Chronicle Books Blog

This July marked the beginning of a new design fellowship session here at Chronicle Books. An opportunity for five recent design graduates to be a part of the design process and learn all that goes into creating Chronicle products. From books and ebooks, to stationery and marketing materials, these designers will have the chance to be fully immersed in the design culture here. We are pleased to introduce three new fellows who will be working with our publishing and children’s design groups. Along with our new additions, you will notice two familiar faces from last session who were asked to extend their fellowships due to their outstanding contributions thus far.

Ryan Diaz, publishing fellow

Ryan hails from Washington State where he graduated from University of Washington in 2011. Ryan has completed some impressive internships with McSweeney’s, the Henry Art Gallery, and Digital Kitchen in Seattle. In his work at McSweeney’s, he designed Love, An Index, their first collection for their Poetry Series among other projects. He impressed us with his thoughtful approach to all his projects, particularly his self-initiated ones. I would be remiss to not also mention his incredible typographic skills! Wow. Ryan loves to write almost as much as design, particularly poetry. He also enjoys reading, yoga, video games, art, and soul music. We are excited to have him here!

Check out some of Ryan’s work:

Daniel Triassi, publishing fellow

Daniel is a California native, who graduated cum laude from Cal Poly in 2011. Daniel is also interested in writing—he finished Cal Poly with a double major in Journalism and Graphic Design. Daniel’s portfolio shows his great attention to detail as well as his playful approach to design. His charming redesign of the Hardy Boys Mystery Series for his senior project won him a scholarship award from Bookbuilder’s West in 2011. Daniel impressed us with his thoughtful concepts as well as his thorough process. In addition to his interest in books, Daniel loves fashion, getting outdoors, watching the SF Giants, and hitting the Alameda flea market where he hunts for unique vintage trophies to add to his growing collection. We are looking forward to having him on our team!

Check out Daniel’s work here:

Tara Creehan, children’s fellow

Tara Creehan is an amazing locally based talent, having lived in the Bay Area for the last 15 years. She received her B.S. from Berkeley, but then felt something was missing and found her way to art school. She just graduated with distinction from CCA and won the thesis award. In addition, she was the recipient of the Richard and Jeane Coyne Foundation Scholarship through Communication Arts. Tara is a food lover—Papalote is her favorite burrito joint, and she just had lunch at Shanghai Dumpling King in the Richmond—and highly recommends it. She previously taught cooking and gardening to kids, and recently returned from Bora Bora where she and her husband enjoyed a second honeymoon! We are thrilled to have such an accomplished designer onboard in the Children’s Publishing Group.

Take a look at some samples of Tara’s work:

Lydia Ortiz, marketing fellow

Lydia finished her BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts in San Francisco last May. At CCA, she received two Student Achievement Awards, the first for her outstanding work on her thesis and the second for Junior Review. Her portfolio shows her unique form-making skills as well as her compositional prowess. Her work also reveals her original and fresh way of thinking about storytelling and combining text and imagery. Lydia is originally from Manila, Philippines, and has called California home for the past nine years. Just looking at Lydia’s work is inspiring, and we are so happy to have her with us for another six months.

Check out some of Lydia’s more recent work:

Jackie Jakob, digital media fellow

Jackie Jakob, our 2010 University of Florida Honors Grad, has spent the last six months working with CSS, HTML and XPGT documents as our first digital fellow. Her knowledge of SVG containers, kf8s, epubs, and media queries is steadily growing and becoming legendary within certain circles. During the next 6 months, Jackie will be exploring metadata within epubs and experimenting with new ways of coding and epub3 standards. Don’t let the fantastic and fabulous life of coding and ebooks fool you, Jackie still keeps it real by spending time with her Golden Retriever, Miley, and pals Mickey and Minnie Mouse. We are thankful to have such a skilled and devoted fellow here for another session!

Take a look at what Jackie has done so far:

Meghan Nowell
Design Studio Assistant