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 …
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 …
To illustrate this story, I took one of Metro’s rail maps and stripped away all the text and lines, leaving just the stops. I tried versions where I drew in the lines with crayon, but finger paint was much more effective. The thick, vibrant lines more closely resembled Metro’s recognizable map and quickly got across …
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 … …
Inspired by the idea of a defaced yearbook, I hand lettered the headline and drew devil horns on a stock image of a teenage boy. For the inside display, I drew a halo over the same teenager since the column was debunking the myth that all teenagers are bad.
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.
This column discussed a recent trend of talented female celebrities posing nude or semi-nude in men’s magazines to advance their careers. While there were many photos available, there weren’t any I could use in the newspaper. So I decided to create a playful and suggestive illustration using a silhouetted figure and typography. The headline and …
