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 …
Typography
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 … …
I wanted to give this cover a nostalgic, literary feel since many of the writer’s ideas had to do with reading, getting back to nature and enjoying the simple things in life. After designing the headline, I felt like the page needed a touch of whimsy so I went about looking for photos of children …
I created three versions of this cover — Maryland, Virginia and D.C. — using type to highlight the issues that would be facing the state/district in the coming year. Similar to a word cloud, issues that had more significance were played larger. Each cover featured the governor/mayor who would be addressing the issues during his …
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 …
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 …