Day in the Life (In-Office): Jon Simeon
Assistant Designer, Charlesbridge
Day: Friday, September 16, 2022
9:00-10:00 AM
It’s a day in the office—and work has been crazy with proofing for the past few weeks as all my books for this frontlist season just ended up back-to-back on the span.
I don’t usually go in on Fridays, but the circumstances have kind of made it a necessity to go in-office.
First thing I do is email. I’m looking for art corrections that we were expecting for one of the books I’ve been working on. The proofs for it came last week and we realized there were a lot of color problems stemming from how the illustrator made the art. She’s been at work to help me fix these issues but is still going to take some effort on my part to prep them for printing.
I spy with my little eye that art for the next season is in my inbox and needs to be placed! Two artists that I’ve been working with decided to finish their work early—yay? It’s great to have the art early, but I literally have no mental bandwidth to work on those at the moment.
I review the proofs of the book I came in to look at with an editor—and make plans with the Production manager on how we want to proceed with the book.
10:00-11:00 AM
I have a standing meeting with another editor about a long-format non-fiction book that we’re working on. It’s got a lot of moving parts and we meet every week to communicate our progress.
This meeting is a good break from the impending chaos.
11:00-3:00 PM
A lot is happening, and I’ve touched and worked on so many books this morning that it’s a little disorienting, but there’s no time to dilly-dally. I need to prep the art corrections.
This book, in particular, is a weird one, it’s a two-color book and the process is new-ish to me, and because of that, I’ve made a couple of mistakes when working with the artist. I spend the next few hours separating the color channels in the artwork and making sure everything has no color in it. The corrections the illustrator made did help out, but there’s still a lot of work I need to make sure happens on my end.
At the same time, the editor working on this book is getting last-minute text changes from the author—oof!
3:00-5:00 PM
The time has come for Production to check the files, and… oh no they found color somewhere!
The last couple of hours become a sort of race against the clock to find out why this is happening, make that correction, and get it through the preflight check process again.
By some miracle, it all manages to happen just a little after 5 pm!
5:30 PM
Time to organize the files for the printer and get them uploaded!
Off it goes. And, I write an email to let the Production team know I’ve sent instructions for the printer. I leave the computer running with the upload in progress, hoping in the back of my mind that nothing goes wrong over the weekend.
