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 …
Veteran Washington Post photographer John McDonnell doing test shots of the foyer lighting at the DC Design House. Over the course of two days, we photographed the rooms of various local interior designers while they were madly trying to finish them up. Story comes out in Local Living on April 12.
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.
Like last year, Local Living’s Thanksgiving day cover story featured struggling food pantries and ways for readers to volunteer in their communities. My challenge: do something different with the same story and no money. I called on Felix Sockwell, whose illustration services I’d won in an SNDF auction. I felt his style where he uses …
The challenge this week was do something different than last year with essentially the same story idea: holiday entertaining tips. With hardly any budget remaining for illustrations this year, I chose to use stock photography to create something lighthearted. The black-and-white photo is reminiscent of the idyllic 1950s where the stereotypical “housewife” would know how …
