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 …
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 …
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 …
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 … …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
