Charles Apple

Oops. I couldn’t log in Monday, so I’m a whole day late with this one…

Here’s hoping for the most special of VizEds birthdays to my former intern, Lindi Daywalt Feazel of the Fort Myers News Press. Lindi turned 25 Monday.

Lindi came to us two summers ago, shortly after earning her degree from Ohio University. I was slightly nervous about hiring her: She had no college newspaper experience and had never worked a newspaper internship before.

However, she was already signed up to work eight weeks in the Cleveland Plain Dealer graphics department. I would get her immediately afterward. Hey, I don’t mind letting Dave Kordalski and Ken Marshall break in my interns for me. So we were happy to have her.

Naturally, she walked in and knocked our socks off.

It hadn’t been my intention to use her exclusively on illustration work, but man, was she good and man, was she fast. Lindi did so well — and our designers were crawling to me to request her services — that I never got around to assigning her a graphic. It just never came up.

By the end of the summer, Lindi had a big pile of portfolio pieces and a number of papers that wanted to hire her. I was delighted that she chose to work with my pal Javier Torres in Fort Myers.

As she left for points south, it was her turn to be nervous. Javo wanted Lindi to design pages. Lindi had never worked as a page designer. She asked: Did I think she could do the job?

Ha! Are you kidding? Lindi has talent dripping out of her fingertips. Even when she was “only” working on an illustration assignment, Lindi paid careful attention to the placement of type and to how all the elements of the page behaved together. She is a natural for a design job.

And, I’m glad to note, she’s kicked ass in the two years she’s been in Fort Myers. A few pieces:

Last fall, Lindi produced this wonderful series of photoillustrations for the News Press‘ annual all-area high school sports edition. According to Lindi, the photographer came up with the idea of shooting nice portraits and turning them into illustrations. Each of the random-looking scribbles Lindi used in this series meant something to each athlete, Lindi said. Beautiful stuff. A few examples:

See more of Lindi’s work here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=6377

I had hoped to see Lindi in Orlando last fall, but it didn’t happen. Instead of attending the SND workshop, Lindi had the gall to go back to Ohio that weekend to get married. Hurrumph. Some people just don’t have their priorities straight.

Lindi shares a birthday with singers George Michael and Carly Simon, actors Jimmie “Kid Dy-no-mite” Walker and June “Lost in Space” Lockhart, and futurist author George Orwell. Plus, Monday was Log Cabin Day. Seriously.

Happy birthday, Lindi! I’m so proud of you!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 5:28 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Happy birthday, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.