Name: Abbe Tykwinski
Title: Print Production Coordinator
Website/Blog: abbetyk.blogspot.com
Location: Chicago, IL
Tell us about your educational/professional background.
I graduated in 2006 with a B.A. in Professional Writing from Michigan State University. My track was Editing & Publishing, but I took a lot of the Digital & Technical Writing classes as well. After college I moved to Chicago and got a job re-designing the website of a writing instructor, which I enjoyed. I maintained the website until I got a job at a small publishing company that produced pages for office supply catalogs. I had a temporary job there as a proofreader and when they hired me full-time, I was given the task of re-designing their website as well as managing their image database, reporting on catalog data, and even doing some page makeup. I’ve also done a little freelance web design.
Tell us about your current job.
I currently work at CVS Caremark through a marketing/design staffing agency called Aquent. I started working here in January 2009. I work with two other people to print and assemble proposals and presentations and also a variety of marketing collateral. We run this stuff on the four digital presses we have in house.
I’ve diverged from that job description a little bit by helping design new print request forms and revamping the department’s project tracking database. When I started this job, the database we used captured no useful data other than the names of the projects and who requested them. When the VP of Marketing started to request actual reports, it was obvious we needed to change our system. Our workload had lightened substantially and we had hired a third production coordinator, so I used my downtime to build a new database in Filemaker. I’d never used Filemaker before so it was a real learning experience. I’m happy to say that today we have a functional database that captures all the cost, supply usage, and workload information that we need. (more…)
