In the last few months, the bulk of my time has been spent working on Custom Ad Sales pieces for PCWorld and Macworld (the screenshots are from the Cisco Resource Centers on PCWorld.com and Macworld.com). The work has predominantly been online (there was almost a cool little wordsearch piece that was going to run in our print publications, but it fell through) and it seems that all of it has been accomplished by the seat of our pants and the skin of our teeth.

This was unexplored territory for both our publications, and a substantial stake in our business development was placed in growing these opportunities. We learned as we went along, and we often had to spin in different directions in order to complete any given project. These custom projects often involved months of proactive pitches and proposals by our sales team. It wasn’t unusual to create a mock, forget about it entirely, and then have to build it within hours a few months later. Of course, within those few months, both our site and tools had iterated, and whatever I’d envisioned often needed significant adaptation to make it work with our constantly evolving and iterating (and complicated!) sites.

Through it all, I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with a team that is understanding of the impossibly fluid, and sometimes contradictory, priorities of advertisers. Without the solid support of our dev team, none of these projects would have gotten off the ground as quickly as they did. None of the projects were like another. Every single piece I worked on added new wrinkles, and created new bugs as we pushed the tools to provide whatever was asked. Our edit team, rather than being appalled at our mingling of the church and state of edit and advertising, were savvy enough to understand the need for developing revenue streams, while still prioritizing the integrity of the brands and our users.

From the outside, if we did our jobs right, it should have looked quite smooth, but from the inside, there was a fair bit of teeth gnashing and hair pulling. It wasn’t the smoothest path, but I do believe we proved our value to the decision-makers in the upper echelons of our corporate structure. With any luck, this will continue to be an area of exciting growth, and will provide a functional business model that can sustain many of my friends and colleagues.

Every day, I learned something, not the least of which was my ability to use my skills as a designer–creative troubleshooting, hands-on tinkering, and constant iterative generation of ideas– all at breakneck speeds.

It will be hard to leave after so many years, but I’m glad to have been part of this brave endeavor, and am excited to see what comes next for myself and for the fine folks at IDG.

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[ backfill from ewee.posterous.com and flickr]