What I Do Every Day At Work

When I work I don't realize how confusing the process is until I step back and look at the big picture of what I'm actually doing every day, ha. I design the homepages for Kmart.com, but here is what I really do:

I design a layout for a particular week, which usually has 2 parts: front and back half of the week, which are set up in layers in Photoshop, and for client review must be submitted as 2 jpegs. Sears and Kmart are switching their site layouts to "liquid" so for some of my weeks I have a liquid and a non liquid version, which inside that has the 2 parts to its week, and additionally the liquid layouts will have a sort of rotating slide show so I have further separate layouts for each of the 4 slides that will rotate out in the animation (later done by the coders). On top of that, I work on about 2-3 weeks at once actively, which need jpegs and pdfs created for client review.

So in conclusion: I design and revise a week in 2 halves as well as in a liquid and non liquid format (until the non is no longer in use), and 4 slides for the liquid format; each half of the week and each slide needs a jpeg and and each half of the week and each slide needs a pdf. This process gets repeated after revisions are made and for revisions after the week goes live on kmart.com (which are live site changes). All these tasks are multiplied by the 2-3 weeks I work on simultaneously, and are primary to the other tasks I sometimes take, such as Sears affiliates banners (which usually come in groups of 2 or groups of like 15, usually similar layouts, but different pixel sizes, and generally have a ton of text and images they want crammed into a 120x90 pixel box). Having a hard time visualizing "what I do" ? Here's a visual aid:


(you might have to click to see up close, if you're even that curious)
Each of those windows has a second layout in the hidden Photoshop layers for the other half of that week. Amongst the windows shown is March week 2-5. The window of files in the background is a good view of the projects I work on during a week. And yes, I work on 2 screens because 1 isn't enough for all that I need to see! (Sometimes I think I need 3). Thank goodness for CS4's ability to do Photoshop windows in tabs contained in just 1 window. I sometimes work that way too, but it helps me to see everything at once still.

So when you ask me, "What do you do at your job?" and I answer with this, either your head will be spinning or you'll be more engaged mentally than if I just answered, "Design stuff."