediator between designer and client at the firm. He went through some of the client base they had and jobs that had been done recently. What was interesting about it was to get insight into how the job actually turned out, and then what the client ended up changing that resulted in a different design than the team had envisioned. This is something that happens all to often to all of us. We are given the go ahead to have complete freedom, but the client ends up wanting something that is not, in our opinion, as spectacular. One major thing I learned is you can still recover some dignity in the piece even if you have to bend a little to the customer.

Melinda actually gave us insight into a specific job and showed us the organization aspects of wire frames and grey boxes in Photoshop. This is always interesting to see how people manage their files. I always learn something that I can integrate into my own file management to make my life easier and more productive. She also spoke about how the team at Coptix has divisions. There is the design team who makes the wire frames and Photoshop mock-ups, and the web designers who create the code for the design, and the two teams work closely and well with each other to get the best overall solution. Most of the work Coptix specializes in is web and print based. Both are very different but design is shifting in such a way that both can be integrated into business to encompass the whole package. I was very impressed  with their quality of work.

On Thursday, October 16, Tyrick Christian, Bekka Reese, and Daniel Ryan visited from Coptix. First, Bekka showed us the portion of the project she worked on. She developed the wire frames to organize where info would go on the page. Designing good wire frames helps the next guy out if you all work together to complete the job. Tyrick immediately began a step by step instruction of how he organizes and preps for designing a web page. He was put into the project during the phase of Photoshop mock-up and began adding color and images to the design based on Becca’s wire frames. He showed us how to do a Photoshop mock-up and keep files neat and tidy. Finally, Daniel, the coding guru, began showing us how to begin writing code and CSS to execute the design that the design team came up with. This requires that everyone tries to stay on the same page. I really learned a lot from these two sessions and I enjoy professionals coming in and giving us advice, wisdom, and tricks of the trade. It will help me tremendously in the next assignments.