Behind the Scenes: The Making of Mildly Scenic
Exactly a year after meeting Sacramento State professors for the first time, we took our audience through the journey of our collaboration and how genuinely fun, nerdy and creative it was to work together.
Remember how I partnered with Sacramento State’s Geography Department and the six upper division geography students in the Fall of ‘23 to create the original maps for Mildly Scenic? If not you can read more about it here.
Well, recently I had the incredible opportunity to gather the most influential people of Mildly Scenic — the geographers and graphic designer — together at the East Village Bookshop, the very place where the owner Sabrina Nishijima first nudged me toward authoring this book nearly three years ago.
We called the evening Behind the Scenes: The Making of Mildly Scenic, and took our audience through the journey of our collaboration and how genuinely fun, nerdy, and creative it was to work together. We talked about how words, design, and visuals such as maps each help to tell the story. We outlined the choices we made to include — and exclude — elements in order to craft a unique and cohesive narrative of the river. We recounted the hours of hard work involved to pull off the melding of each piece into a cohesive book. And we also recognized the serendipity of meeting the right people at the right time — producing something truly special. We laughed all the way through the evening, telling the mildly unlikely and amazing story of making this book.
From left to right:
Matt Schmidtlein (Professor and Chair of Geography), Ashley Shult Langdon (Author), Anna Klimaszewki-Patterson (Professor of Geography), Greg Traverso (Graphic Designer and Brand Developer).
In the clip below, Dr. Schmidtlein and Dr. Klimaszewki-Patterson talk about the process of assigning the six upper division geography students — Casey Echesveste, Gabby Eimanverdi, Jessica Shugrue, Justin Liberman, T. Sean Hamilton, and Tyler Westin — the challenging task of building the maps from scratch. They highlighted with exuberance the opportunity for these students to build their skills on a real-world project like Mildly Scenic that bolstered their skill set and allowed them to be hired right after graduation into jobs like CalFire and other government organizations. It was clear that the Sac State professors wanted to not only contribute to the community of Sacramento, but to launch their students successfully into the careers in Geography.
“This idea that she just went out and explored and came to love her landscape. And... it really became clear to me that she wasn’t writing a trail guide, she writing a love story about the American River. ”
Many of the attendees were former graduates of the Sac State Geography program, and attended the event to reconnect with their professors and this real-world application of the degree.
