What I'm Up To At Work...

Since I had such fun feedback about "all the things" that I'm up to at work these days, I thought I'd take this opportunity to show you some of my FAVORITE work projects. I'll start off by giving you this website:
Thurston County 4-H Website
From here, you can look at two projects that I recently did work on (both are graphic design, lay-out, and information-disbursement, but I also did all the scheduling for the Super Saturday workshops).
On the left of the screen, you'll see a link to the Super Saturday brochure - I made it! It should be a fun day (so I wanted to convey fun) full of a variety of workshops, presentations, and activities (so I also had to convey a lot of practical information). This would be a tri-fold brochure if it weren't in electronic format, so think of the first two pages back-to-back with one part you can tear off concerning registration, and a secondary sheet folded inside with the day's schedule of sessions.
On the right side of the page, you can look at a PDF version of a 4-H working calendar that shares all the deadlines, committee meetings, fair events, and fun events that we have scheduled through the office or through the Thurston 4-H Council. I have to point out one flaw immediately so that I can apologize for it - for some reason, when we turned this from a Publisher document into a PDF document, the word September always gets cut off. Strange. Anyway, you can see the happy, smiling faces of a whole bunch of children (I had to check to make sure we have photo release forms for each of them, which was 3/4 the work of the whole project) doing fun 4-H events. Check it out if you're interested.
I also made a completely ridiculous number of signs to go all over our office to direct people to offices, bathrooms, buildings (and the popcorn) for a February 10th open house that the County Commissioners (they are the ones who hold the fate of our funding in their hands) attended. I'm not going to bore you with putting those up, but I will tell you that I "designed" logos for a few programs that didn't have them so that we could be more graphically interesting as an office. Sadly, at least one of those programs will be leaving our office already next week, due to budget cuts. Say a little prayer for county extension offices everywhere before you go to bed tonight.
The final graphically interesting (I think) object for you to witness is one that I made just last night for the Thurston County Master Composter program. We're going to be accepting applications for this year's class soon and need to get the work out. I was given a piece of white paper with a heading in a large font of Times New Roman and several complicated paragraphs describing, in great detail, everything that could ever be wanted to know about the program, when classes are, and how to get involved (in small font Times New Roman). My artistic urges took over and I stayed at the office last night until after 7pm in a creative frenzy designing something that would be eye-catching on a plastered bulletin board in downtown Olympia, that would look neat and professional (like we want to portray our organization), and also would get all those paragraphs of information across to the interested passer-by. I'll put that image below this post so that you can see it a little better.
Thanks for taking the time and energy to show interest in what I do at work. A lot of my day is data-entry, phone calling/answering, and a variety of filing and paperwork. When I have the opportunity to create something of beauty and information to share with the public, I nearly explode with enthusiasm. Although I can't spend the time I'd like to make them real works of art, it's fun to be able to share the tiny crack through which my creativity can flow with you.

(I know this is too small to read, but you get the idea - and you can see it bigger if you click on it)
Much love,
Lauren