Chronicles of Old New York

Explore 400 years of Manhattan history. Chronicles of Old New York was the first book I worked on with Museyon Guides. The first half of the book details stories in and around New York City's history. The second half of the book featured walking tours which would highlight eight areas and provide references to the first half of the book. The historic content was pretty awesome. Gun duels, old taverns in the city (that George Washington went to!), rich capitalists that built the city...it was nice to know more about the city I lived in.

This book was to be an off-shoot book (up till this point, Museyon had been making a series of books called Art+ and Film+). We decided that we wanted to have a different look, but still keep the looks aligned. We worked together to establish some base rules and some standard layouts and with the skeleton of the book created, we went about populating the pages.

Since this was the first time we worked together, I had to make sure their production files were all up to snuff. The owner had a decent eye for design and some previous production experience with magazines, but the files were a copy-and-paste mess. I showed them how to automate the more menial tasks, like converting folders of images to CMYK, paragraph/character styles and indexing (because humans have better things to do!) They had me pretty involved in the design and photo selection process which I quite enjoyed.

Epilogue: We worked really well together and this book actually became their best selling book which lead to them doing more in the Chronicles series (which meant more work for me! Yeah!). They eventually asked me to do more in the series, but that took some time. In the meantime, they asked me to layout a fashion book.