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: Ezra Furman / Cover photo by Christopher Benbow

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In acknowledgment of the fact of there being no lazier means to describe a newer band’s sound than by comparing that sound to other bands who have come before, I’ll say that if you find merit in the music of the Violent Femmes, the Pixies, Neutral Milk Hotel, Tim Buckley, They Might Be Giants, The Posies and/or The Moldy Peaches, then you will assuredly find something to like about Mysterious Power by Ezra Furman and the Harpoons.

I’m up to my armpits in new music most days at the day job, so as a personal rule, I have to be fairly taken with the band and their music if I’m going to design something music related outside of work. Such was the case with this band. A great band made up of great guys, I’m surprised they’re not bigger. Listen up.

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Art direction: John Gall

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The November Criminals by Sam Munson is a first-person account of resident smart-ass Addison Schacht: a self-loathing, pot peddling, hyper-articulate high school senior who enlists his best friend Digger (who he emphatically swears is not his girlfriend) to help investigate the mysterious death of a fellow student who was neither their friend nor their enemy. The story is told in the form of a lengthy protracted confessional college essay addressed to the admissions board at the University of Chicago.

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Between the overall mythos of high school, Addison’s verbal cadences as well as the story’s essay structure, this cover was a gift to design for. I handed my comps off to John one day, time passed and a few months later I was informed that we had an approval for the above cover with nary an art amendment requested. A sampling of other ideas I submitted in that round went like this:

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I kept waiting for a sudden, critical about-face from the publisher sending me back to the drawing board to grind out new ideas, but the moment never arrived. The good fortune in this instance all but assured that I will never have it so easy again in my life. To further cement this certainty, neither marketing, nor the editor nor the publisher seemed to mind when Addison hijacked their back cover copy with his leaky red marker either.

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Art direction by Kelly Doe

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At this point, it’s difficult to feel anything but pity for the creative forces behind the Spider-Man musical. My relative ambivalence towards Bono, U2 and musicals aside, wrangling a struggling creative endeavor with so many working parts, with so much money already spent, while under near constant public scrutiny looks like a  perfectly awful experience. Solving problems of any kind is an often ugly-looking, graceless process by virtue of the fact that failure is an essential component needed to help discover the thing that does actually, truly work. Having the privacy to indulge in those failures is just as essential if, unlike Bono, you’re an ordinary human being for whom concentration requires effort.

The Spider-Man musical has had no such luxury as of late. Since the poorly reviewed previews have begun, they’ve had the added task of doing public damage control to combat the already negative perceptions of their show which hasn’t yet properly opened. The latest maneuver of which was dismissing Julie Taymor, their original, hand-picked director, in order to publicly demonstrate that steps are being taken to refine and improve the show.

Writing for the NYT Week In Review this weekend, Patrick Healy links Taymor’s firing with other openly political gestures such as the firing of a campaign manager in mid-presidential campaign as both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton did during their failed presidential bids in 2004 and 2008. I worked with Kelly Doe on the illustration accompanying the article.

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Unlike the beleaguered musical, I had the luxuries of working on this image in relative peace, in my home, in the dead of night without interruption or anyone tapping me on the shoulder to tell me what they thought of my preliminary sketches. This was key as the final image was arrived at after all kinds of failure photographing buttons at night without decent light and grasping blindly for visual cues for an article which, at that point, had not yet been fully written. Not only that, but it had to happen quickly, so I only had to live with the hovering specter of failure for about 24 hours. All of the other trials (and errors) are below.

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“The Constitution…no longer corresponds to “reality.” Congress has assumed a secondary role to the executive, and the Supreme Court is “a marginal player.” In all “constitutional showdowns,”…the powers that make and judge law have to defer to the power that administers the law.”

Going by the review, the book’s principal conceit is that all three branches of government are equal—it’s just that the executive branch is more equal than the other two, and that may be OK. Harvey Mansfield, the reviewer, doesn’t argue the point, but he does argue the foundation of the thesis. The illustration was done post haste for the Book Review (which also boasted a gorgeous cover by Monika Aichele). Art direction by Nicholas Blechman.

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Kudos to Christopher Sergio and Catherine Casalino for distributing this petition to preserve the AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers competition, which was only recently, unceremoniously discontinued. Publishing is unarguably going through more than a few simultaneous growing pains right now, but sacrificing the inspired ideas and visual narratives that come out of designing books and book covers isn’t one of them. Signing it requires less than a minute.

UPDATE: Saved! That was quick. The petition scored over a thousand signatures in less than a week. Hot damn.

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Final cover: Art direction and design by Jason Ramirez

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Mr. Jason Ramirez at St. Martin’s Press contacted me a short while back about this book cover with an extremely succinct brief for Less Than Human: “DEHUMANIZATION. SLAVERY. OPPRESSION. HUMAN VIOLENCE. TREAT IT LIKE AN OP/ED. GO!“

Actually, he was substantially more calm and thorough than my paraphrasing above would suggest. I only heard it that way as I was in the middle of an extended traveling jag which had me on planes, trains and/or buses for eight weekends straight and as a side effect of moving seemingly all of the time, I began processing emails faster than I do on average. Travel insanity aside, passing up an opportunity to work with Jason struck me as a roundly ridiculous idea so I accepted and we were off to the races.

