C Smith Studios
Creative Director
Being the Creative Director on this job was an incredibly satisfying experience, as I was helping the man known as “Cincinnati’s Personal Photographer” to preserve his professional legacy. I was deeply honored to be a part of helping this octogenarian photographer to create a compendium of six volumes encompassing the last 65 years of Cincinnati’s Black history. The work to publish this important piece of Cincinnati’s story was one of my most rewarding jobs.
Duties & Responsibilities
I designed the book using Adobe InDesign. I created the overall aesthetic, chose fonts, colors, chose the paper stock, etc.
As this was a six volume set, it was important to be able to create continuity between volumes and keep the designers on brand. I designed the style guide for the brand.
There were literally thousands of images for the book, and they had to be easy to locate. I designed a simple FileMaker database and had it designate each image a unique number. The images were catalogued by which book they belonged in and linked to the Google Drive where the actual images were stored.
I designed a FileMaker database relating the job title and the average hourly rate for that job to the overall project budget. That made it easy to know what rate to pay contractors, allot hours to each task, and know how much they were costing us, giving us a way to report it to the investors.