Matthew first began getting involved in newspaper design at The Lompoc Record in 1995 when he took on the additional duties as Sunday editor for the 8,000-circulation, six-day a week newspaper.
Matthew designed numerous special sections at The Daily World, but his design skills were enhanced when the paper worked with a consultant to redesign the newspaper. Matthew was the primary newsroom liaison with the consultant and eventually codified the new design into a 50+ page manual. The manual featured both detailed specifications on everything from photos, headlines, and body text to the sports agate. You can peruse a copy of the manual here. [PDF Format]
Matthew was hired as a copy-editor/page designer at the North County Times. During his tenure there he quickly became the lead A1 designer for three zoned editions of the newspaper. He also designed and copyedited Metro, Business and the weekly Science & Technology of the newspaper. Like at The Daily World, Matthew led an overhaul of the newspaper's templates and stylesheets that led to a better ease-of-use for employees and more consistency in design across both news and features products.
At The San Diego Union-Tribune, Matthew started work on the newspaper's community news initiative in the north county of San Diego. After a few years there, was transferred to the paper's main Mission Valley office and began working on the paper's Metro sections, the weekly "Wheels" automotive section and its editorial pages, including the Sunday "Insight" section.
After leaving the Union-Tribune, Matthew took a project manager position at XYZ Textbooks. [Follow the link to view some of the books.] In addition to his project management duties, he worked on the design and proofreading of a variety of math textbooks for the community college market. In addition to its own textbooks, XYZ was received contracts from educational publisher Cengage Learning to typeset new editions of Charles P. McKeague's popular developmental mathematics series. Matthew took detailed design instructions and helped implement them in InDesign templates.
In addition to numerous math textbooks, Matthew also designed a variety of marketing materials, including those in the front of the textbooks, flyers and e-newsletters.