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Currents Magazine is the magazine published nationally on behalf of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE.org). This bit above that ran in the October ’09 issue is paired up with an article about how colleges and universities now have to go to greater lengths to protect and uphold their reputations online in the age of Twitter, Facebook and bytes and bytes of user reviews from anyone with a keyboard and an opinion.

David Herbick art directed me on this one and, whether intended or not, exposed me to a funny little bit of tunnel vision that I sometimes get when trying to solve a problem using symbols. My first round of sketches (below) relied heavily on imagery that’s extremely college specific: pennants, shields, university crests, etc.:

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The first sketch was clearly the direction we eventually chose for our final, but we ended up swapping out the crest and shield for the more universally protective connotation of the umbrella largely on account of the aforementioned tunnel vision. Throughout the sketch process, it never once occurred to me that Currents, being a magazine of which colleges and education are its primary subjects, might have been seeing their fair share of pennants, shields and university crests years before I came along. Needless to say, this was exactly the case and contrary to most editorial assignments I typically get, they asked us to solve the solution using imagery that didn’t necessarily correspond to ALL of the key details in the brief. The editors requested that the art didn’t need to scream ‘college’, but more so ‘online protection.’ Hence, enter the umbrella. This served as a nice little reminder (which apparently, I needed) that you’re not always beholden to interpret ideas like this quite so literally—in fact, sometimes, you shouldn’t.

Snapshots of David’s type and layout for the final spread are below:

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Where is the country’s primary comfort zone with big government overhauls? In Richard Stevenson’s article for the Times’ Week In Review, he ponders this between the historical touchstones of Obama’s current ongoing struggle to radically reform health care and George W. Bush’s failed attempt at radically reforming social security in his last term as president. Stevenson’s primary observation is that issue-specific details notwithstanding, the fear tactics that are currently being used by Republicans to hinder Obama’s progress with health care were similarly employed by Democrats in Bush’s last term when his Social Security reformation platform crumbled. The tactics remain the same, but the sides switch.

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Landing on images to illustrate the ideas in this article was no easy task for me. It’s a testament to art director Kelly Doe’s gift of distillation that she was able to explain these ideas to me succinctly so that I had something to work with before we had a proper story to read and review. Moreover, since I had another illustration on the front page of the Week In Review only a few short weeks ago which also referenced health care reform, there was added pressure for me not to repeat myself thematically or stylistically. I’m still up in the air as to how well or how poorly I may have pulled that off.

Additional sketches and concepts that were submitted went like this:

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In other news pertinent to the Week In Review, Kelly has also launched a new feature in the section called Considered in which each week, an artist visually interprets a current news event purely with pictures. For the kickoff, she hired none other than illustration MVP Edel Rodriguez to do a rendering of Disney’s 4 billion dollar acquisition of Marvel. Unsurprisingly, it’s beautiful—particularly that bit with The Hulk.

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Sunday’s Op-Ed doesn’t have many kind things to say about AG Eric Holder’s re-opening of dozens of cases regarding detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay by C.I.A. employees. It’s not that the author, Joseph Finder, thinks that falsely imprisoned detainees, were that they were abused, don’t deserve justice. It’s more the reality that these cases were already exhaustively explored years ago by “hardheaded career prosecutors, unforgiving of CIA transgressions”. The re-opening of these cases is likened to political posturing and it is then suggested that using the substantial money and resources required to explore these cases one more time dilutes the efficacy of the C.I.A. while undermining a few essential principles of our government. In this situation, the more you look into something, the less you’re inclined to see.

For the final illustration, Kim Bost and I landed on the above image to drive home the suggestion of a futile, justice vs. justice scenario. The initial comps that I submitted went after the idea that looking at detainee abuse again (and for dubious reasons) will reveal less and less information about the thing that is being investigated. As such, there were many fallen soldiers for this piece, three of which are below.

