Choose Your Own Disaster

I had the pleasure of creating this cover last year, and now that it's published and available to pick up, I'm happy to post about it. Dana Schwartz is a very talented young writer who has been featured in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and many more, and currently writes for Entertainment Weekly. And you may know her not just from her personal Twitter account, but also from her extremely popular Guy In Your MFA, and Dystopian YA handles as well. She also made one hell of a book promo photo shoot! As is stated on the cover (and implied in the title), the format is like a mix between a personality quiz and a choose your own adventure book- which I loved reading as a kid- with all the deeply personal experiences you'd expect in a good memoir.

I really enjoyed reading the draft while working on this, and now I'm looking forward to reading the finished product! It was an incredibly enjoyable cover to work on, and I'm deeply humbled to say that it was well received by the author herself. Thank you to my AD, Brigid, Grand Central, and to Ms. Schwartz, for the honor! Go pick it up at your local bookstore!

Riding off into the Sunset Strip

Meant to post this a few months back... Last year I worked on designing a poster and what's called key art for the seventh season of Showtime's political thriller Homeland. The ad campaign consisted of a series of pieces, and I provided one of them. The brief called for a very simple, graphic image and needed to hit on some themes of the show: namely referencing Claire Danes' character (Carrie)'s exile from the White House, due to events from the previous season. The campaign included billboards, and subway two-sheets. If you happened to be driving down the sunset strip in Hollywood earlier this year, you may have come across this one:

If you were able to get close enough to one of the posters, here's a detail of what it would look like:

Of the sketches I turned in for the project, this inverted Washington Monument idea won out, as it hit on some of the themes they wanted to highlight, such as the fact that D.C. is the setting for this season, as opposed to NYC in previous seasons, as well as the perilous position Carrie finds herself in, being on the outs with the government. It sort of works as a Sword of Damocles, dangling overhead- or maybe that's Sword of Dainesocles, or Damoclaires... sorry, I'll stop now.

Photos of these billboards come courtesy of Jason Morgan, at Daily Billboard. I also received word  that my poster is on Indie Wire's "Best TV Posters of 2018, So Far."

Thank you to Bob, my AD on this project! 

Serenity now, insanity later

I had an illustration in this past weekend's New York Times Sunday Review, for an article on what some economists call the "resource curse" and how it affects the U.S., Appalachia in particular. The concept of the resource curse is used to explain why so many of the continents and regions around the world with the most resources- oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, fruit, etc.- are often the poorest. A simple explanation is that historically, conquering colonists arrived, ethnically cleansed or enslaved the indigenous population, and extracted all the resources out of the land, leaving little behind. Replace colonists with corporations, and things aren't too drastically different today. Although in the U.S. we more often use eminent domain as opposed to genocide. But the companies still show up, take all the resources, employing the locals for a while, and then pack up when the resource is gone, leaving behind joblessness and a severely polluted ecology- like a big, fat tick, draining it's host of blood and leaving behind an oozing, infected wound. And probably Lyme disease. Capitalism has always been a terrible way to divvy up our resources. 

The article details the way some people in these communities of Appalachia are starting to fight back against the many fracking outfits chomping at the bit to drill, baby, drill- having learned some lessons after the coal companies had their way with the land for so, so long. I chose to have some fracking rigs in the middle of a lush Appalachian landscape, with the rich color being drained from the picture postcard setting, like an oil spill slowly spreading over the land. Here's a view of the spread:

You can read the story here. Thank you to Nathan, my AD on this one!