This past Sunday’s Op/Ed in the Times took the form of four different ‘economic postcards’— four writers chronicling four separate slices of life in various parts of the country which share how people have been managing in the wake of the ongoing economic slump. The piece above is perhaps the most optimistic of the four, describing a couple in Boise, Idaho who when faced with a serious gopher problem in their garden, meet a wildlife coordinator who’s exceedingly efficient at solving problems of that kind. This guy is far more capable than, say, Carl Spackler.

This one accompanied a piece about a young woman in Portland, OR who’s found a way to purchase organic produce using food stamps. However resourceful, such shopping is kept in check contextually with a brief detour through comparable markets in Las Cruces, NM.

This one went along with a discourse on the paradoxes of the Dallas real estate market.

Lastly, this one went along with the page’s final piece about a Providence, RI theater owner who’s switched his bills up to all comedies all the time in order to drum up business which has fallen off sharply.

The four of these images went through multiple incarnations and at least one fast last minute change within a very short window of time before locking in to the common pictorial cohesion that we arrived at for the finals. Also worth noting, this was wrapping up at the end of a particularly lengthy week and I was tired. I would credit Aviva ‘Nothing-Is-Over-Until-We-Decide-It-Is’ Michaelov for goading me into digging deep and pulling out a batch of images which ended up in a far better place than they were in when we began.

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September’s been a bit of a blur. Amidst the hopscotch of the day job, the night job, Amtrak and the Bolt Bus, I was able to knock out three pieces for three different sections for the Times. Above are two illustrations which accompanied Matt Bai’s piece in the Week In Review a few weeks back which examines the efficacy of Obama’s presidency in a more integrated, global society in which he’s increasingly tethered to the policies of other countries.

Kelly Doe art directed these two with me—and quite gracefully too when considering that these pictures began as a single spot, before it was briefly considered for the cover, before ultimately being relegated to one spot on the front page and the second piece on the interior. Amidst all of the juggling, she’s calm, that one.

If you treat your news in the same way I treat my New Yorker subscription, you can read the article three weeks too late right here.

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Next up was a quick Letters spot which collected responses to Paul Krugman’s column about the anger coming from the wealthy upper class directed at Obama on account of his raising taxes. Many of the voices who chimed in on the Letters page felt differently.

This was art directed by the Op/Ed page’s brand new assistant art director Alexandra Zsigmond. Alexandra’s good.
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Lastly, this decidedly freakier one above was done for Nicholas Blechman at the Book Review for Laura Kipnis’ book How to Become a Scandal. The book examines the psychological links between the voyeur and the public train wreck and the motives, raging ids and spectacular self deception required to initiate a public scandal. She breaks it down on a case-by-case basis, examining the particulars of Eliot Spitzer, Linda Tripp, James Frey and Lisa Nowack, the diaper-wearing, wig-donning astronaut from a few months back from which the final illustration drew its inspiration.

New projects which were begotten in places besides 620 Eighth Avenue are on the way…

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The second rush gig which capped off an epic week of little sleep was the cover for this past week’s Week In Review. Working with Kelly Doe for a fast few hours before jumping on a plane, the article describes the new modern arc of the superathlete a la Lance Armstrong, A-Rod, Lebron James, etc., and how the public’s perception of heroic athletic feats has changed from a sense of awe and aspiration to one of justifiable skepticism. Michael Sokolove kinda, sorta nails it in his opening:

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The notion of looking up to the sports hero was always dubious. Now? Forget it. The new definition of a sports hero is someone whom we don’t yet have enough information on. 

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This one happened so quickly that, in a rare, borderline miraculous feat, we were able to get a concept approved over the phone without preliminary sketches. I’ve heard tell of this feat done with other, far more seasoned designers who contribute to the Times, but being the searching, second-guessing soul that I am, it’s rare that I’m ever so comfortable committing to an idea first before trying to work it out on paper first, so this was a new one on me. Once the idea was approved, I had a few hours to obsess over how best to render it. The other version that we tried out which didn’t make the cut uses a torn paper conceit which I will absolutely hold onto for when the right assignment comes around. The sculpture won’t carry over but I’ll be sitting on those shreds of discarded paper like a mother hen.

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A quick one for the Week In Review above. Nutritionists are presently taking on a lesser-of-two-evils argument, discussing whether a child is worse off if they begin life as obese in their youth, or alternately decide to take up smoking in their teens. Nice options!

Kelly Doe and I have been working on upwards of 25+ images for a presentation that she’ll be giving at the upcoming ICON conference this week, with conveniently dovetailing deadlines of now and immediately. In the midst of that craziness, we figured what was one more?

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Last month, it was hornets. This month, it’s the WASPs (mercifully in phonetics only).

The op/ed above explores how Protestants’ latter practice of inclusion and equal opportunity in both academics as well as their broad perception of worldwide religious practices has succeeded so thoroughly that with the presumed confirmation of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court will contain zero protestants, where it had once held a definitive majority. Professor Noah Feldman, who wrote the article, takes care to stress that it’s a rare bit of good news that religious practices aren’t such a crucial, modern  distinction when determining who would be a good fit for the court of courts.