Jason’s initial idea for this cover was to treat the jacket as a ripped-from-the-headlines styled op/ed newspaper layout and asked me to come up with ideas for simple, direct illustrations which would support the suggestion of dehumanization. I knew to a certainty that working on an illustration for a book cover was going foster my own opinions about the application of type regardless of whether or not it was my anointed task, so Jason graciously agreed to let me submit my own type treatments for the cover in addition to his principal concept while sharing the illustrations. I was in airports for the majority of our initial correspondence, so I ended up scribbling ideas on the plane:

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To my own great aid, the direction of the sketches were given the go ahead quickly, so I worked up some semi-complete sketches which enabled both of us to experiment on various directions. Jason forged ahead with the op/ed direction (the comps of which I would post if I still had them, as they looked both awesome and completely different than what I had imagined when he told me the idea). A sampling of my own comps, traditional by comparison, are below:

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(The head-as-shackle concept was totally Jason’s idea).
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Although both of our batches of comps were cut away throughout the various rounds of approvals, the idea of the shattered hand which we had at the very beginning would prove to have enough traction to endure through to the final approved cover which Jason designed. Through measured, professional collaboration and conversation were were able to achieve the visage of rank, putrid, godless human debasement which we had sought all along. Dehumanization accomplished.

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Art direction by Alexandra Zsigmond

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The vocal end of the Times’ readership comments on whether or not judges should be permitted to engage in pet political causes. Thank you AZ!

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Art direction: Kim Maxwell Vu

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A true rarity for me–a portrait assignment(!) of Ronald Reagan(!)–for the Washington Post’s Style section above. This ran on the front of the section in conjunction with reviews of three separate documentaries being broadcast about Reagan on 100th anniversary of his birth.

There were two distinct added bonuses that came along with this assignment:

1. Despite it ultimately amounting to a killed sketch, this nevertheless did present me with a chance to take another crack at a straight, no-frills pencil drawing. Having vowed as recently as New Year’s Day to do a little more of that kind of thing this year, it seemed wrong to not indulge the opportunity. So there you go:

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2. I do love a chance to wedge the illustration into and around the copy whenever it can be done and Kim Vu was a game co-conspirator.

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Art Direction: Patricia Hwang

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This illustration for Bloomberg Business Week came together quickly after the story that Patricia Hwang and I had been working on prior to this was killed. The large oil drop is attached to a piece reporting how small, independent drilling companies are being bought up by larger oil corporations in the wake of the Gulf oil spill.

The story which we had been working on previously (which, naturally, I’m now keenly interested in reading), examines how the announcement of Goldman Sachs’ new finance reporting guidelines amount to little else than a shuffling of numbers just complex enough to present the impression of work. It’s obviously a weighty accusation, so it’s entirely possible that tabling the story while conducting further extensive reporting might have been why it was pulled. Details of the sketches I submitted are below.

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Much to my surprise, January 2011 began with a full-tilt sprint of still-in-the-works work. So, in the wake of what has been a Pamplona styled onslaught of ongoing work and activity, I’m running contrary to the content ravenous, must-post-first 24 hour news cycle by posting my own completed, belated tidbits at the end of the month, rather than the beginning. These are they:

1. SI 53 (above)
The series of illustrations I produced for the Times last January on the psychology of terrorism had the honor of being part of the Society of Illustrators Sequential & Uncommissioned show this January. Chairman Edel Rodriguez, executive director Anelle Miller and the entire crew at the Society hung and presented a beautiful group show which showcases a formidable range of styles and talent and I would encourage any and all who are interested to check it out in the next two (2) remaining days before it comes down in anticipation of what is sure to be their next great show for Book and Editorial pieces.

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2. YESTERDAY’S NEWS (Cont’d)

Art direction by Alexandra Zsigmond.

I (slowly) completed what was perhaps my most challenging assignment for the Times’ Letters section in recent memory. The Letters were in response to a Week In Review piece about Justice Scalia and the particulars of Constitutional originalists. Coming up with a spot-sized image that is devoid of snark which also somehow encapsulates the suggestion of Constitutional originalism is difficult enough on its own merits. Having to follow Paul Sahre, who had already spectacularly tackled the concept not once, but twice in the original article was an altogether separate challenge. This solution, for better or for worse, was not arrived at with ease.

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3. MAH, I MADE IT TAH HAHVAHD!
I’ve recently been working with art director Betsy Robichaud at the Harvard Business Review doing spots for their Interaction section in which their writers respond to their readers’ responses to their original pieces. A sampling of the conversations revolve around what follows:

— How emotional reasoning can sometimes trump a high IQ

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— On developing ‘disruptive’ work and business skills—skills which don’t come naturally, but substantially support an individual’s innate talents

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— How office-sponsored health and fitness programs improve productivity:

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(Approved Final)

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— Forecasting 2011′s developments in social networking

(killed sketch)

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Bertrand Russell

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1/1/11 gave me the chance to do two things I had far too few opportunities to take advantage of in 2010.

1. We had company over.

2. I drew for recreational interest only (and without deadline) for the length of the late afternoon and evening. In this instance, an as-yet-finished drawing of a very elderly Bertrand Russell. Hopefully, there will be more opportunities for this kind of thing in the next 363 days.

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