Meet William Mack

William Mack did not start out as a designer. He studied creative writing at university, but when he finished school he ended up working with book covers in New York and eventually he ended up as a senior designer at Weldon Owen in San Francisco. On Feb. 1, he made a temporary switch as a GROW participant, moving from San Francisco to work at Templar Publishing in Dorking in the English countryside, some 50 minutes outside London.

Mack, 31, has been a senior designer at Weldon Owen for nearly three years, designing books across a wide range of subjects. "I work with the editorial team to discover and develop the appropriate visual language for a project," he says. He has a similar role at Templar, "but the books themselves are a bit different." Which is what drew him to applying for the GROW position.

"I wanted to learn a bit about how another publishing company worked and business was constructed in the European market," he says. "Specifically, Templar makes great novelty books and I wanted to learn more about that process. It's exciting getting to work on an extension of the Ology series, which I'm a fan of."

Mack is impressed with Templar's R&D and large prepress departments and he says he's learned a lot in the two months he's been at Templar. The schedules are a lot tighter, and he's finding out the specifics of what it takes to work on books with novelty elements. "I'm also getting a bit of schooling in a more traditional way of working with illustrators that I never really had," he says.