What are you up to now?
Freelancing (focusing on Identity Design and Web Design).

Did your Endicott experience prepare you for the work you are doing?
The Endicott experience provided me the flexibility to take a variety of courses that could be customized to my interests. This allowed students to design their electives around their specific interests, ultimately helping them become informed about what they cared most about.

What to you was the most valuable part of the program?
The most valuable part of the program was the senior internship. This internship allowed me to apply all of the skills I learned in the course work into the real world. It also allowed me to learn far more that I could have learned in school through experience with the incredibly talented designers and developers I worked with as well as learning client-designer relationships.

Is there anything else you’d want a potential Endicott Visual Communications major to know?
Start archiving and looking for inspiration as early as you can. Ask teachers for the best design resources and blogs, and start creating a digital archive of what inspires you.

What are you up to now?
Learning as much as possible about Design, Development, Music and how they work together. Embarking on many different projects and experiments.

Did your Endicott experience prepare you for the work you are doing?
Endicott gave me a solid rooting in design principles as well as giving me opportunities and room to experiment and grow. Endicott’s internships also help got me accustomed to the work environment and out of my comfort zone.

What to you was the most valuable part of the program?
The professors (Thanks: Professor Roberts, Professor Currier, Professor Maier, Professor Ocean, and Professor Farrier) really got me excited about art / design and encouraged me to (as well as provided opportunities to) go above and beyond.

Is there anything else you’d want a potential Endicott Visual Communications major to know?
It’s not easy. Design is not just building a website or using Photoshop. It’s solving a visual problem and coming up with elegant, creative, and effective solutions.

While it seems fairly obvious for students from these two majors to work together, most schools don’t formally promote the collaboration between design and computer programming.  So, we (Michael Ocean, Professor of Computer Science and Sandy Farrier, Chair of Visual Communications) designed and ran such a course in Spring 2012 to allow Visual Communications students (Designers) to work directly with Computer Science majors (Developers).

CSC377 “Software Engineering Practicum” had two goals:  1) have students from both departments work together to develop one larger-scale project throughout the semester, and 2) have that inter-departmental experience reflect the real-world collaboration students will encounter when they enter their respective professional fields.

The results were impressive. Designers and Developers learned each others’ jargon and thought processes. All students saw the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in such a group effort. Designers learned that even simple changes in layout, font choice, image size, etc. come with a lot of code “under the hood.” Developers honed their skills while working on a shared codebase using concurrent versioning software; e.g., they learned how not to step on each other’s toes and blow away each others’ changes. Both groups learned that designs don’t just come from thin air, and that good ones require considerable thought, planning, and hard work.

What did they build?
An Endicott College “Lifestyle” application, called GullNest.  It provides access to practical information that the CS and GD students felt their fellow Endicott Students need.

The Process:
In an effort to insure student ownership and commitment, we let the class decide on the app to design and build. In the beginning, students did not have a fixed idea as to what the project would be.

After a week of deliberation, they agreed on an Endicott-specific app. Another week was dedicated to choosing the app’s features and who would work on which parts. After a third week exploring design options and real-world examples, the Design students produced concept screens and a look & feel that the class agreed upon. With this design template in hand, different groups of developers worked on specific content independently while still aiming toward a consistent, branded look for the finished product. Classtime typically involved problem-solving and compromise between the two student groups in order to achieve mutually acceptable results – just like in the professions.

Under the hood:
The app was built on web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, JQuery Mobile, PHP, MySQL) to present a User Interface that appears native to an  iPhone. Class discussions included the use of PhoneGap, which would enable bundling GullNest as a native app and selling it in the app store.  All web services were hosted on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloude (EC-2) on servers generously provided by IBM’s Academic Initiative.

How did it go?
Quite simply it was an amazing, enlightening, motivating collaboration. Students came away with an understanding of each others’ concerns and workflow. As teachers, we know how to make this class even better when it runs again. Most importantly, students’ overwhelmingly positive responses tell the story.