Art direction by Josh Cochran
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Another Op/Ed for this week—this one on the balancing act between raising taxes and generating government revenue.
For a person who spends an (un)healthy amount of time behind a desk, it feels as though I’ve spent the past few weeks running very, very fast.
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Art direction by Nicholas Blechman
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Two for the Times were done this past week. The first (above) for the Book Review is an illustration paired with a critical account of the new tome about the history of Goldman Sachs and how they have miraculously, (or more accurately), suspiciously survived and emerged still resilient through the current economic crisis.
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Art direction by Aviva Michaelov
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This second one was done for an op/ed calling upon Obama to honor members of the military and government who have stood up to policies permitting torture. The authors posit that since Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, having both tacitly approved of enhanced interrogation techniques, have both been awarded honors by the previous president and that Obama should stand to honor the opposing voices. Aviva provided me the rare luxury of sending me the article a short while before midnight the evening before the illustration was due, so I had all night to pull my hair out trying to figure out how to solve the problem. The extra time, in this case, truly was a gift.
Also, for those who are deathly curious: ‘Lux Veritatis’ = ‘Light of Truth.’
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Art direction: Aviva Michaelov
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Unless the advent of time travel reveals itself to us in our present time in the next few hours, the final New York Times’ Letters illustration for 2010 is above—and it concerns an issue that’s been brewing enough for the past few years to safely count on it percolating in 2011. On the state level, many of them (Illinois especially) are running on deficits between overdue payments while sponsoring tax cuts. The letters written in response to the Christmas Day editorial are all roundly angry and understandably so.
As our manic, stymieing, never-once-boring-not-even-for-a-second year of 2010 collapses in on itself like a dying star, a crazy thought: maybe 2011 is a good time to resume paying actual taxes?
Provided that those who have them now remain fortunate enough to continue having jobs?
Happy 2011! (I hope)!
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.
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…
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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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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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 Letters piece for the Times corresponds with some reader responses to the op-ed from 6/14 which explored how to best watch out for as well as prevent terrorists from detonating nuclear weapons on U.S. Soil. As a fair warning, reading both the article and the letters in tandem do an effective job of canceling out any particular ‘ray-of-hope’ type of scenario that one could gain from reading only one of the two. Nuclear weapons still more or less remain a thing too big and too scary to contain in your head for too long without going a little bit insane.
Weapon of mass art direction by Kim Bost.
This illustration for the Times’ Op/Ed Page accompanies Paul Kane’s article suggesting, among other substantial reforms to our armed forces, that the Air Force be eliminated entirely and have its resources redistributed throughout the Army, Navy and Marines (apparently, this leaves squat for the Coast Guard). To hear him tell it, the proposal sounds a lot crazier than it actually is.
As I am a sucker for dots, here’s a detail:
Leanne Shapton contacted me about working on this on a Friday night, giving me the weekend to experiment and brood. This turned out to be a blessing of sorts as I really struggled to land an idea for this article that I felt confident was going to stick come Monday morning when the comps were due. The article makes two additional reformation proposals which, while not as headline-grabbing as the Air Force suggestion, were powerful ideas nonetheless and I performed a healthy amount of self-flaggelation trying to concoct an image that could potentially encompass all three of these ideas. Ultimately, I failed in that task and Leanne, whether for good or for ill, endured more comps than usual from me on this one. The most ridiculous one below depicts an F-15 landing trajectory flying directly into a black hole before touching down.
Also of interest, the design firm Fogelson-Lubliner, who regularly contribute great pieces to the Op/Ed page, did an excellent spot for the Letters section today on the opposite page regarding U.S. torture and accountability. Good stuff.
UPDATE: Esteemed design guru Paul Sahre and his co-conspirator Sebastian Rether did the Letters’ piece documenting the responses to Kane’s piece. The letters (including one from the understandably nonplussed Air Force Chief of Staff), are all over the board, but the illustration is uniformly awesome.
The bit I did for today’s Op/Ed page in the Times proposes that having a less overtly American presence in Afghanistan and spending greater energy and focus in training their local soldiers can help to avoid many of the combat-based and diplomacy-based problems that U.S. forces incurred in Vietnam. Arthur Keller, a former C.I.A. operative who was based in Pakistan, is speaking more or less first hand.
Leanne Shapton was a big help in getting this one done. Without any overbearing art direction of any kind, she suggested very simply that I search for a historical link between both conflicts. When Keller (the author) writes about “leaving a smaller footprint” in Afghanistan than we left in Vietnam, it became the second and final cue I needed to blaze through comps that night and have art ready the next morning. Given the absurd turnaround times required for art on that page, hindsight is a true albatross when looking back at those things, thinking about how you might have approached the idea differently had you not been under such a tight time constraint. Below is another comp that ALMOST made the grade.
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