From November, 2018 till the beginning of 2024, I did the weekly newsletter for Golf Manor Synagogue (“GMS”). The design took its cues from the existing newsletter, as well as the typography in its long-standing logo. I added a simple drawing of the stained-glass ner tamid from the synagogue’s main sanctuary as a structural element. Here are an image of the Bulletin’s previous design and three examples of the redesigned newsletter.
In 2019, while working for Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati, I did their banner for the annual Sukkos art show at the Mayerson JCC. Visitors gave it the award for “Most Original Material!”
Click on the image to see a larger photo.
Over the course of nineteen years, I produced eleven annual reports for the Cincinnati Community Kollel – annual in the sense that each covered a year’s activities. Over time, they evolved and grew, reflecting different periods in the Kollel’s development. I’ll include all of the reports here, for the amusement of any Kollel alumni and friends who happen to find this page.
The first three reports were very similar, and relatively simple. They were produced in-house (printed and saddle-stitched), on letter-sized paper. Although some of the photos in the PDF’s are in color, these reports were actually printed in black and white. The Kollel made a point of including financial information, provided by a volunteer bookkeeper. (Donors immediately appreciated the organization’s transparency, even if they didn’t know how to interpret financial statements, and they still do.) For these first three reports I didn’t bother prettying the financials up; I just scanned them and pasted the images into the reports. We also included a comprehensive list of everyone who had ever made a contribution; the Kollel made a point of recognizing even relatively small donations, in contrast with the norm among big-city and East Coast organizations – an attitude of which I’m still proud.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
After a year’s hiatus, we did two more reports. I refreshed the visuals, and typeset the financials to match the reports’ look and feel. There were also produced in-house.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
In 2007, the Kollel expanded into a second building and opened up a satellite location in the northern exurbs. We didn’t put out an annual report until the following spring, but when we did it reflected that expansion, moving from letter-sized (11″) paper to legal (14″). The layout was completely revamped, there were more photos (including some taken by me). We printed the cover, the centerfold, and the financials in color – on the Kollel’s first color laser printer. The following year’s report was done the same way, with the addition of a simulated group photo, featuring then-current staff and local alumni and their families.
A few years went by before we did another report. By then, the Kollel’s northern outpost had closed, but the Kollel had started a community-building project, hiring a part-time community evangelist of sorts. The 2014 report was totally redesigned and much more colorful, although it was still printed and bound in-house. A lot of emphasis was placed on people the Kollel had brought to Cincinnati; that included hiring a photographer to take portraits of the staff and their families. The content was organized into distinctive sections, each with its own visual cues. This was such a large undertaking that the following year we followed it up with a simpler, trifold brochure – printed in color on 14″ paper, with a front panel that bore a strong similarity to the 2014 report.
In 2016, the Kollel practically doubled in size. This was partly funded by a 24-hour online fundraising campaign, and the list of donors grew so long that for the first time we had to limit it to the current year’s honor roll – which still included anyone who had contributed at least $25 over the course of the year. The format of the report borrowed heavily from the materials I’d produced for that years’s annual event. This report was printed at a traditional print house (Springdot) and it featured a full bleed – what a luxury! The centerfold featured a composite photo of the enlarged Kollel “family.”
The next year, we weren’t able to produce an annual report until the final week of the calendar year, when printers were closed for the holidays – so we had to print and bind it in-house once more. No bleeds. The visuals from the most recent fundraising materials didn’t lend themselves well to an annual report, so instead I borrowed a bit from the Kollel’s parasha sheet – including the head shots for the staff lineup, which moved to the inside back cover.
In 2008, the Kollel’s PR started emphasizing its role as a community builder. To illustrate that point, I was asked to create a group photo which would include the staff, all the alumni who had stayed in Cincinnati, and their families. One Sunday, almost everyone gathered for a photo shoot in the dining room of Cincinnati Hebrew Day School, which we had festooned with blue plastic table covers. Dr. Nachum Klafter took the actual photo. A few days later, I photographed the handful of people who hadn’t been able to make the weekend shoot. I put everyone together in Photoshop, and superimposed the group on a photograph of Old Westbury Gardens – the only photo I could find which matched the scale and perspective of the group photo!
