Day 13

Post three pictures that show a process at your internship—This could be drafting & revision, how something is done at your internship, how your project was developed, etc.

I have a lot of pictures and screen shots of the process I used to make my project come to life, but I've already posted a lot of those. So I'll post the CAD-ing process instead. CAD stands for Computer Aided Design, but Skinit uses the term differently than most companies. Architects use that as the term for building computer models of houses, for instance. Skinit uses it in the sense that they call the process of scanning a device and making a template and cut path for the skin CAD-ing.

First, Matt, the CAD-ing guru, scans the device using the office copier. He scans all the necessary sides--the front and the back. He's scanning my cell phone here, because after searching the Skinit website for my cell phone's model (Samsung SGH-T329), I couldn't find it. He's CAD-ing this real quick, just for me. Plus, they're supposed to have everything! Looks like they missed one.

The images that Matt scanned at the copier are sent to his computer. There, he uses Adobe--it looks like he uses Illustrator--to create a template and cut path. The printer beside him follows the cut paths and uses a small razor or knife of some sort to cut the template into some scrap skins. He puts it on the device to see if it fits, and if it doesn't, he fixes the cut path and tries it again.

Here's a picture of the very first skin he made for my phone. It's a bit of a tight fit, and the top part doesn't extend all the way. Matt gets input from John, my mentor, about these kinds of things, and then goes back to edit the template again. My phone has tried on four or five skins today.

Here's Matt at his desk again. He's working on the template again, and there is a row of scraps and drafts of the cell phone skin in the trash. He's really trying to get it to fit perfectly!

This is the skin my phone tried on last. There are small dents in the top tab thing because Matt was trying to figure out how to get those thin indents on the face to look good. He figured it would help get the air bubbles out, but it didn't. This isn't the final draft, but he finalized it after getting the tab length right and returning the dents back into straight lines.

And that's how a skin template gets made. The printers for the real production line are much bigger and longer, but I'm not allowed to take pictures of those.

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Interview With John O'Brien Follow Up

Do you ever take your work home? How and which work?
Yes. Basically, I'm always doing email, sometimes managing Base Camp from home, and working actually doing design at home... I used to do a lot more prior, I don't have a home office set up anymore, so I do less of that, and it's more life if I need to come in on a weekend, I'll come in.

When you take your work home, would you rather be doing something else? Or do you like designing at home?
I like designing stuff at home, but I'd rather be doing something else. It's one of those things [where] I prefer working at home--generally to working at the office... because there's less distraction.

I heard you talking to some others earlier about the website... Your collaboration with others--how do you do/deal with it?
[In] Design, you're almost always always in form of collaboration. It's generally, someone's coming to you asking you to solve a creative problem--you know, make something look good. So if it's something in sales, they're coming to you asking, whether it's a packaging project or a POP [point of purchase display], or something for a trade show--trade show graphics, marketing collateral, whether it's a brochure or something like that, you're basically trying to put it together so they look good and they can make their sale. When we're collaborating with the tech department, we're basically working with them so that we're designing something for the website, so we're trying to make graphics for the website. It's my job... to make sure there's a good user interface, following the tenets of Heuristics. It's basically like common sense, tenets of design, so that someone can know where to click--they know where to go, it makes sense. So collaboration can be really fun and really kind of inspiring in a way, and other times it can be very very frustrating--especially if you're collaborating with someone you're not on the same page with, or you disagree with. It can prove sometimes very frustrating.