At the end of spring semester 2015, when we lost our one graphic designer (she graduated), we hired a completely new graphics student five-man team. We also decided to combine our graphic designers, tutorial designers, and photographers into one large team. We've named it the multimedia team. This team will be responsible for:
    library event pictures (taking, editing, organizing)
    designing posters for the Informatics department
    designing graphics for the library website (including Benner bulletins)
    designing graphics for the Archives website (including Archives Marquees)
    designing graphics for any other Informatics' needs that may arise
    writing scripts for specified library tutorials
    creating assigned Informatics and library tutorials
    maintaining and organizing library tutorials

We have never had such a large "specialized team" in the department. It now consists of nine students: Bekah, Biz, Emilie, Emily L, Emily R, Kristen, Nick, Walker, and Will. These students are also expected to work as our normal Informatics lab students. Knowing how things work in the library and having regular lab training enhances their knowledge when designing for the library and Informatics department. The organization and policy design has become an overwhelming task. We've divided the multimedia team as a whole into three teams with much overlap.

One of the first issues we ran into was scheduling. We have had to be creative because becoming organized takes a lot of group meetings. We were lucky to find a couple common times where most of the team can meet. Our weekly meeting time is on Fridays. Each week we decide who needs to be at the meeting. Sometimes it's the entire multimedia team and other times it's one of the subgroups. Some weeks we do not meet at all. We have had to be creative and give up other office student staff time in order to justify having nine students in the office at the same time.

The first couple of weeks we spent getting organized, talking about current projects, and setting up policies and procedures. We were down to one tutorial student so that part was easy - we just needed to get more students trained. Our one student (Emilie J) has been here for four years and is magnificent at her job - she can do it all including a great job of training. We chose three people (now down to two) that had an interest in making tutorials and had her run with it.

The graphics team was a little different. We had worked with two of the students over the summer from off campus. It was very difficult. Tasks were put in Asana and we had shared files using Google Drive and it wasn't the smoothest of systems. Trying to connect with a graphics designer off campus is not the ideal scenario especially when they are new and don't know a lot of your expectations. It was definitely a learning curve.  Both girls, Emily R and Kristen, stuck with it and had great attitudes. Being the upperclassmen of the group, Emily R quickly emerged as the leader so we made her the head graphic designer for the team. All graphics need to go through her before they come to Informatic's Administration. She rose to the challenge and stepped up to the plate. She spends a lot of time organizing everyone making sure everyone has an assignment. We kept our summer workflow and began to run into problems immediately. We found that ai files did odd things in Google Drive. Colors in the viewer were often skewed and not the right hex numbers when we used the color picker. We even had some sizing issues when we were trying to open files that came from Google Drive in Adobe Illustrator. After a couple of months of just surviving, we decided to come up with a more concise policy:

Open appropriate folder on our shared drive:
There will be a series of folders where files should be stored:
1. Working copy - is just yours to use as needed if at all. It would be a great place to back up or end a shift with bc they you could pull it up on other Informatics computers. Please delete these files once completed or outdated.
2. Submit for review - this is where you put the ai files that you are ready to have reviewed by the Student Graphics Leader. Once you put it in this folder, update your Asana task tagging the leader so they know it is there
3. Once it has been reviewed, revised, re-submitted, and approved, the Student Graphics Leader will move it to approved, tagging the Informatics Librarian in Asana.
4. Informatics Librarian will move them to appropriate application or person, check as completed in Asana, and move to completed on T Drive. She will also give the artist their project completion tally points in Tally.
Since September though our sub graphics team has cranked out three color palettes for our two websites and applications. This was a enormous undertaking because Informatics Administration (Matt and I) are very picky! We often changed the rules and guidelines on them because it didn't always turn out as we expected! :) They have redesigned/designed most of our Benner bulletins and Archives Marquees and they have begun to design new icons for our Informatics' homegrown applications. (We have about twenty in all.)

Emilie has been working on training Will and Biz on tutorials and still cranking out new tutorials in the meantime. Biz just completed her first tutorial. Emily L returns to us in January - we are really looking forward to seeing her again!

Bekah has been busy cropping staff pictures and building pictures for the new Archives pages.She has worked closely with the University Archivist serving as a liaison between the two departments. She and Angie (Informatics' Administrator) worked together in designing the photograph that serves as the Archive sites background. (http://archives.olivet.edu)

I am genuinely impressed with the level of professionalism that they have demonstrated through this chaotic semester. They have had great attitudes, shown tremendous patience, and paid astute attention to detail.