Newspaper Publishing

My Role: Contributions include art direction; project management; concepts; staff and resource management; hands-on design; budgeting.

Notes: This 32-page, weekly newspaper was distributed throughout NY, NJ, and CT and specialized in local area job listings. The company was well ahead of the technology boom that was coming in the next ten years as their parent company, The National Employment Network, had built an operational database of resumes that could match qualified candidates with jobs as early as 1991.

The paper itself featured government and private sector jobs as well as relevant articles written by freelance and professional writers. While we weren't working with a huge budget, we were able to do quite a bit of bartering. Published authors allowed us to use relevant excerpts from their books as articles in the paper. For them, they received free advertising and possibly the sale of more books.

We shot a lot of our own photography, but keep in mind that this was pre-digital, so it was a lot more work and money to get things turned around as quickly as you can today.

Not having the understanding of print that I do today, I regularly found myself frustrated with the poor registration that would occur when we tried to use color in ways that required tight registration. Obviously, newspaper printing at that time was not cut out for the same type of design that would be used in a high end glossy magazine. More recently, technology has made some amazing advances in this area as proven by papers like USA Today.

In addition to directing the entire design of the newspaper, my staff and I were also responsible for designing all of the display ads including working with sales to develop copy.

Sales reps frequently had my group design and complete ads in order to sell the space to advertisers. We joked that we should be receiving commission since the more that this method worked, the more reps requested it.