The other day I went to a printer shop on the west side of Manhattan to do a press check for the magazine that I produce and design quarterly, as part of my job as a senior designer for a financial firm. This means that I check that the main color matches the previous issue, that there is no text missing, that the portraits of the managing directors look crisp, and that the typography is legible, among other things before they go ahead and print the full run of 25,000 copies. I was sitting in a comfortable room with a computer where I could surf the web whilst waiting for the press sheets to come out, so I could approve the colors and get back to my office when done.
At some point, I heard a bunch of young people coming into the room. Usually it is very quiet with only a few press-men and sales representatives walking by. Normally, I would have just continued checking e-mails and minding “my own business” or being shy. But something quite unusual happened, I got curious and I found myself asking someone who seemed to be the teacher leading this group of young students if it was a design class and from which school. He explained they were students from Pratt Institute and he had brought them to learn about the printing process. “What a coincidence” I thought, “I also went to Pratt”… And without much thought I told him that I had graduated from the Communications Design Masters program in 1998 and that now I worked for a financial firm designing their publications… He asked me if I could talk to his students about my professional experience.
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