When I was asked to art direct the Weekend cover story about the trend for super-sized restaurants in the D.C. area, there were no visuals. Well, at least there weren’t any good ones. The story was about the recent opening of several very large restaurants (one of which seats 1,000 people) as well as a …
I am thrilled to learn I won four Awards of Excellence in the Society for News Design‘s 34th annual Best of News Design Creative Competition for my art direction and design work at The Washington Post. The contest invites entries from newspapers and magazines published all over the world. This year, there were over 9,000 …
The Washington Post hired me to art direct and design this week’s issue of Local Living. The cover story was a Kids and Nutrition column about how to make healthy new year’s resolutions about food and stick to them. Author and nutritionist Casey Seidenberg recommends breaking your better-eating resolution into 12 manageable parts and tackling …
Craig Alan of the Deljou Art Group creates “populist” paintings where he makes portraits (like Marilyn Monroe and the Statue of Liberty) using small figures. I immediately thought of him for this story about introducing kids to summer Olympic sports. My original idea was to create the Olympic rings out of tiny, child figures wearing …
When gardening writer Adrian Higgins first talked to be about this story for the Washington Post, I knew it was going to be great. It would showcase Higgins’s witty voice, and I needed an illustrator who could pull off something equally fun but still botanically accurate. I hired illustrator Vidhya Nagarajan to draw the eight …
Of the seven foods mentioned in the story, I decided to play with the idea of eggs on the cover since they lent themselves to so many fun metaphors: good egg vs. bad egg, deviled eggs, etc. I found some stock images of eggs and “drew” on them in Photoshop to represent the good and …
For this story on fragrant gardens, I chose D.C. illustrator Elizabeth Graeber, whose loose application of color on black line drawings perfectly conveyed the idea of fragrance “escaping” the flowers. Plus, her sketchbook approach made me imagine someone appreciating and studying flowers in their own backyard. (Elizabeth actually documents flea and farmers markets on her …
I worked with illustrator Lincoln Agnew on this voters guide. I loved his enthusiasm and can-do attitude. We went through a lot of versions, but I think the end product was unique and eye-catching.
Last week, I had the pleasure of art directing the photo shoot of Mitchell Gold’s DC loft. A week prior to the shoot, I visited the condo with reporter Jura Koncius, which allowed me to visualize the space and come up with a solid shot list in advance. I collaborated with Washington Post photographer John …
I worked with Harry Campbell to create this concept for the Virginia voters guide. The challenge was to create an original cover that was different from the previous Virginia voters guide cover that ran only two months prior. I had put most of my effort into the full-page version of this cover, then learned that …
