This material is intended for the use of the Visit Kenosha Staff in assessing NMP’s Proposal for the production of the 2024 Visitors Guide. I am happy to bring along hard copies of the Career Guides (mentioned below) to an interview if requested.
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Guide
The work I complete for ODI is all for online use, and needs to be ADA compliant. I mention this because there are features in this document that work only because it is an online publication. These include map pages in their original format and folios in the upper right corner instead of alternating corners based on left- or right-hand page placement.
This was a complex project because even in the midst of production, information was changing. Produced at the beginning of 2022, restaurants were still feeling the effects of COVID closures. Many restaurants in the lists provided by the school had closed for business.
Another level of complexity was the arrangement of the Guide. I was instructed to separate the Guide into sections for each underrepresented population. The motivation of the ODI was to provide a resource that would help their students acclimate to Harvard life by providing a slice of home—whatever that looked like.
For me this request felt uncomfortable, so I approached my contact for the project and suggested separating the sections by services. I will always ask questions, or point out problems or concerns. She listened to what I had to say, and we moved forward with their original plan for the book. She simply repeated their motivation for the piece, and that was enough for me. I’m an ally, and not the decision maker.
The staff in the ODI look to me for my expertise in layout and design, and they are frequently very happy with the results.
Purdue University’s 2017-18 Career Planning Handbook
Nan at CRM
From 1997- 2018 I worked for the same company. When I was hired in 1997, CRM was privately owned by Alan Weisman and the offices were in Evanston, IL.
He sold the company to Alloy, a publicly-held company headquartered in New York, and they moved our offices to Wacker Drive in Chicago.
In 2008, Alloy announced it would be closing CRM (then, Career Recruitment Media) and discontinuing its main product line—the Career Guides published for colleges and universities across the country.
Our publisher at that time, Tim Clancy, asked me to come aboard a stripped down version of CRM (renamed College Recruitment Media). I accepted and proceeded to set up my home office to continue work on the Guides.
Tim sold the company to some business associates in 2018 and they closed the company in January of 2019.
This lengthy explanation was necessary because my work for CRM is the pinnacle of my career to this point. I spent 21 years with various versions of the company, and I made the cut because a large portion of the work we did was coming across my desk.
Career Guides
We worked with around 50 schools each year from 2008-2019, as well as 400+ advertisers, to produce Career Guides for their campus career offices.
These were magazine format books, some 4C throughout and some with b/w interiors, most were saddle-stitched and some were perfect-bound.
Many of the Guides were pick-ups with edits from the previous year. New clients or an occasional redesign for an existing would happen and they were far more involved. In tandem, the advertising staff was selling recruitment advertising to support the production of the books. Some of our best-selling schools experienced some profit-sharing as well.
Purdue University CCO was one of our most-involved and treasured clients—every spring we met with them for a season kick-off lunch.
Purdue had CRM print 8,000 copies in 2017. It was my responsibility to provide an online edition as well. The PDF below has been created from the Online INDD file—resume pages have been rotated within the document.
I worked closely with Veronica Rahim in the production of the Handbook.
The cover was designed by a student on campus, and this was a regular practice throughout the years. Veronica had approached me when they wanted to transition from my designs to a student design model. Initially, she was going to have a design contest in which the students would design a cover for the Handbook, submit them for adjudication, and a winner would be selected. This is a common practice, but it is not great for the designer because it is work-for-hire—you have to design a piece (actually a challenging thing to do) without knowing if you have the gig.
I suggested that she might instead have a portfolio review of students’ existing work, and then select a designer to work with on the project based on their overall style. The student would not be distracted from their classwork, and she would be able to work one-on-one with the actual designer on the project. Additionally, she might receive more submissions since students just had to toss finished work into the ring for consideration. She put my suggestion into practice for the remaining seasons we worked together.
Advertising Review and Communication
The Kenosha Area Visitors Guide project requires your new designer to interface with your advertising clients, and that is familiar work for me. I received artwork in many different states…word Docs, PowerPoint Slides, all the way to ad agency print-ready. Each ad needed to be pre-flighted and confirmed received.
While the books were under development, our sales staff was busy selling ads and our office manager was busy processing the orders and assigning ad codes. All references to an ad in production started with the assigned code followed by the advertiser’s name and the ad size. I was notified once a day of the new list of codes, and I created a file structure for them:
Inside each ad folder was an “email” folder with all communications regarding the ad insertion. Nancy’s email with the code and notes about size, special placement (if any), insertions. Hector or Ann’s emails with special instructions or forwarded artwork, my confirmation to all parties.
I had ad templates for each of the ad sizes we offered (quarter, half horizontal, half vertical, and full page), and I placed the template and added information as I received it.
Artwork was either submitted directly to me or came to me via the sales person. I would pre-flight the ad, and either send an email with issues or questions, or I would email a confirmation proof like the one below for the ArcelorMittal ad on the back cover of Purdue’s Handbook.
You can see in the file name, special positions were noted (BC for back cover). I also maintained a spreadsheet for special positioning in the guides. It was kept in a shared drive for the sales people to reference.
I would send a proof as an email attachment. Here is the email with stakeholders copied:
Hector was one of CRM’s salespeople. Nancy Peterson was our office manager. She would print a copy of the proof for her files so our publisher, Tim Clancy, could review the ad during the paging process.
There were two insertions for this ad, and they were “17A” and “17B” because the ad order (17) had been “versioned” for each insertion. Purdue’s ad referenced the Big 10 (with Big 10 logo) and the Rose Hulman Institute of Tech insertion did not. There were multiple checks built into the system to be sure the correct ad went in the correct book.
NMP Ad Specifications Sheet
NMP maintains an ad specs sheet for publishing partners. It can easily be modified for use in the media kit for the Kenosha Area 2024 Visitors Guide.