On November 2nd, I interviewed Don Haugen who works at the company Inseego Corporation and has been the creative director for six and half years. He also manages the team of web development. Before he worked at Inseego Corp, Mr. Haugen was a freelance photographer and owned his own business for ten years. When I told him that I am a student at Lane he mentioned he went there as well.

Mr. Haugen’s job has required him to learn how to work with Adobe Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, MicroSoft Office, and Powerpoint for all his web design. His least favorite program to work with is Powerpoint and he doesn’t use it often. He says for him personally, it isn’t that engaging and it’s also hard for him to put a slideshow together because he would have to be changing it often. Mr. Haugen shared with me that one of the frustrating things about working with so many programs is that once you learn all the shortcuts for a certain program, you’ll want to retain that information. He said he once knew all the shortcuts for Premiere, but then forgot all of them in six months and had to relearn them when some of his projects required Premiere. The characteristics Mr. Haugen looks for in future employees are people who are willing to learn and to keep up with the “ever-so-changing” technology in the business.

On a regular daily basis, Mr. Haugen checks his e-mails, goes to meetings, and makes sure he prioritizes projects for his team. The most challenging part of his job is keeping up with everything. He mentioned the part he dreads most is attending meetings throughout the day, but what he enjoys most about working at Inseego Corp. is designing client websites. He works on creating what the website will look like and then his co-worker, who I was going to follow-up with before his illness, takes care of the programming side of it. Designing a website is Mr. Haugen’s passion and it allows him to get creative. He loves to solve problems and if something doesn’t look right on the website he will redesign it.

Something surprising about working in this department is just how short deadlines can be, and how disorganized some people can be at times. Mr. Haugen gave an example of each saying that there was a time when his boss came to him with a project and his deadline was that very day. Mr. Haugen had to stay late to work on it and get it approved. He said not all deadlines are that short, however. Some projects are due in several days, others have deadlines in a couple of weeks. It all depends on what needs to get done and what the project requires. He admitted that he is sometimes disorganized himself, not in his work necessarily, but in managing his family and daily life on the weekends. From this interview, I got a sense of how challenging and important deadlines can be, and I was excited to find out I’m already learning the tools Mr. Haugen mentioned he uses for his multimedia design job.