Currently, I'm supporting Northrop Grumman's contract with the Air Force Civil Engineer Support Agency (AFCESA). My main task is designing and laying out their quarterly journal, Air Force Civil Engineer (PDF available in Portfolio). As part of that job, I process submitted photos—clean up, crop, resize, mask, build clipping paths, and convert to CMYK—select appropriate clip art, and create simple graphics. When necessary, I locate appropriate art or photos and obtain permission for use from the copyright owners. I also serve as an assistant editor and occasional writer for the journal, and take on editing and graphic design projects for anyone in the agency on request.

In 2004, I redesigned the magazine to give it a more consistent, professional appearance. Based on a grid system and using a limited set of typefaces, the new design is more inviting to the reader, as well as easier to use during the layout phase. There was some resistance to the redesign during the planning stage, but the final product was received well.

During the redesign, the journal's editor and I took a critical look at the production process we inherited when Northrop Grumman took over the contract. We jointly streamlined the workflow, moved some of the editing duties from her desk to mine, and set up a quarterly schedule of internal milestones. The result was less wasted effort, less "dead" time for me, a more equitable distribution of work, and ontime delivery of the finished journal.

ETI Professionals is a Denver-based consulting firm with offices nationwide. Their focus is the environmental industry, to which they provide trained professionals on a contract basis. I was hired for a short period to take on a project for the Orange County Environmental Protection Department. In addition to creating the petroleum clean-up summaries, I taught EPD inspectors how to use the template to maintain the summaries and to create new ones.

The staff wanted me to stay on, but funding wasn't available. However, department management thought well enough of me that they contacted me the following year for more of the same work. Had I not already been employed in a different city, I would have accepted their offer.

engineering-environmental Management, Inc., (e²M) is a Denver-based consulting firm that specializes in the enviromental industry. It has offices nationwide, as well as in Germany. The company's primary customer is the US government, particularly the National Guard, but it also has clients in private industry. The company's products include environmental compliance assessments, site assessment, standard operating procedures (SOPs), remediation plans and implementation, and training.

I hired a small staff of editors and a graphic artist to support the engineers and scientists in their documentation efforts. As a team, we redesigned existing documents and moved them from FrameMaker to Word to suit the clients' needs. I created new Word templates for the redesigned documents, as a well as templates for new documents. Occasionally, I helped the graphic artist with minor projects when her to-do list got too full.

I wrote the company's style guide (see Portfolio) to standardize the company's documentation and to help the technical staff avoid common problems in their writing.

To further support the latter, I wrote and published (via e-mail) an informal newsletter called "Writers' Daily Dose" (see Portfolio) The newsletter provided information on common grammar and writing problems, often in response to technical staff suggestions/questions, as well as tips and tricks for using Word more efficiently.

I was also the Jacksonville office's initial point of contact for PC problems. I contributed to PC/peripheral purchase decisions, installed new hardware and software, and helped users troubleshoot any PC/network problems. If I couldn't solve the problem, I escalated it appropriately to the system administrator in Denver and/or a local service tech that I located.

Saudi Aramco is a major oil producer. al Hoty Establishment hired me as a contractor for Saudi Aramco's Loss Prevention Department, which implements safety policies. Part of that duty included publishing safety materials of various types, aimed at audiences ranging from workers in the field to their family members to company managers to senior executives. Most publications are bilingual (English/Arabic). In general, bilingual publications start with English at the left cover and Arabic at the right cover; the two halves meet in the middle. The Arabic design is usually a mirror image of the English.

Soon after coming on board, I reviewed the workflow with the unit manager. After streamlining the process to reduce redundancies and setting internal production deadlines to bring publications out on time, I became the English-language editor for all of the unit's publications. I also redesigned several of them, and created PageMaker templates for all of them. Previously, the staff created each one from scratch. After setting up the templates, I taught several small classes on PageMaker and Photoshop basics. I also gave a one-time technical writing seminar for the department's engineering staff.

The unit ran several themed safety campaigns each year. I designed the majority of the print pieces, and was also involved as a writer and consultant for the production of several short video public service announcements (PSAs) for traffic safety. The PSAs ran on the company television station, which broadcast to a large portion of the Eastern province.

All print work was done by local printers under a contract system similar to that of the American Government Printing Office. I wrote the printing specifications for the bids and explained them to printers' reps during the pre-bid meetings. I visited printing plants to determine whether they met the company's standards, and observed print runs for high-profile pieces, such as the annual Loss Control Report, pulling check sheets during the print run to ensure quality.

Because of my Macintosh background, the department's system administrator asked me to take over as the first point of contact for any troubleshooting of those machines. When the department decided to consolidate on the PC platform, I supervised the transfer of publishing operations between platforms: I wrote the specs for the computers and software, set up the computers when they arrived, transferred archive and working files from the Macs, and ensured that the PageMaker templates still functioned as expected on the PCs. When new PCs were issued each year, I installed all the publishing applications and fonts on a single machine which the sysadmin then cloned to the other PCs. Arabic publishing stayed on a Mac due to a lack of PC software, and I maintained that machine until my departure.

In April of 2000, the company launched a new corporate identity, with a single logo replacing the various unit, division, and departmental logos that had proliferated over the years. As a result, all of Loss Prevention's publications had to be redesigned to reflect the new colors and design elements. Samples are available on the Portfolio page.

