Arizona Statehood vs. The Grand Canyon (A Period Piece)

November 30, 2011

Here's a period piece, literally. For our centennial issue I want to illustrate how tiny the period of Arizona statehood is, vs. the forming of the Grand Canyon. I woke up this morning and whipped out these little Anasazi-Hohokam type figures pointing at the puny, insignificant part of the timeline where human inhabitants in this region began.

And the punchline is that if you drew a line from New York City to Phoenix, Arizona to represent how long it took to carve the Grand Canyon (hint: some 17 million years), the amount of time Arizona has been a state would be represented by the period at the end of this sentence.

That's what they are pointing at—the period, in a period piece.

Hope it tracks in the article. Dan The Man Harshberger is coming out at 11 for a big graphics design meeting. In addition to our 20-page centennial package, Dan is redesigning all of our departments and it is a herculean effort for the staff, converting, editing and tweaking everything. Thanks to Ken Amorosano, we have dedicated an entire wall in our conference room to this effort. We were inspired by a Hearst documentary we saw online, that showed how the staff of a new launch magazine critiqued and redesigned spreads right up to press time by pinning the pages up on the wall and arguing about flow. That was inspiring and it is now part of our regimen.

Hope to have one more pass before it all goes to the printer on Friday. Half the staff is already gone to Las Vegas for Cowboy Christmas. We have a booth at Mandalay Bay. I am going over a week from tomorrow. If you are in the neighborhood I hope you stop by and say howdy.

"You are richer for doing things."
—Jessica Tandy