My first long term job as a graphic designer was with Black Press from 2003 until 2008. In my time I worked in several capacities there and learned a lot from this experience. My main duty was building Display Advertising and preparing files for press. In addition to that job, I ended up working with the Sales team on many initiatives including helping to shape the Automotive Section and working on many key marketing materials in my tenure.

I started with time at Black Press working on-call and over time this developed into a near full-time position with the Peninsula News Review. after a year or so, I moved to the downtown office working with a few different two person sales team. I was still called on at times to sub at satellite offices to manage their newspaper productions independently while all this time still making various marketing materials for the Publishers and sales teams.

As I stated, I started with mainly Production Design, building new display ads, updating and editing current advertising and developing speculative advertising to be sold by the sales team, developing different concepts and functions that could serve the client. The challenge was creating ads that stood out and depending on many factors from size to colour range to the quality of materials I had to make the ads, varied greatly in difficulty. I was also given the opportunity to build supplemental advertising sections and was brought in to help launch a weekly automotive supplement to the weekend edition papers. Above is an example of one such section, the 2008 Auto Preview.

In some cases, I was able to develop a relationship where I would end up helping the clients, whether in-house or in a freelance capacity, to build different projects, such as materials from logos to even flyers. After being happy with a full page ad design for example, I ended up revising their logo as well as building their Christmas flyer for them. I also carried on developing ads for other publications for some clients as well.

In the time working with the Black Press’s Island News Group, I worked at three different offices from Sidney to Langford and the Downtown Victoria offices. I designed and built countless amounts of display ads, worked on several supplements, put together marketing and in-house materials. I worked with several great and challenging people in a high-energy, short deadline environment. I felt like it was an environment where I thrived as a designer, I fed off the energy and while it varied in mood, I feel that I contributed positively to those offices that I worked in, which is a goal I have with all positions that I step into.