Kollel staff and local alumni, with families – September, 2008
photo shoot, September 2008
Printed on photo paper and framed, the result looked a lot better than it would seem if you had only viewed the photo on a computer monitor. On screen, you can definitely tell which people were added later, and artifacts remain from the “blue screen.” In hindsight, we should have made sure the group shoot was lit up better. We were also running up against the limitations of digital camera resolutions at that time.
the ‘studio” in 2010
the magazine cover
Two years later, I was asked to orchestrate another group photo, this time for a magazine cover. We did the shoot in a nearby, vacant house, where we could set up our tripod, the “blue screen,” and the lighting, and leave them, undisturbed, for the week or so it would take for everyone to file through and have their pictures taken. This helped to make sure that the lighting and perspective would be consistent across all of the photos. All together, there were 65 photographs! Because they were all shot from the same perspective, they didn’t look right when arranged horizontally (as I’d done in 2008). I ended up stacking everyone on top of each other, and I chose a stock photo for the background which would make it seem as though the photo had been taken from a distance – which would jive with the perspectives of the individual shots.
Kollel staff and local alumni, November 2010
the photographer in his studio, 2016
In 2016, after the Kollel expanded its staff, we did a third group photo, which we used as the centerfold of that year’s annual report. This time we set up shop in the Kollel’s Annex Library. Again I took lots of smaller photos and combined them, but this time we only took pictures of staff members and their families, so there were only 32 photos to work with. Instead of looking for an appropriate photo to use as the “setting,” I incorporated the group photo into the backdrop of the annual report – a photoshopped picture of the vintage Formica in my mother’s bathroom! The photograph below is the result, as it appeared in the centerfold.
Kollel staff and families (most of them, anyway), November 2016
Years ago, a friend and former coworker started agitating for a locally produced parasha sheet – a weekly, one- or two-page publication with insights into the weekly Torah reading and religious holidays. The Kollel wasn’t ready to take the project on, so he arranged for a local synagogue to distribute it. I was already producing the synagogue’s newsletter, and I ended up also doing “CZE Torah,” as it was called, in my “spare” time – which was barely enough for me to scan the material for glaring typos.
At the beginning of 2013, the parasha sheet finally became a Kollel project. It was renamed Cincinnati Torah, aka Torah miCincy (a Hebrew pun). The weekly was also given an additional raison d’être: coverage of the Kollel’s activities and programming. The quality of the layout improved, and I started editing the content in earnest. I was able to make more contributions as a writer now, which I enjoyed, but the tradeoff was that I also ended up becoming the guy who had to ask other people to write pieces for the sheet.
In 2016, the Kollel expanded both its staff and its programming. The parasha sheet got a minor facelift, and Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Crystal took over as what I call “Contributing Managing Editor,” overseeing the creation of more varied content and soliciting contributions (written contributions, that is; another staff member took charge of finding sponsors). I continued in my role as “Contributing Production Editor,” doing the design and layout, editing the content, and writing the occasional piece, until April, 2018, shortly after I left my post at the Kollel .
There’s an archive of several years’ worth of parasha sheets at cincykollel.org, but here are several issues from the most recent iteration of the parasha sheet, including three for which I did some of the writing.
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Here are three earlier issues with content I wrote.
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And, finally, here are some badges I created, to identify special or seasonal content that spanned a series of issues.
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From 2010 to 2014, the Kollel‘s point man for campus outreach, Raphael Weinschneider, organized a series of chamber concerts to benefit his programs. I tried to carry the look and feel of the publicity materials over from year to year, while subtly varying them to reflect changes in the musical line-up. The idea of riffing off of a grand piano’s silhouette probably came from the original album cover for “Mi Ya’aleh” by Schwebel, Scharf & Levine (later re-released as “The Lost Album,” with a less avant-garde cover).
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Designing the look and feel of an annual event’s materials can be a lot of fun – especially if the event itself looks to be a fun one. Here are several I did for the Cincinnati Community Kollel.
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From late 2007 to early 2010, Rabbi Yaakov (“Cobi”) Robinson gave two series totaling 15 lectures to women. The goal of these flyers was to create a “brand,” as it were, which would highlight each lecture’s topic, while making it clear that the lectures were part of a continuum.
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The Mayerson JCC has a themed art show in its sukkah every year, and all of the local Jewish Federation agencies are invited to participate. From 2013 to 2017, I designed the Kollel’s entries. Here are four of them, along with some photos of the art show.
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