5 YEARS OF GAUGE MAGAZINE DESIGN
Where did the #$%^@-ing time go?

This thing is verging on... a career? (!)
I would never have believed it would last this long. Those were dark days, back when I lucked into this job. The burst of the internet bubble and the whole 9/11 thing had left me & plenty of others in a very depressed state. With the unexpected death of Gauge's web-designer Blair Smith, the magazine was in a desperate state - my editor, Donnie Babb, knew he had a hot new web-zine on his hands, and nobody to design it...

My background has never been cars - it's music and computers - but I had done some pretty clean web-work for Dayton, OH based car-club Altered Images, and one thing led to another. Suddenly I found myself with a BIG monthly project on my hands and with only a couple of DAYS to complete the first issue! I had no templates and very few source files to work from, and literally hundreds of pages to complete.

Things have changed a lot since then! I pulled four 20 hour days to finish that first issue... five years have streamlined the process quite a bit! Plus we moved from the original SLOW servers to my own in-house boxes - then those got crappy and unreliable and we moved to faster servers. During the time that I hosted the site, traffic SEXTUPLED - and since it left my servers, it's gone through the roof. We don't brag a lot about our traffic, but it is pretty astronomical!

So, five years, 60 issues... about 10 features per issue... I must be right around 600 splash-graphics that I've churned out since the beginning - needless to say, I've honed my design chops quite a bit, and except for those very early days it's been a great experience. The editorial staff here at Gauge has always encouraged me to 'go nuts' as far as the graphics are concerned, and there is little-to-no editorial control over the artwork I create. Donnie provides me this freedom based on the mutual trust built up over these 5 long years. I love being able to flex my creative muscles every month, but pulp-work can be trying at times, so as a reader you'll have to forgive the occasional mis-step... All in all though, I think I have a better ratio of hits than misses.

So - we're already into the artwork by this point - I'm sorry they don't link back to the original features, just too many and too much time and effort for stuff that already ran once - but if you click the thumbnails, they get bigger, that I can guarantee!

So without further blather and blagger, I present the best of my 5 years at Gauge Magazine, and don't forget to enjoy the current issue as we lurch forward into the next 5 years!

Thanks to Donnie, the staff at Gauge, and of course all the readers!

c.wright - webmaster / designer
gaugemagazine.com