Here’s a flea market find from earlier this summer : An old photo of a kid who probably grew up to become a Beastie Boy. I bought this for a dollar.
It’s been three months since my last update, and four months since the post in which I declared I was attempting to become a more active blogger. A disappointing performance, to be sure, but I have a good reason for my fumble: Eight entries into my hottest, longest-running blogging streak ever, my life took an abrupt and very serious turn when I unexpectedly lost my job at Men’s Journal.
I don’t want to comment on the matter here, but I’ll share a remark that a magazine veteran and design hero of mine made to me a few days after I had the rug pulled out from under me: “You’ve just joined an exclusive and prestigious club of talented people fired without merit by Jann Wenner. You should consider yourself lucky.” (Another respected magazine vet later added, “Actually, the club’s not so exclusive anymore. It’s getting bigger all the time.”)
I’ve faced unemployment once before in my design career: In October of 2008, I was a victim of company-wide layoffs at Greenspun Media Group, and lost my job as Art Director of Las Vegas Weekly after holding the position for more than six years. And as if it wasn’t bad enough to be unemployed during the worst period in our nation’s economy since the Great Depression, this happened to me two weeks after buying my first house. It was a very dark and stressful experience to be a newly unemployed, first-time homeowner in a town with virtually no publishing industry to begin with, let alone open positions to fill. And I wasn’t really on anyone’s radar outside of Las Vegas.
I sent out applications all over the country every week for months, but never received any interest. It was a dire time. I’d stay up until 6 or 7 in the morning working on my portfolio and website, sleep for five or six hours, then get up and work on it again. By late December, I was wondering if I’d have to change careers just to find employment.
Luckily I landed a job in Seattle — a city I’d never been to before — and started working again five months after I lost my job. For the next two years, I was the art director of Seattle Met. And then I got the offer to go to New York …
This time around, my period of unemployment was — I’m so relieved and proud to say — about as far removed from my prior experience as you could hope to get. Beginning just a couple days after losing my job, my days were filled with meetings at all the big publishing companies in Manhattan. I was really motivated by the all support and encouragement I received from my peers in the magazine world, and from veterans I was meeting for the first time. When I wasn’t out interviewing or at home polishing up my iPad portfolio, I even managed to squeeze in a little freelance work for my friend Mindy Benham at Orange Coast magazine. And exactly two weeks after losing my job at Men’s Journal, I accepted the Design Director position at Runner’s World.
All in all, my period of unemployment was an utterly uplifting experience. And I’m really, really lucky to be able to say that.
Joining Runner’s World meant working in Emmaus, PA — 85 miles from my apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. That’s the view from my bedroom window there — that’s One World Trade Center being constructed in the background. As much as I loved living in New York City, I didn’t see commuting as an option. So without hesitation, my girlfriend and I decided we had to move again — just 16 months after we moved to NYC from Seattle — to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
Our house-hunting trips were thrilling. We didn’t know the area at all, so we were immediately struck by the vibrant green grass and trees, the richly colored soil, and the mixture of new and really, really old. I’m a huge fan of old farmhouses, which are plentiful here. And I love the look of old, weathered barns, which are now among my favorite things to photograph. Here’s something I snapped between rental viewings:
We saw rentals three times the size of our apartment in New York, for roughly one-third the cost. We considered this 1800s stone farmhouse, but decided to pass because it had no central AC:
In the end we chose to rent a newer townhouse with all the space that we craved in New York, in a secluded little area across the street from a little park with a river, and with a backyard that leads into a small patch of woods. It’s about four miles from my new office at Runner’s World — less than two hours from New York City, and about an hour from Philadelphia. I feel very fortunate for the way things turned out.
My first issue as Design Director of Runner’s World is in stores now, and I’m currently closing my second issue. In my next post — which I’ll try to put up within a few days, to try and resume the blogging streak I was on earlier this year — I’ll share some new Runner’s World pages and concept sketches.
