Name: Patricia Palao
Title: Promotions Designer

What is your educational background and how do you feel it has helped prepare you for the publishing industry?
I graduated from Fordham University with a degree in Business Administration and a concentration on Marketing. I was drawn to Marketing because it’s a field that focuses on communication between organizations and the general public. Because of my interest in the design aspect of Marketing, I began taking Graphic Design courses at The School of Visual Arts in 2004. I think both marketing and design play a significant role in publishing. While nothing can replace a book’s valuable content, proper marketing and strong design can raise a book’s profile.

How long have you been working here?
Five years.

What does your job entail?
I design printed material such as catalogs, brochures, and postcards. I create the images for promotional giveaways such as notepads, mugs, and pens. I prepare web and e-mail graphics such as banners, buttons, and headers.

Can you describe the basic day-to-day responsibilities of a promotions designer?
Because of the different items I design, my days vary depending on deadlines. Some days are focused on time-sensitive e-mails revolving around a current event. Some days are focused on meeting ad deadlines. Most days involve a back and forth between myself and the marketing associates regarding the progress of their different projects.

Which is more important: selling a design or design skills? Why?
I think they go hand in hand. Being able to “sell a design” means having well-executed strong concepts. Being able to fully realize these concepts stems from design skills.

What is your process for conceptualizing an idea and developing a design out of it?
First I think of the target audience and what message we want to send. After that, it’s a matter of brainstorming and piecing together visual elements to properly convey the message.

Where do you find your inspiration? What are some models that you use as a guide?
Visual inspiration can be found everywhere — even in non-visual things. I find mine in books, films, music, concerts, art exhibitions, illustrations, images I see in magazines and websites, blogs, old photos, day trips, and on and on.

What has been your favorite project or type of project?
My favorite type of project is one that involves strong collaboration and focused ideas. For Darwin’s 200th birthday, I worked with a team of marketers to create a Darwin-centric campaign. This allowed for a lot of creativity and fun designs.

What does Cambridge mean/signify for you and what is the message that you try to put across through your work?
I support Cambridge’s mission of advancing learning. It’s a distinguished company that remains relevant today and I hope that my work properly conveys this image.

For a person wanting a career in promotional design, how would you recommend they proceed?
Always be learning. Take design courses. The Internet is a valuable source of information — full of great design blogs and on-line tutorials. Give yourself projects to brush up your skills. Read books. Talk to people and learn from your friends.

Is there anyone that you look up to and model yourself on?
I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by strong, confident, and savvy women in my family. Professionally, I hope to emulate my Aunt Debbie’s career path. Having started out as a business major herself (Accounting), she eventually turned her attention to developing her design skills and now runs her own business. She creates gorgeous pieces of furniture, travels to seek inspiration, gives her time and skills to charitable organizations, and speaks at various learning institutions to guide budding designers.

What is the best advice you have ever been given?
Don’t over-think. Also, my dad reminds me from time to time that as long as you’re constantly moving, learning, and growing, then you’re OK. It’s not unlike an old Chinese proverb I once read: “Do not fear going forward slowly; only fear standing still.”

Do you have any thoughts on how to re-invigorate the design community to improve our general visual environment?
I think there’s a great sense of learning and collaboration within the design community. There’s a mutual respect and a consciousness of what others are doing. I very much admire the current movement of design for social change and hope one day to contribute in an even bigger way to this industry.

With this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, scholar Stuart Ferguson puts the unique legacy of Ravenna in context – and calls Ravenna in Late Antiquity “fascinating and dense” – “both a narrative history of the city’s ruling elites and a survey of its architectural and artistic treasures. . . . [treasures] worth pausing over.”

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Wall Street Journal, 4/24/2010

Where Kings and Emperors Once Lived

By STUART FERGUSON

Ravenna, along Italy’s northeast coast, is in many ways a typically modern city, with tourist-welcoming hotels, outdoor cafés, Vespas zipping by and, a few miles away, populous beaches that ease their way down into the Adriatic Sea. But it is also a place with a fabled imperial history and a host of literary resonances: Boccaccio lived in Ravenna in the mid-14th century; Dante wrote the “Divine Comedy” there and is buried alongside one of the city’s churches; and Byron spent a memorable several months in Ravenna in 1820-21 (with a mistress, naturally) while he composed parts of “Don Juan,” his mock-epic about daring deeds and lost loves. Oscar Wilde later paid tribute to the city: “Mighty thy name when Rome’s lean eagles flew . . . [but now] in ruined loveliness thou liest dead.”

