Tangled up in Blue Cross

This piece I just finished for The New Yorker site is up now. It's for a three-part story on the confusion, complexities and problems in the health care industry, and maybe a few solutions, as millions of Americans prepare to choose insurance plans next month:

Thinking about trying to find another health insurance policy, or even dealing with any insurance company in any capacity, makes my eyes go crossed, and my brain go numb. But this piece was fun to work on! My first one for The New Yorker! Thank you to Chris!

Also check out part two and three of the article.

C is for Conglomerate

This was a quick piece for the November issue of The Atlantic that accompanies an article on the new parent company of Google: Alphabet. The piece explains how Alphabet is striving to be a modern-day conglomerate- that hodgepodge of varying operations that were so popular in the sixties, but aside from GE, are hard to find nowadays. Will it work out? Only time will tell.

Being that it's Google's new parent company, I thought it made sense to use a bunch of web windows forming a "conglomeration," if you will, that makes the "A" in Alphabet's logo. And here's the page:

Thank you to Kara, my AD! I'll have another piece I just finished up in the December issue of The Atlantic that I'll post when it's out. Same bat time...same bat channel.

Compliments of PRINT

I just received my copy of the Fall issue of PRINT, where I have an illustration for the Rick Poyner article. It's about how internet culture has affected our language, how we read and write, and design in general. People have grown accustomed to having information broken into tiny little pieces for them by the internet. It's much quicker and easier to click a thumb or text an LOL than articulate an actual thought. Sound bites and catchphrases reign supreme, while more lengthy, nuanced views are deemed too long and time-consuming. This has implications far beyond design, but it affects our industry in particular when designers don't read about design. Poyner argues that this prevents deeper understanding of, and critical thinking about design.

I wanted to show how content is reduced down to trivial little bits. How something detailed and weighty, like an opinion or review of something, can be turned into an almost meaningless shorthand like a thumbs up, or ; ) . This web tab shredding what looks to be a (design?) magazine, and translating it into the common digital glyphs that stand in for what sometimes ought to be a much more complex expression, worked out well. And yep, that's first grader Justin Renteria's Yale Elementary yearbook picture in that article (I modified an existing magazine spread for this fictional one- from the article headline to the images- so as not to infringe on anything).

Here's a crappy pic of my issue that came in the mail the other day:

Thanks very much to my AD, Adam!

A papal piece post

Trying to catch up on posting a few things. Here's a somewhat recent piece I did for the Boston Globe Op-Ed section. This was about Pope Francis' upcoming (at the time it was published) visit, and how he differs from Popes of the recent past:

My immediate, and ultimately most successful idea was to show the three previous Popes' hand blessing someone/making the sign of the cross. But Francis' would be making a heart shape. It came from focusing on the following passage from Mary Gordon's piece: "The most important thing about him is that he is a man of compassion. He wants people to understand that God is a God of love and not judgment..."

Thank you to Nathan Estep, AD!