At the time I started this project, I thought existing usage guidelines would be provided for me to work with, redesign, or update as necessary, with the new logo suites. To my surprise, however, discovered that no such usage guidelines existed. This was reflected in the previously disparate Houghton logos that existed across the various business units at the time, as outlined below:
The goal was to start with a clean slate, to develop a clean suite of logos across all the business units, and then provide the usage guidelines for implementation. Because this seemed too possible a task, a time element was added—the usage document and the cohesive logo suites had to be created over the course of four days, in order to be ready for the upcoming Education conference season. Keep in mind, design studios typically have months to prepare a usage document, with multiple versions and revisions as every particular usage is considered, dozens of people are consulted and have input, and the document is fine tuned. I had four days between go-ahead and final delivery of both the usage document and all the final files. And two of those days were around my regular day job as the Design Director for Great Source. The Corporate Communications department was garnering heat from al the divisions, which needed to have the usage guidelines, and more importantly the logos themselves, in time to get large convention-sized banners created. And, fool that I am, I hesitate to say “die”, even when the bullet’s gone clean through the cerebellum.
So, I pulled all my experience in corporate usage documentation, which had for previous years been on the user-end, rather than the provider end. Corporate entities from United Healthcare to Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), among others, had provided me with extensive usage guidelines for products I’ve produced for previous employers. And, for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on at the time, I‘d collected and filed them all. Now I pulled them all out and spread them out in my Boston home office to try and determine what would be needed for the HMH Usage Guideline document.
I fully expected that the simple, rough document I put together would be heavily edited and reworked, But I was pleasantly surprised when it came back with minor structural edits—the content that I had written outlining usage was virtually unchanged. With great attention to detail, but also under intense time constraints, I worked personally with Corporate Communications to fine tune the final documentation.
See, in working through this process and needing to turn on a dime, I had taken on the project myself. In fact, I had all the files on my personal laptop, ad only there (though backed up on a backup drive) ready at any and every point to turn them over to another design house of Corporate Communications choosing. But that call never came.
I worked on them over a final weekend, after which I was to attend one of the first conferences of the season, in Florida. So it was that I found myself making the final changes to the Usage document at Logan Airport at 5am, paying for WiFi internet access to upload the final files to the corporate server for distribution to all the business units. I was literally the last one to board the plane, as it required me to close my laptop and break the WiFi connection, and I wanted all the files uploaded to the server for use.
It was an exercise in dedication. Later, the corporate communications director I’d been working with promised to bring me out for a drink in Boston, which never materialized in the days before I left HMH. But all significant exercises require breaking at least a little sweat.
All told, I developed and prepared multiple files (for usages from everything from conference banners to book spines)for multiple business units, including Corporate, School division, Religion division, Trade and Reference division, Learning Technology, International, Supplemental division (of which Great Source was a part), Holt McDougal, and Riverside. These had to be created in the three standard PMS colors, Black, white and PMS 293, and had to be provide in .ai (illustrator) .pdf (Acrobat) and .eps formats. Later, corporate asked me to take away all the editable .ai versions.
Below are a very few sample pages.
Afterword: These are indeed pages from the corporate usage guidelines for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, used through 2008. However, I recently learned that this document was revised and replaced with one that was (as anticipated) outsourced to an external design house, which was paid a number with several more zeroes than I recieved to produce it. It's a pretty thing, with additional an PMS color palette, developed to complement the corporate approved colors.
But I'll bet they didn't do it in four days, in their pajamas. So there.
Then again, I'll bet they got their beer.
Logo production under the gun ain't for pansies.
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