In fact, Ravenna’s heyday— roughly the fifth century to the eighth—is anything but dead. It is alive in an array of churches, basilicas, baptisteries and tombs, many with evocative images on their surfaces and interiors. Other periods make themselves present in Ravenna, too. There are Roman ruins that reach back to the days of the republic and city gates from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—and a 15th-century castle from the era of Venetian rule.

Ravenna was once the home of emperors, kings and viceroys, many of whom tried to leave behind a material legacy as grand as their aspirations to political glory. Poised between West and East, the city served as a major outpost for two empires: those of Rome and Byzantium. “Ravenna in Late Antiquity,” by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, is both a narrative history of the city’s ruling elites and a survey of its architectural and artistic treasures.

These treasures are worth pausing over. Staring down from the walls of the Basilica of San Vitale, for instance, are portraits in stone and glass tesserae of several figures. The Byzantine ruler Justinian (483-535) is shown wearing a halo and, well below, startling red and purple shoes; his archbishop Maximimian is wrapped in a white tunic and gold vestment, with the pallium draped over his shoulders, his “blazing blue eyes” staring from a “lean, intense face,” as Ms. Deliyannis puts it; the Empress Theodora, for her part, stands among eunuchs and female attendants holding a gem-encrusted chalice. No visitor to the basilica in the early sixth century, peering up at such august notables, would have any doubts about who was in charge, in the earthly realm at least.

In fact, Justinian and Theodora never lived in Ravenna—and apparently never visited. But many other rulers made the city their home. For example: the Western Roman Emperor Honorius, who moved the seat of government there in 402; the Visigoth kings, who swooped down from the north in the fifth century and controlled, for a time, most of the Italian peninsula; and the so-called exarchs—the viceroys who governed Italy from Ravenna on behalf of the Byzantine emperor well into the eighth century, before the Franks and Lombards arrived from Gaul and the Danube Valley and the city became more a repository of architectural fragments than a thriving capital.

Keep reading at The Wall Street Journal Book Review > > >

Eight Questions for William Wallace

When I was researching and writing A Journey into Michelangelo’s Rome, I read thousands and thousands of pages — books, articles, interviews, journals — and one name kept popping up in my research, that of Dr. William Wallace.

Dr. Wallace, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the world’s foremost experts on Michelangelo — a specialty which takes him to Italy frequently.  He has just published a new biography, Michelangelo: the Artist, the Man, and his Times.  It is delightfully readable and creates a fuller, more intimate portrait of the Renaissance genius.

AKN: You have devoted most of your academic research to the study of Michelangelo.  How did you come to choose him as your subject?

William Wallace: I first traveled to Italy as a junior in college.  I was an art history major, but on that three-week trip I realized “this is it!”  I had read The Agony and the Ecstasy.  I thought it was a pretty good read.  But on that first trip I had that experience that so many people have when traveling in Italy.  No matter how often great works of art are reproduced, that moment when you walk into the Sistine Chapel for the first time is so dramatically different.  My breath was taken away.

AKN: Italy draws millions of visitors each year in large part because of the artistic treasures there. What is it about the Italian Renaissance, in particular, that resonates with travelers and art-lovers around the world?

William Wallace: First of all, Italy has a wonderful climate, good food, and engaging people.   That’s part of the draw.  But the Renaissance, in scholarly terms, is “early modern.”  The institutions and way of life are recognizably modern. Their banking, their politics, their basic ways of life aren’t so foreign that most Westerners recognize them without much work.  And Renaissance Italy was a region of vast wealth, and there was a coincidence of tremendous talent and tremendous wealth which transformed cities like Florence into what we see now — an outdoor museum.

When we travel we go away to see the familiar — the David, for example.  We’ve all seen images of it, so we go to Florence to see it in person.  But while we are there, we also experience the unfamiliar.  So many people visit the Academy, where Michelangelo’s David is, and when they return they say, “I went expecting to love the David, and I did.  But I was even more impressed by Michelangelo’s slaves.”  The familiar introduces us to the unfamiliar in a way that is both challenging and comforting.

Keep reading at The Gypsy’s Guide >>

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Part X: The Tomb of Julius II

Click here to listen to Wallace describe the tomb of Julius II.

This week, I’m posting a little early. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone!

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Part IX: The Florentine Pieta

Click HERE to hear Wallace discuss Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta.

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Part VIII: The Roman Campidoglio Plaza

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Part VII: The Laurentian Library Staircase

CLICK HERE to hear Wallace speak about Michelangelo the architect, and his work on the Laurentian Library stairs.

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Part VI: The Delphic Sibyl

Click HERE to hear Wallace discuss the Sistine Chapel’s Delphic Sibyl.