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This piece for Suffolk Alumni Magazine concerns a Boston parking clerk who searched high and low for a way to dismiss the fine for an out-of-towner’s parking ticket after the plaintiff wrote in to the clerk’s office to explain that, A: not only was she confused by the city’s parking regulations, but B: visiting Boston was on her ‘bucket list’ as she had been diagnosed with degenerative heart failure and had only a short time to live without a transplant. (The woman’s medical records had been enclosed to the clerk to verify her condition). The orange shreds of the heart shape are from a genuine honest-to-God parking ticket, but the fine print I actually had to design, print, rip up and reconstitute on my own.

With the clerk ultimately succeeding in dismissing this ailing woman’s ticket, death notwithstanding, the story had a relatively happy ending. It was a refreshing change of pace for me to work on something so optimistic-hearted as so much of my assignments usually deal with epic, looming global problems from which there is typically either no escape or no easy answer.

Curiously enough, it was a different story among a handful of my friends and co-workers, all of whom were collectively outraged and derided the prospect of this woman’s special treatment in light of her medical condition. Nearly every last person I described the scenario to sided with the ‘rules-are-rules’ bureaucracy of the typical traffic violations office. I mean, seriously? Can we not, as a society, make a one-time exception for a parking ticket in the case of exactly one dying woman? This doesn’t exactly bode well for expanding public support on health care reform.

So much for that happy ending.

Art direction by Kaajal Asher.

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Obama’s as-yet-resolved proposal for the epic reform on our nation’s heath care system has spawned a bumpy side effect in Washington in the form of health and pharmaceutical lobbyists swarming the congressional hill that he pledged to keep them away from during his campaign last year. To complicate matters, the proposed bill is so multi-faceted that the lobbyists themselves can’t commit to a specific position without that position shape-shifting as the bill evolves. The illustration that accompanies the article didn’t require nearly as many somersaults as this bill ultimately will, but we didn’t arrive at it quite so simply either.

Alicia DeSantis, displaying the kind of patience typically reserved for higher powers such as Buddha, art directed me through no less than ten comps in under 24 hours before we arrived at the winner printed above. Typically, I submit anywhere between three and five proposals for any given assignment, but this one played out a little differently as even a rough draft of the article wasn’t available for us to read until a few hours before the deadline. The time between Alicia giving me the assignment the day before and landing on an approved sketch almost a full day later was spent feverishly generating comps in a manic attempt to capture the essence of Obama being overrun by lobbyists. The details in the final that call out the issue of health care directly didn’t work their way in until very late in the afternoon until we were able to read the near-complete piece and have our shared ‘eureka’ moment. That moment, for me, came down to the obvious-in-retrospect realization that if your subject is confusing and complex, it’s OK to follow suit with the picture. A sampling of the comps leading up to the finished piece are presented below in sequence:

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If a programmer working for Goldman Sachs makes a copy of a code that he wrote and posts it elsewhere as an example of his body of work, does it constitute stealing? Former computer programmer Michael Osinski speculates the current Goldman Sachs/Sergey Aleynikov lawsuit on the Times’ op-ed page today.

For the illustration above, Kim Bost gave me the option of providing a single large image for the top of the page or making a slightly smaller one for the top in addition to a small crawlspace for a spot illo just beneath it. With the subject revolving around theft, this second option gave us an opportunity to, in essence, steal a chunk of the image itself to bludgeon the point home. Kim’s good.

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Art director Victor Williams helped me to set a personal land speed record for completing an assignment for this 2″ x 2″ spot for Business Week. The image concerns the suggestion that social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace etc., are on course to compete with and potentially replace sites such as Google and Yahoo as people’s default destination on the internet. Their versatility and general lean towards group connectivity establishes them as hubs for links, news feeds, shopping and inane status updates from your twice-removed high school acquaintances. Compiling all of this information on a central, personalized web hub like Facebook as a one-stop shop suggests an interesting take on the future of the internet.

Victor hit me up about this around noon on a Monday, specifying that he would need it quickly that afternoon. By 3:00, we were looking at comps, which is admittedly fast for me. It helped considerably that the ideas were blunt and simple. Many of which, pictured below, were killed ultimately nixed (with good reason).

