Hi, welcome to Office Hours.
I'm Audrey and this is what I do at HarperCollins.
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As a marketing designer, my team will create advertisements and
different promotional items to get the message out about our books to the world.
And it's a pretty awesome job.
Because we have so much variety and so
many different things that we're working on every day.
We could be working on a print ad.
We could be working on social media, little animation.
It's always different and we're always growing with the trend.
Especially in children's book publishing,
we have to keep on top of the technology and make sure that what we're creating
is going to resonate with the younger audiences who are always going
to be ahead of us in technology and the newest app, and the newest craze.
When I was a senior in high school, I was applying to music conservatories
because I wanted to be a jazz saxophone performance major.
And my parents convinced me to still go for that but
to try to go to a school that had some other options.
Because I think they sort of knew me and they knew that I might change my mind,
which I did end up doing.
But from the start, I always knew that I wanted to be creative.
Jazz saxophone turned into creative writing, which turned into publishing.
And publishing is what led me to design and I fell in love and
I've been doing that ever since.
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So I remember exactly where I was, when my teacher gave me the Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe to read.
She just looked at me and she said,
I think that this is going to be really special to you.
I remember after I read that book,
that really just kind of opened up the floodgates and
I swear that I'm not just saying this because it's a Harper book.
There was something special about that moment.
That wardrobe opening up to a fantasy land.
It made me realize that books can open up these worlds not just to fantasy lands but
to wherever I wanted to go.
And after that I just started reading all the time, and I couldn't stop, and
I haven't stopped since.
As a designer, there are so many options that you could choose for
your career path.
But working in books gives so much variety to your day.
One day, my team will be working on a paper crown for
LeBron James's newest picture book, I Promise.
And the next day they might be working on a tote bag for Epic Reads,
our teen community.
>> Yeah, Jane, will you show the tote bag?
>> Yeah, so we're trying to do the Epic Reads tote bag and
we are selecting between a couple of different things.
So this is not canvas or anything, this is just the materials by the way.
>> Or a social carousel that explains and educates the school-to-prison pipeline.
It gives so much variety to the day, so
much variety to the type of design you might be working on.
All of these different book genres will have different sorts of styles and
it really challenges a designer and it keeps everything exciting and fresh.
One of the things that I think separates a good designer from a great
designer is their ability to communicate.
When I think of creative collaboration,
it reminds me of something that Adam Grant once said in his podcast,
Work Life, which is amazing and I recommend it for everyone.
It's not just about work life, it's about life and
relationships, and how people think and it's fascinating.
But anyways, he talks about creative collaboration.
And he actually likens it to jazz, which I love.
He says that when people are collaborating, he calls it burstiness.
Because when everybody is excited about something,
sometimes they'll just kind of burst out their ideas.
And then someone else might grow off of that and
someone else might grow off of that.
And it ends up somewhere that no one expected it to be.
And he likens it to jazz cuz it's sort of like an improvisation where someone
plays a note.
Another person plays another note on top of that.
And then it harmonizes together.
And creates this beautiful music that you might not have initially meant to play.
One of my co-workers might say I wanna do a tote bag.
One of my designers might come up with an illustrative idea for
how the best concept would be.
And then we present it and someone else says, but
this isn't quite in fitting with our audience.
And so we get more and more ideas.
And then at the end, we come up with this amazing tote bag that no one could have
come up with on their own.
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One of our biggest books in the upcoming season is called Amari and
The Night Brothers and we're doing a huge marketing push for that.
So yesterday I finished a little animated ad that went out to
the industry to get everyone excited that this book is coming out.
I was really excited about this ad because I was able to add a little bit
of animation which I think especially in an eBlast will always grab more attention.
And it also shows how invested we are in this book.
Once the collaboration process is over and our designs are out in the world.
It's really amazing to see how many people that they'll reach.
So sometimes when we create an image for Epic Reads, our social platform,
it could reach over 200,000 people, which is is amazing.
I've also designed these newspaper ads in the New York Times which reach even
more than that.
I designed a subway ad once.
And they don't really change those up so much.
So for months and almost a year afterwards, I would go into the subway and
I would just see my ad sitting there.
And it was just such an amazing experience.
If you want to be a designer in book publishing,
you should definitely focus on learning all of the Adobe Creative Suite programs.
One thing that I'm really pushing that my team learns is After Effects because
as the market is shifting more and more towards digital.
It's so important to have even just a slight bit of motion and
something to grab people's attention.
And then also make sure that you're looking around, you're observing.
You're taking inspiration from everything around you.
Design is everywhere.
An Instagram ad that really grabbed your attention or it could be the coffee
cup at your favorite café or even just the old type on the side of a building.
Anything that you can grab inspiration from is so important.
HarperCollins has been amazing.
Everyone here is super collaborative.
It's a really awesome team.
And even though I only worked in the office for
a few months before the pandemic hit and we all started working from home.
I feel like I've worked with all these people for so
long because they're such an amazing group.
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