The end of the summer brings a new crop of admissions work, cultivated throughout the year and finally harvested. In 2011, graduate admissions have taken pride of place. St. John’s University School of Law has been a focus throughout the year, and now the viewbook and ancillary brochures are in, with the Dean’s Report and interactive viewbook still in the works. The Harvard School of Public Health admissions catalog is also ready — a fascinating assignment that involved above all remapping content for better usability.

I’m getting more and more annoyed about pre-. It’s a perfectly good prefix, but people seem intent on escalating the beforeness of almost everything. I first starting noticing the trend with the announcement, “This program was prerecorded.” Well, yes, if it’s not live, it’s recorded, so why do they need the pre? What’s wrong with, “This is a recorded program”? Suddenly it was everywhere: presold, preordered, precooked, and on and on. And then there’s preapproved, as all those credit card and re-fi offers tell you that you are. It still raises my ire, but for a different reason. It implies that you’re approved, but you can’t actually be approved until you file an application. So what preapproved really means is, “Based on all the evidence we have on you, you’re highly likely to be approved if you file an application.” But that’s not nearly as preassuring, is it?

It’s probably not too tough to lure a group of design and publishing experts to Maine on a Friday in June, and the local AIGA did a great job of it at the ABSTRACT conference: The Future of Design in Media. The speakers were all magazine designers and art directors — representing the gamut from Fast Company to Martha Stewart Living/Omnimedia, and The NYT Sunday Magazine — who have also led the transition to electronic and pioneering iPad publications.

All this was fascinating on the design front, but there was a lot to learn about content development and deployment as well. I’m looking forward to bringing some of these lessons to my clients so that their content can keep working, working, working for them.

If you’re curious about the speakers and presentations, you can find them all at http://abstractconference.com/post_abstract.

“Summer reading” may be an anachronism, joining such other quaint concepts as “close of business” in a spidery archive. But if you do find yourself with some contemplative moments in the hammock or on the beach, here are my two best recommendations from my reading during the first half of 2011: Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and Life, by Keith Richards. As rockers continue to join the ranks of senior citizens in droves, we can expect many more memoirs, but few are likely to measure up to these star turns.

At heart, both books are about the creative process — that’s what makes them so fascinating to me. Richards’ descriptions of how to write a song are in the best tradition of of spinning straw into gold — a lick here, phrase there, and the concept takes off in a blaze of creative glory. Put Keith and Mick in a room, and out swaggers “Satisfaction.” Richards is also terrific at recounting his progression from copying Delta bluesmen note for note to building out his own original work on that amazing base.

Smith’s story begins differently. She yearns to be an artist, but unlike Richards or her friend and companion Robert Mapplethorpe, she doesn’t have a genre. Instead, she has to invent one, and in doing so becomes the Godmother of Punk. Dedicated to adventure and renewal, with this memoir, a National Book Award winner, Smith more than proves herself as a prose writer.

In a strange (or not so much) coincidence, both Richards and Smith report stealing meat from supermarkets during their impoverished early years. A rite of protein passage for starving artists?

Okay, okay, I went to college a long time ago, in the brief Golden Era between the Eras of Fear (that is, of pregnancy on one side and dreadful diseases on the other). In college as I knew it, young women and young men earnestly tried to create relationships of equality, and not just romantic ones. Of course there were some louts who desperately parodied the bad old days of yore, and they could be offensive, but otherwise harmless. Maybe my campus was unusual, but I can say that my friends and I never found it a hostile environment.

I haven’t exactly been living in a cave since those days, and my work has given me great insight into the social mores on contemporary campuses. Even so, I’ve found the reports of harrassment at Yale over the last few years deeply shocking — hardly the doings of a few harmless louts, but in fact a redefinition of the term hostile environment. Now Yale is under federal investigation steming from a Title IX complaint that alleges that the university has failed to stop the hostile sexual environment on campus.

Today WBUR’s On Point explored this issue in a segment titled Are College Campuses a Hostile Environment for Women? Well worth listening to.

If you missed last night’s FRONTLINE segment about the NCAA and the eternal question of whether elite college athletes are amateurs or pros, watch it now.

Definitely worthwhile, especially to see the NCAA president squirm and answer questions with weasel words. (And then today he announced that he actually is willing to explore paying athletes!) I’m not sure which side of this debate I finally come down on, but I was rather shocked to learn that athletes’ images can be used in perpetuity without compensation. Your thoughts?

I fell in love with Zappos the day we first met. For years, the company has delivered happiness to me in the form of dog-walking boots and peep-toe kitten heels, free shipping both ways, and those friendly, helpful people on the phone.

Now I have yet another reason to love Zappos: CEO Tony Hsieh. His book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, is an account of how he built a powerhouse brand on the happiness of both customers and employees. I’ve experienced that first-hand — and I reflect on it every time I deal with a non-customer-centric organization, which is of course all too often. “It is possible to do this differently,” I always want to scream, “It really, really is.”

One caution: The first part of the narrative is devoted to brainy-but-clueless college-boy (with the emphasis on boy) antics. Think The Social Network. You’ve already seen that movie, so skip to the good part.

Susan recently wrapped up nearly a year of work with long-time client College of the Holy Cross as the college launched its first fully integrated admissions communications initiative. Susan was creative strategist, messaging maven, and writer on Being Holy Cross, which comprises multiple print publications and a new admissions website containing videos and other interactive elements. Visit the website and ask Susan about print samples.

“Beyond the Ivory Tower” is a column The Chronicle of Higher Education offers as a service to graduate students who are considering careers outside of academia. I was once in the same situation, so The Chronicle asked me to share my story. Read the interview.