Follett Campus Resources (now known as Follett Higher Education Group) is part of a family-owned set of companies that deals in used college textbooks, which are resold by Follett-owned college bookstores or affiliated independents. In addition to buying and reselling used textbooks, Follett created and maintains several software packages. The FIRSTsystem client/server package runs under AIX and provides accounting and inventory control support at college bookstore POS terminals. CourseWorks BuyBack supports Follett buyers using PC laptop or desktop systems when they are on-campus, buying used books from students.

I redesigned the layout for all FIRSTsystem documentation to give it a common look-and-feel, and to improve the readability. I rewrote the Accounts Receivable User Manual and the Guide to System Administration to incorporate changes in the latest version of the software. These manuals are intended for a primarily non-technical audience: the staff of a college bookstore.

The AR manual is available here as a PDF on the Portfolio page (sceen shots have been removed). I can bring to an interview a marked-up draft of the Guide to System Administration.

CourseWorks, FIRSTsystem's eventual replacement, was designed as an Oracle-based application, running under Windows 95. The first module to be completed supported the book-buying function, and replaced a much older DOS-based application. I selected the Hypertext Development Toolkit (HDK) as the documentation team's tool for online help, performed the task analysis for help topics with my supervisor, and designed the help system. I wrote approximately 1/3 of the first version of the help text, and assembled the first working version. The contractor Oracle programmers had never set up context-sensitive help before, and didn't know how "hook" the help system to the Oracle screens. I researched this with various programmers and help developers, both locally and via the Internet and e-mail, and then provided the programmers with the information they needed.

Saudi Aramco is a major oil producer. Many of their employees receive advanced technical training from company-designed and -taught training programs. As part of that effort, al Hoty Establishment hired me as a contractor for Engineering Services (now Engineering and Operations Services) to write technical training manuals for refinery inspectors. The company's goal was to create an accelerated training program to transfer the skills and knowledge of trained inspectors, mostly American and British with decades of experience, to young Saudi employees. The experienced inspectors acted as subject matter experts (SMEs) and provided resource material for the initial drafts, which they then reviewed. Working with the SMEs involved many phone calls, office visits, and occasional field visits on a writer's part in order to gather information and understand exactly how some equipment worked.

I wrote several training modules, covering topics ranging from fin-fan coolers to metal fatigue. The majority of the training modules contain information that the company considers proprietary, but the supplemental module, "Metal Loss" (PDF in Portfolio), provides a short example of my writing. The template's page format is mirrored from left to right, with wide outer margins to allow commentary in the outer column of participant modules, and and answers to questions in the instructor modules.

Later, my writing duties were somewhat curtailed as I began editing for the entire group. I set the standards for vocabulary and readability, and created a development handbook to detail those standards and explain how to use the module template in Word. I also created a database in Claris FileMaker to track the development effort and final delivery of each module.

I also designed a number of special purpose brochures and publications, both for my own division and for other divisions under the Engineering Services umbrella. A sample brochure cover is available on the Portfolio page.

At one point, I was asked to create an internal professional journal to publish technical articles for engineers. After designing the journal and creating a PageMaker template, I collected and edited original papers from the engineering staff; cleaned up or modified existing graphics and photos; created some graphics; obtained reprint permission for copyrighted photos; wrote brief notices; arranged for printing; and delivered the first issue of Connections. Following the first issue, the Public Relations Department took over responsibility for the journal, and renamed it the Saudi Aramco Journal of Technology.

During my last year on this job, I was asked to take over as an instructor for a class on Aldus Persuasion, then a competitor of MS PowerPoint. After rewriting the course, I taught this one-day, hands-on course several times a month to classes of as many as 14 Saudi engineers of varying ages. The largest hurdles were class size, computer skills, and scheduling. The course was very popular and the scheduling group packed in as many as the room would hold. Frequently, at least half the participants had only minimal computer skills and didn't understand such basic Windows commands as cut, copy, and paste. Teaching the class was often hectic, but I truly enjoyed this assignment, and got consistently high marks from the students in their feedback.

Software Productivity Solutions (now Modus Operandi) was a software engineering firm that specialized primarily in government-sponsored software R&D. I was initially hired for a summer through Florida Institute of Technology's co-op program. My assignment was research to support a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program contract to study software reusability. My write-ups on various programming languages exceeded expectations and, rather than serve as someone else's resource, became a chapter in the final report, "Knowledge-based Reusable Software Synthesis Systems." I received credit as one of the co-authors and was offered a full-time position. The company allowed flexible hours so that I could continue attending FIT full-time.

I continued to work as a research assistant, but also took on writing and graphics duties. Proposal production was one of my main duties; I took the input of several engineers, edited it for grammar and a consistent style, and created the final proposal according to the specs supplied by the customer. I created Word templates, designed product logos, wrote advertising copy, and rewrote ads used to hire new engineers.

Under contract, the company developed a software engineering database product to capture data about software under development and the work process. Part of the product's feature set was the ability to generate milspec documentation from the database, rather than writing it as separate documents. In a two-week period, I learned the product's custom scripting language, and wrote & compiled 21 document templates.

For my last major assignment, I took on project manager duties for a non-government contract to develop a master's level program in software engineering. In addition to the administrative duties, I created PowerPoint slides for the instructors. I also brought in outside consultants to handle certain aspects of the project.