Central Piedmont Faculty Handbook

While serving among the first class of Faculty Fellows at the College, one of my tasks was to reinvision a faculty handbook for college faculty.

User Research

I work on the same campus as the skilled trades programs, such as HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc, and we had a lot of new hires at the time, so I began asking them what was missing in their onboarding experience. They had a lot to say.

I also asked new faculty who were just completing the orientation program for feedback on the things that they needed to know but did not learn through formal training at the college.

Pain Points

• The organizational structure of the college is broad and is generally organized in terms of business rules rather than user needs, and there are too many end user types to optimize for them all, so faculty can get left behind. Especially part-time (adjunct) faculty from industry (no prior teaching experience).
• There is a spectrum of users among the faculty, from degree-holiding, career academics to industry professionals from skilled trades like plumbing and HVAC with no prior teaching experience. Those with academic experience have an advantage in that they have more context for the business rules of the college. Established full-time faculty also have an advantage over new faculty and even long-time adjunct faculty. They receive more correspondence from leadership and more informal training.
• There is an orientation for new full time faculty, but it is focused on the mission and values of the college and classroom technique. New faculty reported that what they really needed help with was knowing what the protocols and systems were as an employee of the college, like how and when to submit a timesheet. They reported that things like that were learned though the grapevine and that there was no place to learn how to do that outside of asking colleagues for informal assistance.
• The orientation for adjunct faculty is unpaid, and therefore optional. Many do not know it exists due to the existence of so many channels for communication, resulting in a high number of adjunct faculty who do not have much context for college proceedures.

A design for the end user with the most needs.

Content Inventory and Information Architecture

I conducted a content inventory of the available college onboarding materials, and discovered some new web pages and dashboards that even the Fellows did not know about or did not use. I proposed that we make a list of all of the things that a faculty member needs to over the course of a given semester and then search for the best existing resource for each, documenting them all in a spreadsheet.

A working rapid-prototype for proof-of-concept

Once we had identified all of the existing resources, we could create any resources that did not yet exist. Then, we could create a web-based handbook that faculty could use to find these resources in a single source rather than having to search multiple channels of the college web presence.

To present the proposed solution to leadership, I used Bootstrap and PHP to rapid-prototype a proof-of-concept that could be shown to stakeholders. It uses the college brand standards to fit within the ecosystem of our digital strategy, and places priority on new adjunct faculty from industry as the primary end user, while also providing easily-accessible quick links for more seasoned faculty in the form of a persistent footer.

I spent several years working for a wholesale distributor of books, movies, and music. A significant portion of my time was spent creating catalogs and brocures to be included with our shipments to our customers — brands like Sony, Overstock, Books-a-Million, Barnes & Noble, etc. — or in drop-shipped packages that went out to their customers.

It was here that my mastery of InDesign and task automation began. I produced a multipage catalog in bifold, trifold, or 2-up saddle-stitched once or twice a week, hundreds in all.

While the interior work was systematic (taking a spreadsheet of data and formatting it to import into InDesign, using stylesheets, parent pages, and nested styles to format the text predictably, searching for cover art by ISBN and optimizing the images for print in Photoshop, etc), the cover art was often an opportunity to create an elegant composition of image and typography.

Some Highlights From the Archives

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Following an agency rebrand, I was charged with helping to manage and extend the brand with new internal and external outreach programs and collateral. One of the first things to come from that effort was an employee newsletter to help foster a greater sense of community across eleven physical locations across the U.S.

A naming contest was held among all staff, and the winner was BTW. While the acronym officially stood for Baker & Taylor at Work, it is also a nod to the editorial conventions used by bookstore managers, librarians, editors, reporters, and avid readers, and a relevant choice for a more casual office read.

While the agency had created the logo, color palette, and some high level brand standards, it was my job to expand upon these elements as we built out the full footprint of the new brand. The newsletter was published quarterly for digital distribution.

The Logo

Many of the people who work at B&T are avid readers, with a background in the publishing world. That in mind, the logo for the newsletter is designed using a typeface that falls within brand guidelines, and also draws a reference to literary constructs, especially leisure magazines.

The Newsletter

The newsletter was designed for digital distribution as an interactive PDF. I created the first editions using Illustrator for the covers and InDesign for the publication. Once I had established a scalable solution, I created a template that could be used by the editorial staff and trained a coworker (who had never used InDesign or Illustrator) in using the programs to produce future editions.

AGDA Symposinar

In the Spring of 2018, faculty from the Graphic Design programs across the NC Community College System got together to create an organization to improve collaboration and cooperation across all of our programs, called the Advertising + Graphic Design Association of NC (AGDANC). I served on the executive board for the first four years. One of the best things to come out of our decision to organize is an annual conference where we share tips, tricks, and intel on the deisgn profession and design education.

Conferences, Symposiums, and Webinars Abound!

Our 2020 conference took place in person just before stay-at-home orders were issued, but the 2021 conference would be held online during lockdown. During that time, there were so many online conferences and webinars being held that it was difficult to keep up with them all. During one of the executive board meetings, I suggested that we should use a playful name to make light of that fact and to help ours stand out. I suggested we call it the Spring Symposinar, and the board agreed.

We worked with a third semester design class to allow students to generate the logo, a PowerPoint template, and some swag to send in the form of a care package by mail, and I was asked to create a one-page website that we could use to provide access to each web conference room throughout the day. We decided to update the page after the event to lead to the recorded sessions.

Not many people have a story that calls for a memoir in their 20s, but Rye Barcott is not your average guy. During his undergraduate studies at UNC Chapel Hill, he founded a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Kibera, Africa. It's called Carolina for Kibera, or CFK for short.

Rye was serving in the Marine Corps at the time, and his story took place across several continents as a result. As his memoir, titled It Happened on the Way to War, neared publication, he realized that a map showing the critical locations in the story would help his readers to have context for the events that were unfolding. Unfortunately, such a map didn't exist.

Rye came to me on a short deadline with the idea of a map that would help the reader understand the geography of Kibera, and also the other locations in his story. The only map of Kibera that he had was too detailed, showing the population density of the area, and we would still need a world map to show it in relation to the other locations in his story.

After sourcing a vector world map, I simplified the map of Kibera into regions and enhanced the boundary of the railroad tracks as a main focal point. We were able to deliver the map to the publisher within a matter of a days to make it into the first press run of the book.

Source Materials for the Final Custom Illustration

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