Second Job

In November I interviewed at five companies. In the end, I still ended up doing work similar to my first job. This reminded me of someone who said you must be careful choosing your first job, otherwise you’ll be stuck in this circle for life. Of the five companies I interviewed at, three were graphic design related. Two companies gave me job offers, but only this current gold investment company made me a formal employee. However, the workload is much less than at the previous advertising company. At the advertising company, I had to complete several drafts a day. I felt exhausted and there was no salary compensation, so I resigned (I believe the fundamental reason classmates complain about being tired, exhausted, and wanting to resign is that the salary is too low). This current job is unusually relaxed. I can work on one draft for three days. There are only a few drafts a month. Time still passes the same way, work is still done the same way. I only need to provide multiple different proposals for the manager to choose from. Most importantly, I don’t have to deal with clients anymore.

I’m still in my probation period. My salary isn’t much, but my actual disposable income is more than before. Actually, I should feel ashamed—room and board are all provided by my parents. I considered moving out later, wanting to live closer to the company so I could sleep an extra hour and have more freedom. But our family is quite traditional. I need to consider my parents’ opinions.

Attached: One-week work summary, Design for customer.

This is my first week at the company. During this week, I roughly understood the company’s organizational structure, business types, and met some new colleagues. I’ve been doing design work at the company for a week. Compared to the previous complicated work, the current work is more organized and directional. The design style is relatively stable, so the current work makes me feel a bit more relaxed. Under this premise, when designing works, I’m more meticulous and rational. Besides viewing from a designer’s perspective, I think more from an audience’s perspective about the visual experience of the work’s information. I believe that when we examine our own works from others’ perspectives, our works can be more easily read, and the information the company wants to convey can be more easily spread.

This Monday, I completed the final draft and sent to print the gold savings DM single. This work started being designed from last Thursday when the content was confirmed. Inspired by METRO style, I came up with a general style. When I opened it over the weekend to look, I felt it wasn’t reasonable. I thought the content should be distinguished more finely, and the color blocks should be smaller. After all, print materials are different from handheld devices—they don’t need finger operation. Making the client immediately understand our promotional purpose is the key point of this DM single. So later I redesigned the DM single, added rounded corners to the blocks, emphasized the “membership recruitment content,” and conveyed a much more stable message to the client. On Thursday the finished product came out, and the effect was pretty good.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Zhao Jia asked me to design business cards for the marketing department. I designed six styles. In the end she said the business cards couldn’t differ too much from the original ones, so we still used the original style. However, this business card was canceled before being sent to print. After the company’s VI system design is completed, our business cards will probably also be replaced. Boss Cao told me to take it slow and instead design this year’s Spring Festival “one gram gold” red envelopes.

Thursday and Friday were mainly spent designing the “one gram gold” red envelopes. Additionally, a greeting card needed to be designed inside the envelope, and on the greeting card, a mechanism that could cleverly hold the gold coin needed to be designed. The mechanism for holding the gold coin couldn’t use glue—it had to rely on the paper to stay secure. The design difficulty is quite high (production costs will also increase). It’s expected that the entire set of red envelope designs can be completed within the next week.