headline writing

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 …

Sizeable challenge Read More »

Local Living cover design by Tippi Thole for The Washington Post

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 …

Have a healthy new year Read More »

Local Living cover by Tippi Thole for The Washington Post

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 …

Way to grow Read More »

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 …

Bad egg vs. good egg Read More »

I wanted to come up with a clever way to draw readers into our consumer-friendly package on eye care, so I decided to present the headline as an eye chart. Wanting to emulate an eye chart to the letter, I came up with the start of a headline “If this is hard to read … …

If this is hard to read … Read More »

The story offered lots of tips for updating your interiors on the cheap, using what you have. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a photo for the cover, so I started looking through stock photos. When I found a green sofa, I immediately wondered if I could create a recycling symbol with it. I then came up an …

Renew, reuse, refresh Read More »

This story was about how the color purple was everywhere in fashion and home decor. I came up with a bunch of different shades of purple thanks to a thesaurus and numerous brainstormings with my newsroom colleagues. These not only served to create the “raindrops” for my illustration but also helped make the point that …

Purple reign Read More »

For our Fourth of July issue, I wanted to do something different than the standard, year-old fireworks picture. I created the illustration to look like a fireworks label using some stock vector drawings. To make the cover work, the text needed to play off the visual metaphor, so I wrote some display type and showed …

Fireworks Read More »

Poem for the holidays

This story didn’t have any obvious photography potential, so I decided to illustrate it using magnetic poetry. I created my own holiday poem and displayed it in the shape of two snowflakes to create an immediate seasonal connection.