At Least I'm Not Digging Ditches
More than once recently I have felt like my head is going to pop off. We've been doing so many things here at
ADVANCE at a frenetic pace. We decided to redesign our entire Web site (including adding this blog) and go to full color in print (coupled with a major redesign). All at the exact same time. Although we're absolutely thrilled with the results (and hope you are, too), we were swamped around here to say the least.
I had a conversation with a friend in the art department that went like this:
Jen: "Hey, how's it going?"
Me: "You have no idea how busy we've been lately."
Jen: "Really? What's going on?"
Me: "Well, headshots alone have been a ton of work. We ask people for a headshot. They tell us they can get one in a few days. We follow up to ask for the headshot again. They send it. It's extremely tiny, and the DPI (that's dots per inch for the layperson) won't work for print. Then they say their daughter can probably take one with a digital camera. Then they have difficulty e-mailing it (it crashed their system). When we finally do get it, it's in the wrong format or I can't open it. Then I have to e-mail them again to tell them the newest version's not going to work either. Finally, we get the useable headshot, but it has involved literally 25 e-mails back-and-forth just to get it. Multiply that by the 20-something headshots we printed in our last issue, and it's literally 2 days of work ... just on headshots alone!"
Jen: "Ummm ... Wow. At least you're not digging ditches."
Needless to say, I like including headshots in the magazine (it's a little obsession of mine, I fully admit). (Check out the Oct. 22 issue. I think I counted more than 25). I think people like seeing of the folks who contribute. But like everything else, it requires a lot of work and a lot of time. I always joke that we should ask all 65,000 readers of the magazine to e-mail us a useable, 300-plus DPI headshot so we have a bank of headshots to use. But that's an editor's pipe dream.