In late 2005 I designed the Holiday Catalog for the Red Sox Team Store. It was a 24 page, 5.5″ x 8.5″ catalog featuring everything from Christmas Tree Ornaments to Authentic player jerseys.

For the following season, we increased the size (8.5″ x 10.5″) and the page count (48!) to include hundreds of additional products. One of the Store Managers and I went through Fenway Park one cold winter day along with Wally The Green Monster and a photo crew. There we took hundreds of shots to include in the catalog. It was a great chance to see a lot of the “behind the scenes” parts of Fenway including the Batting Cage, the Locker Room and Francona’s office. Unfortunately, none of these photos made it into the catalog. The Red Sox were nice enough to give us free reign over a number of photographs they had taken over the previous couple of years. The image that adorns the cover of the catalog is one of these.

One of the biggest obstacles that we had to overcome was software. While I did all of the design work, the aforementioned manager typed in all of the text and prices. Unfortunately, she didn’t have Quark XPress. With the Winter Catalog, she would have to input her edits on my computer while I wasn’t there. For the 2006 Catalog, everything was designed in Photoshop. (I know, I know, don’t do text in Photoshop, but we didn’t have any other option.) Each two page spread was it’s own layered Photoshop file. These files ended up being huge. At the time, I was working on a standard PC, so I spent a lot of time waiting for files to open and save.

The 2006 Red Sox Team Store catalog was, at that point, one of the largest projects I had ever tackled on my own. One of my co-workers photographed all of the merchandise, and I did everything from prepping those photos to handing the files to the printer.