Making a mark on Baltimore

A view of  one of "my" sign in the Inner Harbor 

To my one reader, sorry for the delay in blog posts. The last couple of months have gone by so quickly that it feels like we just moved here to Maryland. After five months of freelancing, hiking, stressing and looking for a job. I was offered a position at Meyer Jabara Hotels as their Production Manager/Online Marketing Manager. Meyer Jabara Hotels is a hotel management company with 21 different properties. My responsibility is to design, manage, code and create any marketing (print, web, flash, email, outdoor, etc) for those 21 properties. I am their only designer and at times I really miss my NBM days of working with a team of other designers. But overall the job has been a blast.

MJ's has three Baltimore properties called Harbor Magic Hotels, because they don't have a parent brand, such as Hilton, associated to them I end up doing a lot of marketing for them. When I accepted the job I didn't really think that I would be doing any signage for the hotels. Turns out I was wrong. Thus if you happen to walk around the Inner Harbor or Fells Point you will see my signs. They aren’t the most exciting signs, but it is neat to think that they will be there years from now and that I created them and had them installed. Because MJ is a hotel group I work in a hotel, right in the back office. It is interesting to get a first-hand look at all of the moving pieces of a hotel. I am always afraid a guest will ask me a question or need service when I walk out of the back office, because at the end of the day I don't have any operation knowledge of the hotel. Thus far it has only happened once and the front desk quickly came to my rescue.

The hotel I work out of is the brick building on the right.

The hotel I work at right now is right in the middle of Baltimore's Fells Point. It sits right next to the Harbor. When it is foggy I can hear the Navy Ships’ fog horns. One of their perks is that they have a parking lot that we can use whenever we come into Baltimore. This saves a lot on parking and has helped us explore the city. One of my favorite things about my commute home is smelling the bread from the H&M bakery. It instantly comforts my soul and reminds me of all of the good, simply things in life.