Every year for the past 6 years the Cardinals and Ice Mountain Water give away a large team poster in September. The first two years they used mostly my pictures and had a designer create the poster, but in 2003 I was able to talk them into letting me design the whole thing! The best part about that was that now all of the pictures would be mine and luckily they liked my design better than the past two. We agreed on what I thought was a fair price for photo usage and design and everyone loved the poster. The only problem was for 2004 I had to make it look different than 2003, so enter my wife Valerie. As I was trying to come up with a new concept she suggested that I make the whole background photo red to go along with the Cardinals' 2004 slogan "Red Means Go", which worked out great.
The only problem with designing a team poster is roster changes. It seems that every year we get close to the final approval and the team makes a trade or calls someone up from the minors. This gets real frustrating because I put the players in numerical order and if I have to make a change it could take a couple of hours to move all of the players around. Which brings me to yesterday. I emailed a lo-res version to the Marketing department for approval and other than making a minor change everyone was pleased. I went to the ballpark to get ready for the game and I see minor league outfielder Timo Perez taking batting practice! Why?! Who did we send down?
Well, they sent down Brad Thompson which probably means nothing if anyone is actually here reading this but for me it means that I have to remove player number 48 and put in player number 19. Why couldn't Perez be number 49 so I could just swap them out. I now need to move 16 players around to make room for the new one. Well, The file has 60 layers and is about 1 gigabyte in size, so it will take me a while. So I am going to see if I can leave it as is with Thompson in place and Perez off of the poster because Thompson was on the Opening Day roster and will be back in two weeks any way with the September call-ups. I just have to hope that nobody in Marketing is a big Timo Perez fan!
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