Day in the Life (Remote): Claire Young
Design Assistant, Penguin Young Readers.
Day: Tuesday, October 14th, 2025
9:00 AM: Good morning! I’m feeling a little sleepy in the morning autumn air. I turned on the heat before work, so hopefully the apartment will warm up soon. 🙂 I love how cozy it feels to work from home in the colder months. I log on and check my email inbox, I see that one of the wonderful Managing Editors I work with, Emily Rodriguez, sent me a barcode. It’s for Do I Have to Wear a Coat? by Rachel Isadora. I was assigned to help convert it to a board book, and I need to route the 1st pass for this by tomorrow. So I thank Emily and place the barcode into my mechanical.
9:30 AM: I make myself an Earl Grey latte and listen to this as I answer and write some emails.
10:36 PM: Whew, that took longer than I expected! Part of assisting across 4 imprints means that I need to communicate my workload to people who don’t necessarily work closely with each other. So I send out a weekly email of everything I’m working on to all the art directors and managing editors I work with. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to compile that email and to make sure nothing was missed, but now I have my to-do list for the week! I usually try to send it out on Mondays, but yesterday I was busy getting some passes out, so it fell to today. 😅
At 11, I’m going to have a status meeting that’s over an hour long, so I’m going to make food now to eat in the meeting!
11:00 PM: I log onto the Putnam status meeting with my chicken and rice with furikake. I go to status meetings for all 4 of my imprints, but this is the longest and biggest one. I chime in if needed, but usually I don’t have many updates for these meetings, so I often eat brunch and work while listening. I email comments to an illustrator for a picture book, refine notes and make little art tweaks for a graphic novel, and start converting art to the correct color profile for another picture book.
12:10 PM: The status meeting ends. I keep working on the color conversions for a while, and then I take a little stretch break. I make myself another cup of tea and prep for my next meeting. On Tuesday afternoons, I have 3 check-in meetings, so it’s a day of making sure I have everything I need and getting work done in between.
1:00 PM: I have a check-in meeting with Eileen Savage, an Art Director I work with at Putnam/Paulsen imprints. We go over the books we’re working on together and we also briefly geek out about Taylor Swift and her new docuseries that was just announced. 🤭 I’m relatively new to being assigned my own books, so Eileen’s been super helpful with answering any questions I have. Today, I check in with her regarding art schedules.
1:30 PM: I’m working on an illustrated novel interior. The 2nd pass needs to route by Friday, and there are 197 comments that need to be inputted into the mechanical. Thankfully, most of it is small things like punctuation. I also place in the revised sketches that the artist sent in today! I export a PDF of those pages and send them to the Editorial team to review for next week.
2:30 PM: 142 comments to go! But that’s work for tomorrow. I take a small break and make myself a banana smoothie with cocoa powder, yogurt, and milk. 😋
2:50 PM: I switch gears back into the picture books I was working on earlier today, and route the picture book I was converting color profiles for. It’s a book called Ama’s Purse, and I’m very excited for it to come out because it’s one of the first picture books I got to work on! I did the cover hand lettering for it and it’s a Taiwanese American story, so it feels very special for me.
3:30 PM: I have a brief check-in meeting with my direct supervisor, Lily Malcolm. She helped me answer a question I had about insurance requirements for shipping original art.
After the meeting, I go back to tweaking the cover for the Rachel Isadora conversion. I’m about to meet with Marikka Tamura next, another Art Director and the original designer for the hardcover. So I want to make sure that she’s happy with how the files are looking before I route.
4:15 PM: I share my screen with Marikka, and we go over the cover together. We make a few minor tweaks, and she approves the cover to route. We chat a bit about snacks, holiday plans, and I say hi to her dog. After the meeting ends, I go ahead and export the PDFs and route 1st pass for the board book.
That felt like a productive day! Everything is on track and I’m happy with what I got done today. I’m working on putting up peel-and-stick wallpaper in my living room, so that’s what I will be doing today after work. I’ll also be going to watch a movie later to get out of the house. That’s really important to me with WFH days. ☺️ Signing off!
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