A Message from Our Team

his month, in addition to all of the fanfare surrounding the Fourth of July, I’m celebrating my two-year anniversary as the Insider’s graphic designer. The time has passed quickly, working on clients’ advertisements and the layout for our publication on a daily basis. It’s been an amazing opportunity to grow as a designer, as I’ve learned how to tailor my abilities to fit the needs of our community publication. I appreciate the challenge as I continue to grow and evolve with each passing day.

One of my favorite sections of the paper is the Meet Your Local Veteran section. I love when that article arrives on my desk every month. It’s humbling and inspiring to read about the sacrifices people have made and the challenges they’ve endured in working to secure and maintain freedom for us as well as our country. I love their old service pictures— to witness them in a different era and time— as it reveals a deeper essence of their story and brings it to life in a deeply personal way.

And I’m not the only one who is delighted by this section of the paper. It touches all of our hearts here at the Insider. That’s why we all, as a team, were thrilled that our front page feature for this month so poignantly captures and illustrates the service of the veterans who live in our community by recapping highlights from some of the accounts that we’ve featured previously. It’s a reminder that we’re all celebrating our freedom as a country this month, in part, thanks to them, and the countless other veterans living and deceased, who devoted their time and years of their life to protecting and preserving the unique freedoms that we are able to celebrate and enjoy on a day-to-day basis.

I’m excited to share the traditional cookout with my family and close friends on the 4th— enjoying the great outdoors, the smell of the grill, some beach time, and yard games like corn hole, the giant Jenga game, and volleyball.

But this year, as we fire up the grill and gather around, it will be with a slightly different perspective— not only with a spirit of joy and celebration that it’s our country’s birthday, but with a sense of gratitude for the service of the men and woman who have helped ensure we continue these celebrations year after year.

As we begin to reemerge from such a difficult past few months, we hope our front page article inspires a shift in perspective, a focus on what we have to be grateful for rather than what is lacking at this time. We hope it fills you with gratitude for the numerous blessings and privileges that we all share as Americans, and instills a sense of positivity for everything that there is to always celebrate— family, friends, community, freedom. Happy Fourth of July!

– Rachel Ogg Graphic Designer