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This piece for the Book Review concerns two books that argue that liberalism extends beyond supporting exclusively leftist policies and reminds the reader of its broader objectives. Says author Alan Wolfe: “As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take”.

Not wanting to include any of my own politics in the illustration for fear of making it look like a big chest-beating drum circle, I went for a straight-ahead literal (not liberal) approach to the material. I twisted the U.S. flag 90˚ on its side to reveal its inherent ‘L’ shape in the stripes and then I ‘liberated’ the stars. Nicholas Blechman, who from past experience has demonstrated that he is not shy about letting the image physically inhabit the text, took it even further and allowed the stars to float freely into the article. Liberals and conservatives alike who would appreciate the merits of a good visual pun might both regard such a layout as “totally badass” and they’d both be right.

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Putting aside my talent for stating the obvious, people from all corners of the country have quite a bit to weigh in on within the arena of money these days. Between the bailouts, the deficits, the stimulus packages, the unwarranted bonuses and the collective wallets from which all of those funds will ultimately be lifted from, finding an opinion or a suggestion as to how all of this money is being delegated is easy to stumble upon even if you’re lazy.

A slightly greater challenge of late has been coming up with increasingly different ways to represent this socioeconomic dungheap visually. Above are two pieces I just completed for Report on Business, a magazine released in conjunction with The Globe and Mail in Canada. The articles that they were paired with denote that free-market economic theorists, while currently playing defense to the charge that their policies are in part responsible for capsizing the U.S. economy, still have ample evidence to suggest that the brontosaurus-sized stimulus package that’s currently getting wedged through Congress could turn out to be the biggest waste of money since…well…the dawn of currency.

The piece below was done simultaneously for Business Week‘s current Management issue, concerning the fact that the government will be a much closer, much more present business partner in everyday dealings now than its ever been before.

Factoring in that each of these pieces required multiple comps in order to decide on a specific direction, I remember thinking at the time how difficult it was to keep coming up with different ways of illustrating problems with money. Now, having seen other illustrators’ work in that same issue, I feel as though I’ve been suitably taken to school. During a time in which the future of actual printed magazines is uncertain, Business Week’s art directors seem to have pulled out all their stops in assembling a roster of true artistic heavyweights to take a relatively dry subject and make it sing page for page. Alex Williamson, George Bates, Christoph Neimann, Dan Page, Harry Campbell, Kate Banazi, David Plunkert, Oliver Munday, Thomas Fuchs, Brian Stauffer, Edel Rodriguez, Jonny Hannah and James Steinberg all have pieces in this issue. All are different, all are inventive and all have in as many instances announced to me loudly that drawing ideas forth long after you’re certain that you’ve exhausted the possibilities is central to bringing one’s A-Game to such an assignment. The Business Week site for whatever reason isn’t featuring each and every one of these pieces, so I would strongly recommend a brief abandonment of the laptop, going outside and picking up an actual physical copy to see all that work showcased in one place. It’s a nice, gentle reminder of how printed materials can and should exist alongside the web. Exit soapbox.

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I contributed an illustration to the Nov/Dec issue of Mother Jones for an article chronicling some of the most notorious examples of individuals and groups attempting to disenfranchise voters during recent election years. A good bit of attention has been devoted to ACORN in the press recently and while it’s fully worthy of exploration, the infractions committed by them could be considered quaint compared to some of the epic scumbaggery accounted for here, and it doesn’t bode so well for the next few weeks either.

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This is a portrait of Pat O’Malley that I recently completed for Cleveland Magazine. Pat O’Malley was, until recently, a county recorder and Democratic Party power broker in Cleveland. Employing a spectacular lack of restraint, the depths of his multi-tasking stretched out further to include additional civic enrichment such as public brawling, an FBI investigation, and one particularly sinister toolbox. Remember how the national media went insane covering the fall of Eliot Spitzer? O’Malley should thank the stars that he didn’t work in New York. His story is, to borrow a phrase, “bonkers.”

Jen Kessen, the art director at Cleveland Mag, did a great job on the feature spread which can be viewed here.

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