Eat.Sleep.Work.,inc.

If you have ever visited our Santa Monica office, you might have noticed the BMX bikes hanging upside-down from a pulley system on our ceiling or the surfboard leaning against the wall, still wet from a morning surf. "Cough, cough," we might hear on the phone from an opportunistic employee after a good snowfall. At WORK, there is no lack of enthusiasm for action sports so when ESPN Event Media approached us in 2006 to create a Media Guide for the Summer X Games, we pounced on the project. Having a limited budget but a high standard for design quality, our client sought to restore some glory to the guides they distributed to members of the media at their Summer and Winter games. They also wanted guides that adhere to green standards so it was crucial to work with printers that could produce books on recycled paper using soy-based inks.

While budgets run small for the X Games Media Guides, WORK has been granted almost full creative license. This allows us the opportunity to experiment with various formats, paper stocks, printing techniques, and design themes. Given our passion and familiarity with the subject matter, we have turned out some impressive and ambitious pieces. Our approach to the design and execution of the media guides has evolved since first taking on the project in 2006. Then, we created 52-paged black and white spiral bound booklets with full-color cover designs. While our client was more than happy with the results, we personally outgrew this formula and began to experiment.

X Games Moto X World Championships - San Diego - Media Guide Design

Given a slightly larger budget to create a special media guide for the Moto X Games in 2008, we created full-color, saddle-stitched books. For the cover, we simulated the effect of a mud-splattered tire tread mark using emboss with black foil on black card stock.

Summer X Games 14 - Winner of LACP Platinum Award for Press/Media Guide

Later that year, we decided to up the ante a bit further, using silver foil to stamp out a pattern of technical line art of the various mechanical tidbits that make up the Summer X Games sporting equipment. The interior pages, while not in color, carry out the highly illustrative motif of the cover. Fortunately, we don't have to toot our own horn on this one. The League of American Communications Professionals (LACP) did us that honor by awarding us with Platinum for excellence in the Media Guide category.

The X Games Media Guide project continues to engage and challenge us as we creatively push ourselves to take each new book to a new level. We try to push the envelope as far as we can, delivering to the members of the media something they can enjoy and remember from their experience covering the X Games. With them in mind, we are always thinking about what suits their needs best.

Winter X Games 13 - Media Guide Cover and Competition Schedule

Winter X Games 13 - Media Guide Interior Illustration and Pages

In Winter 2009, this meant creating a narrow, top-spiral bound book that could be clipped to ones lanyard for those in the snow who needed to keep their guides close but their hands free. In the future, we will continue to experiment with book formats and printing techniques, using feedback from those who read it to drive us towards our next solution.

Winter X Games 11 - Media Guide Design

Winter X Games 13 - Media Guide Alternate Design

Summer X Games 15 - Media Guide Interior Page Design