The illustration above was arrived at after my first five attempts took goose eggs at the editorial desk. A handful of the coulda-shoulda-wouldas are below.

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(I was the teeniest bit sorry that this one was relegated to the gallows).

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The art direction and negative space virtuosity comes courtesy of Aviva Michaelov.

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What began decades ago as a cadre of liberals who questioned the economic policies entwined with LBJ’s Great Society are today not much more than Republicans who constantly auger for expanded arms programs and military intervention, whatever the circumstance. At least that’s how a Neoconservative is presently defined in the review for the appropriately titled Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement by Justin Vaïsse in the NYT Book Review this week.

The original pitch for this illustration was to experiment with portraits, (not unlike what was arrived at for this piece), but when photos didn’t materialize in as timely a manner as we’d hoped, we sought out a more typographic approach and landed on the above image.

The other directions that I was playing with in the early stages leaned way too much on the author and reviewer’s present, hawkish impression of neoconservatives and didn’t make any suggestion of the movement’s origin which, all things being equal, wouldn’t have been as complete a representation of the piece as the image that was chosen. In retrospect, I’m relieved that these other ones were not considered:

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Fair and balanced art direction by Nicholas Blechman.

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When Kelly Doe handed me the rough draft for A.O Scott’s piece for the Week in Review about the midlife crisis of Generation X, I was in the middle of an allergy-infused stupor and my skull felt like it weighed 20 lbs. It is with that in mind, that one of last week’s small miracles resulted in us using not one but two of my proposed sketches being used in the final piece that ran on Sunday.

The other (and arguably greater) miracle which manifested itself in its true glory after final art was turned in was the majesty of prescription Allegra. That helped considerably.

One other sketch which was briefly on the table is below:

Art direction: Kelly Doe

Pharmacist: N/A

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A whole slew of oncologists and clinical researchers chime in on the NYT Letters section in response to their recent editorial which explained why current funding for U.S. cancer research is in arrears and what can be done to help correct it.

Art direction: Kim Bost

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I swear up and down that I have other clients besides the Times—they only require that I work faster, is all.

This one above was done for this week’s essay in the Book Review, written by the BR’s very own editor, Sam Tanenhaus. In his essay, Sam revisits The Radical Center, a book published in 2001. The book is one part policy proposals for the ten-fresh decade, while the other half explores a growing batch of mainstream voters who are strongly disenfranchised with both Republicans and Democrats. The book had the comparatively small misfortune to be published right after 9/11, when many of the book’s ideas were rendered either inaccurate or just flat-out insignificant in the wake of bigger concerns. Nearly a full decade later, Tanenhaus suggests that while the policy section of the book may still be a wash, that the authors’ vision of voter discontent was right on the money:

“The Radical Center raises the possibility that a book can be at once behind and ahead of its time, mistaken in some of its prescriptions…but true in its assessment of the costs of a dysfunctional civil society.”

Read onward!

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Art direction by the fair & balanced Nicholas Blechman. I’d post the additional sketches we were considering for the final, but some of those guys are going to get used for something down the line. This I vow.

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A question surfaced in the wake of all the reactionary threats toward members of Congress who voted in favor of the health care bill last week. That question being: “Will our country now be overrun by a giant, angry, pitchfork-toting mob?”

Benedict Carey, sidestepping much of the specific threats to Congress, takes a broader, more scientific view of that idea in his piece for this week’s Week In Review in the Sunday Times. Depending on how much healthy skepticism you hang on to day by day, Carey’s largely optimistic that angry mobs take considerable more effort to congeal than would be required to start an actual fire.

Art direction by the calm, composed, in-no-way-boiling-over-with-rage, Kelly Doe. Mercifully, she was working late at the office the night before this was due and made herself available to help me figure out whether this matchbook idea for the illustration was even going to work.

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Earlier this month, Congressman Patrick McHenry introduced new legislation proposing to place Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill and thereby removing its longtime current resident, Ulysses S. Grant.

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton and author of a book on Reagan, has a huge problem with this. In his op/ed for the 3/13 Sunday Times, he catalogs an impressive laundry list of Grant’s accomplishments that he feels that popular history has largely neglected.

In building an illustration for this, the thing that was deemed most sensible was to have Grant, larger than life, outsizing his own frame from the 50 dollar bill and growing onward. Kim Bost, in art directing, humorously took it one step further and had the top of Grant’s hair encroaching on the headline itself. However appropriate, that’s just plain funny.

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Moreover, not being the kind of guy who walks around with multiple 50 dollar bills in his wallet, you discover some pretty amazing details up close when you’ve tasked yourself with building a collage from one of them.

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Henry Paulson Jr. feels that financial regulatory reform isn’t happening fast enough. In his op/ed today, he singles out specific items to focus on in order to better assess the market’s stability and how to best gauge any substantial risk coming from any one firm which might threaten that stability.

For the illustration on the actual page, we had to compete with a big ‘ol ad in the bottom right corner, so space was tight. Kim Bost gave me the option of doing something in a smallish-sized square or something very tall and very thin. When we landed on the money monocle as our winner among the rough drafts I submitted, she did a truly knockout job on the page.

The other rough drafts that I toyed with prior to our final are below:

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