I’m excited to share with you a just completed project: the Laguna Foundation’s first 5-year Strategic Plan.

Staff and board members met many times with stakeholders, partners and volunteers to develop and refine their goals. Then they brought me on board to create the brochure — I provided writing, editing, design, illustration and project management services.

I loved partnering with them in this process — they’re a wonderful organization doing great work in Sonoma County!

You can download a copy of the Strategic Plan here: Laguna Foundation Strategic Plan 2017-2021

Or download a copy from their website.

Learn more about the Laguna Foundation’s work on restoration, conservation, citizen science and education.

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The illustrations needed to be done in watercolor, have editable layers, and several rounds of revision. There just wasn’t the budget for ‘paint on paper’ illustrations, so I needed a way to reproduce the watercolor process digitally*, with editable layers.  (Shout out to Zoe Piel: her video tutorials filled in some gaps for me).

I loved helping Francis and Byron with their project! It was such an interesting challenge to convey the requested information – in particular, for the “cat/birds” illustration, we tried portraying this many different ways.  If you need help with a project, I’d love to talk to you about it – maybe it’s illustration for a book, or signage for parks or museums, or presentation materials, or…?

Although many different species of birds may be singing in a field, only members of the same species listen.

In nature, only the “correct” receivers act on “messages” received, such as pollen. All others discard or ignore the message.

Each fish in a school participates in group movements and behaviors when in contact with others, yet can also exist independently, if less efficiently.

Trees are inherently structured: no leaf connects directly to another. Instead, flows are organized through trunks, limbs, and branches.

The movement of the neighborhood cat sets off “alarms” in a number of “sensor devices” (birds). A human observer may correlate information from multiple senses and understand what is taking place.

* Tip: One thing to watch out for with this method is that your Total Ink Coverage (TIC) doesn’t exceed the substrate limits. With multiple layers, you can easily go way over what it should be: from 240 – 340% depending on the substrate (newsprint, coated magazine stock, etc.). Here’s more about total ink coverage. Talk to your printer before you start designing a print job so you can get these types of job parameters defined before you do any work.

Note -  copyright symbol and credit/source are placed on images so that when sharing photos, there a link back to the originator. It’s easy to do this in Preview or Photoshop.

Proof several times: first at the end of the copy writing stage, then at the design stage, and finally again before the job is sent to the printer or a website goes ‘live’. Before any layout begins, it’s crucial to do a thorough proofing job. Otherwise you’re laying out incorrect data which will have to be redone — a waste of time/budget.

Always do a final proof, no matter how many times you’ve looked at it. Here’s a memorable final proof ‘fail‘: a cost-cutting decision was made to skip the final proofread. What no one noticed was that 2 digits in the phone number had been transposed. When customers dialed the number, an adult video store answered instead of the client’s business. The client was embarrassed and mad, the entire press run had to be redone, and the project manager’s reputation and bank account were worse for wear. Two hours of  proofreading would have prevented all that.

It’s very helpful to have an uninvolved third party to do the final proofread. Even if you’re a great proofer, once you’ve worked on a job for a while, you lose your ability to see any errors. And you can’t assume that your client will catch them.

7 tips for proofing well:

1. Finish writing and editing before you start proofing. Although tempting, proofing is not another opportunity to write and edit.

2. Know your client’s styles and preferences.

3. Eliminate distractions so you can focus. Reading from the end of the page to the beginning can help overcome familiarity.

4. Label each printout with date and time.

5. Make changes in red pen.

6. Proof multiple times for various aspects:
• Words and meaning.
• Numbers and dollar amounts.
• Consistency: headings, subheadings, body – treatments, capitalization, styles.
• Style changes: e.g., forgetting the first or last letter in a word when changing to bold.
• Line breaks: hyphenation, bad breaks, widows, orphans.
• Formats, margins, rules, fonts, extra spaces, commas, periods.
• Graphics: e.g., watch for backward text and other problems in flopped photos.
• Headers and footers.
• Call phone numbers and try website addresses.

7.  Use resources to ensure your accuracy:
• Dictionaries.
• Specialized dictionaries: reverse, visual, translation, symbolism, hierarchies, idioms/slang, phrasal verbs, technical/terminology (of a specific field).
• Reference manuals: e.g., The Gregg Reference Manual, The Elements of Style, The Chicago Manual of Style, etc.)
• Internet.

Proofreader’s Marks

The following list of Proofreader’s Marks is taken from figure 2.6 of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style Online.

Portions of this post came from Julie Prime who is superb in all things written, edited or proofed.

It presents the photographs and commentary of Kael Alford, and Thorne Anderson, two American-trained photojournalists who documented the impact and aftermath of the US-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in the Spring of 2003.

They made these photographs during a two-year span that began in the months leading up to the invasion and continued into the period when armed militias emerged to challenge the coalition forces and, later, the new central Iraqi government.

The full exhibit contains 50 or so images. These images and more are included in their book “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.”

Even though I knew that what we see in the American press has been sanitized – one has to read European papers to get a more complete story – I was deeply moved by the photographs – both the people in them and the courage and heart of the photo-journalists to go to these dangerous places and take them. I hope everyone sees them and reflects on what a war truly is – on the ground, for invaded and invader.

Photojournalism like Eye Level In Iraq helps us enormously. It’s not easy or simple or pretty. But if you’re an American, you need to see the whole story. I hope you get to.

PS: If you can’t make it to San Francisco, at least take a look at Kael Alford’s narrated multi-media presentation: Windows On Iraq.

PPS: When we invaded Iraq in 2003, the general political time frame of the war given at the time was that Americans would be on the ground in Iraq for weeks or a few months. My prediction at the time was that Americans would be at war with Iraqis for at least 10 years, and that it would be 70 years or so (that is, 2073) before Iraqis would recover. In other words, they would essentially lose several generations to the effects and trauma of this war. These were among the reasons why I and so many others worldwide protested against the US-led invasion of Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003.

The more I learn and read about our own civil war and how long emancipation has taken to truly be enacted, I am now revising my estimate of how long it will take Iraq to recover from the horror and immense suffering they have had to go through. More likely it will be 150-160 years from now. That is, the year 2163 or thereabouts. Will we be there helping the Iraqi society recover for that long? Somehow I doubt it. Careful planning and funding of every phase – including reconstruction — was notably, shockingly, absent in the US-led coalition’s war in Iraq. (A good overview of this is presented in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 by Thomas E. Ricks).

Why is it important to make predictions? I feel it is the duty of every citizen to learn, read, educate oneself, make an educated guess, and communicate that respectfully in a public forum. As time goes by, you evaluate the results and update your base of knowledge accordingly. As one gets older, one hopefully gets wiser.

Our current society skews heavily towards a warrior culture. The drums of war begin to beat and a glorious vision is painted. The truth and reality is far different and far more complicated. Our society needs far more people who will pause to reflect and consider the long term consequences, who have studied history and are committed to not repeating our mistakes.