Three of my partners at Behavior are due to make a huge pitch for a new project to our biggest client tomorrow morning. To do my part, I played the part of the production lackey this evening. This entailed not even typing a single paragraph of the proposal nor laying out a single spread in the elaborate leave-behind book they prepared for the client.

Rather, my duties included making a run to two paper stores, two art supply stores and a visit to Staples, printing six copies of the 50-page document on our rather leisurely-paced color printer, trimming all the copies down to the custom size we had determined for the book, collating the pages, assembling the pages in the uncommon binder we purchased to house them, and affixing tab dividers to mark the eight sections in each book.

I’ve done manual work from time to time since starting Behavior, but rarely to this extent. I’m not complaining, though — in fact, despite its physically laborious demands, I found a kind of meditative quality in the whole endeavor. If nothing else, it was a semi-pleasant flashback to the days when I was an intern and even my first few years as a professional, so-called ‘junior designer,’ when fully half of every working day must have been spent cutting, trimming and affixing things to be given to people. After ten years (yikes!) in the business — including two as an owner in an independent design business — there’s a kind of irony in that, right?

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