Friday, April 26, 2013

…on fire …and gasoline

once upon a time…

the bastard ran an art department…

and then he didn't.

you'd think that would be the end of the story but it was the beginning…

you see…

instead of going to hell…

it got better.

the bastard got some direction…

became part of something better…

and we fixed the book.

then we took the bigger book and made it better a year later.

and it was damn good.

these last few months presented a greater challenge to our little team of professionals.

one of the company's other properties needed a new look…

and their crew lacked the skills to pay that bill…

so it fell to us to build, as the clipper referred to this redesign as, "the little dream"

we started building the bike book which seemed to have not seen a new look since 1983 back after the gun show.

then we all went back to the business of our killing stuff books for a bit and we waited for the word…

which came right as I was to go on vacay to the elephants graveyard.

the bastard was to be the mechanic again…

as he was the mechanic that kept killing stuff monthly looking tight when the ideas were all done and the precision work had to be done.

"your layout will be the king", he said and with it, we built a great book.

I built the king for killing stuff with aspirations as well and aside from a few ad size cock ups, it all snaps to grid.

so when I got back from the land of hanging chads…

I built the bike book in earnest so that we could all begin the journey we all began two weeks ago.

and in all of my days of building templates…

and redesigning magazines…

never has something I've done been more hard won…

never have I had this level of pride of ownership…

of job satisfaction.

and I think to myself…

I'm a lucky man.

I'm lucky that the heads of state wanted me to stay on board more so than the toddler…

yeah…

up yours toddler. I get to have late nights with the voices thanks to you but I get to work on better things for it. fuck you. when I sleep, I get the rest of the just knowing where you landed. and I get to do better stuff than when I was in your shop.

I could have missed out on all of this if it all went your way.

I'm lucky that I got to work on something this cool.

I look forward to the finished product and hope to god the muppets we leave this with don't change too much after we hand them back the keys.

we've all been down this road too long to let the unskilled wrecked our good works

vroom

frikkin

vroom

—the bastard





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