English 420: Business Writing

This week our team finished our whole project. This was quite a relief to finally have done, but at the same time, it was nice to see how nice the deliverables and the video ended up. I was very pleased with how well our group did and I am proud of the documents that we presented to our customer. On Monday we went down to Sports Etc, for two reasons. The first reason was to interview Mike for the video project. This was fun because we had the ability to ask him about things that we had learned about and see how we may be using those skills in the near future.

This week we got our video done with the client. Also we submitted a rough drafts to our clients to get a feedback from them. We will be submitting our final drafts to the client next week sometime. For the video we had a couple of issues with the cord that couldn't be attached to our computers, so we used the computers at the library to edit the video.

This week we went up to Lafayette Instrument and did our video interview for our project. We had our client sign the papers that needed to be signed and came back and uploaded the video to a computer to do some editing on it. We finished all of our final documents to turn into Mr. Baker and now all we have left to do is finish editing the video. Great work team!!

This week our group met on Monday night to finish up our final deliverables. We also met to create a power point presentation for our peers and Mr. Baker displaying what we have been working on with our client for the past few weeks. We were having a lot of issues when it came to being able to print our document. We had used the Indesign software on campus but unfortunately most places don’t have that updated of a version. Phil had gone to the copy shop in the union but every time it was printed there the pictures wouldn’t look right.

During the final week of our client based project, my group and I finished up the entire project. On Saturday, we met in Krannert before we drove over to interview the owner of Skylight Coffee House. We decided on a group of questions that would really focus on public documents and how Skylight has used them in the past and will use them in the future. I did the interviewing and asked the questions. I had about eight questions to ask her but she actually ended up answering four other questions when she answered the first one. I was forced to think of questions on the fly to ask her.

During this week our group met and finished our final deliverables for our presentation on Tuesday and to hand in on Thursday. When we met on Monday to put together our powerpoint and print our final menu we experienced some problems. Philip, during the day went to the copy center to try and have them print the menu on a better sheet of paper. They told him that they didn’t have Adobe CS4. We went to try and save the file as a CS3 format and a PDF again. When we did this, our picture at the bottom of the menu got distorted.

Our client based project has finally come to its last week. Luckily, since our group had done a lot of work prior we didn’t have too much to do this week. Our goals were to finish the final version of our flier and brochure and to get our presentation for Tuesday all lay out. We decided I would speak about the introduction and the brochure, Brandy would talk more about Two Tulips, Samantha would talk about some of needs of the client, and Stacy would talk about the flier. I felt our presentation went very well on Tuesday.

This week our group finished up our final deliverables for our client. Printing the menu turned out to be very difficult though. The copy center in the Memorial Union (the place that sells all of the software on campus) does not have CS4 InDesign on their computers, so the file must be in either CS3 or PDF format. For some reason though, our menu changes color and format when converted to PDF or CS3, so we could not print it at the copy center.

This week our group had many things to finish up before turning in our final deliverables to Mr. Baker. First, we met early this week to complete our final documents and prepare a presentation for our class. We met and created a brief PowerPoint presentation which outlined who our company was, what they were looking for, challenges that we encountered, and a glimpse of what it was that we created for them. The presentation went well and we used the rest of the class period to finalize our documents once more and begin working on our final paper.

This was our final week to work on our professional documents and make any final revisions before submitting our documents. Our group met once on Monday in Hicks in order to work make any final changes to our documents, and to create our powerpoint presentation. Our slides included screen shots of our documents so that the class would be able to judge the quality of our work. Also, during this meeting, we divided this key points of our presentation amongst us. On Tuesday, we presented our project to the class, and on Thursday we had an in-class work day.