The Futility Infielder

Something for the Kids

If you're reading this, you've probably noticed the relative infrequency of my posts lately as well as my bitching about how little time I've had to write here. As you would suspect, these two situations are not unrelated. For the past three months or so I've been engrossed in various phases of my two biggest projects of the year, both for the same client, the World Almanac Group. I'm the Creative Director for the World Almanac for Kids 2003 book, just as I was last year, designing and producing the cover and overseeing the production of a 336-page full-color book. I'm also designing the cover of the 2003 World Almanac and Book of Facts 2003.

This year, significant portions of both processes overlapped considerably (especially when accompanied by the various promotional items which go along with each book) somewhat to the detriment of my sanity. We're not here to get into that; there's a baseball angle too. But before I explain it, I'd better back up a bit.

For several years, the graphic design studio where I work (Bill SMITH STUDIO) has produced a children's version of the World Almanac annual reference book. It's gone from being a rather dry, pulpy knockoff of the adult book to a splashy, bouncy, colorful affair, and as it's done so it's increased it sales. In the three years I've been involved, the book's popularity (New York Times Top Ten Bestseller) and increased competition have allowed us to spend more money, particularly on the cover. For a guy like me, that's like handing over the keys to the candy store.

And it's a kid-in-a-candy-store mentality I've taken into those covers, with regards to color, content, and even dimension. We use a special six-color printing process which lets us produce a broader range of bright colors than normal CMYK (four-color) printing--those candy oranges and greens--and we emboss it for texture. In addition to a handful of pictures which sample the book's content, we also put a celebrity on the cover, and under my regime, the celebrities have been athletes, ones that we hope will appeal to kids. For the 2002 version, it was Venus Williams, and this year, Sammy Sosa.

Our discussion about who to put on the cover started the process off last November. Before presenting to the client, I polled my friends with a few suggestions, offering up Derek Jeter as my top choice (wide appeal to both boys and girls in the 9-12 age range, I argued), but willing to mount a case for any one of a number of ballplayers. Other names came up as well, both in our poll and in discussion with the client--A-Rod, Ichiro, and Barry Bonds, most prominently, and while I could come up with pros for each one, I could recite the snippy cons as well.

In both contexts, when the name Sammy Sosa came up the room seemingly lit up. Bonds may have been breaking records left and right last year, but Sosa's four straight monster years and the emergence of his public persona in that time have given him a much broader appeal, particularly among kids. And while I can't speak for my clients, fresh in my mind was the post-September 11 Major League Baseball promo with Sosa carrying the small American Flag around the bases after a home run--a resonant image from a sensitive time (the actual occasion was Sosa's 59th homer on Sept. 28, the first home game the Cubs played after the attack). I didn't want to refer specifically to September 11 (I already got my fill of that last time around), but I felt that a ballplayer who did his share of reaching out in the wake of such traumatic events was the kind of symbol we wanted (in that respect, Jeter, Mike Piazza, or John Franco would have made fine choices as well). It helped that I had a life-long Chicago Cubs fan sitting across the table from me when the deal went down.

So here it is, the cover of the 2003 World Almanac for Kids, starring Sammy Sosa. I'm quite proud of it and I look forward to seeing the printed product (the final pages of the book went to press last week). Sosa isn't the only baseball player prominently featured in the book; the famous Honus Wagner T-206 baseball card will be on the book's inside front cover and within one of the chapters, and pictures of players like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Hank Aaron, Randy Johnson, and Barry Bonds are also featured. And as for Bonds, he'll just have to settle for being on the preliminary version of the adult 2003 cover. Who knows if some other slugger will earn his way on by summer's end?

That the Kids book went off to press means that I can breathe a huge sigh of relief, because suddenly I should get a large part of my life back, including more time to spend on this site. I've actually spent a fair amount of time *trying* to write here over the last three months, but short attention spans, inability to take long lunch breaks, and a fear of Monitor Tan have held me back like a sore hammy. But the one-post-a-week season ends today (and I thank my readers for checking in more often than that even in the face of my infrequency). Starting now, I'm back in the saddle again.