Category Archives: Drawings and Illustration

An Illustration for Stack America

Stack America is a neat service in which subscribers get a curated bundle of independent magazines sent to them every other month. The titles change with each delivery, but all are selected by editor Andrew Losowsky from among the best of the many eclectic, hard-to-find titles produced by the independent press.

The subscription also includes bi-monthly installments from what Stack America calls “The Designers Series”: graphic prints created exclusively for Stack America by invited designers. Andrew asked me last year to create something for this series, but I was reluctant to say yes for lack of a good idea.

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A Sketchbook Book

If you’re still looking for a great holiday present, It’s not too late to run down to your local bookseller or order overnight delivery for this terrific book I just got my hands on: it’s called “Graphic: Inside the Sketchbook of the World’s Great Graphic Designers,” and it’s another production from the prolific Steven Heller, who co-edited the book with Lita Talarico.

Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to be included within the 352 pages of drawings, doodles, paintings, collage and random visual goodness from over one hundred prominent graphic designers. On page 340 (the book is organized alphabetically by last name) you’ll find about a dozen sample pages taken from the many sketchbooks that I’ve kept over the years. In addition to my own work, there are samples from a ton of amazing luminaries including Gary Baseman, Michael Bierut, Henrik Drescher, Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Bruce Mau, Christoph Niemann, Art Spiegelman and many others.

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Drawing Power at The Times

Sketchbook Obsession at The New York TimesThe latest exhibition at The New York Times art department’s 7th floor gallery space is called Sketchbook Obsessions, and it opens tomorrow evening, Thu 16 Jul, at 7:00p. If you’re in New York and can make it, you’re more than welcome to do so — just send an R.S.V.P. as soon as you can.

This show is all about sketchbooks, and it features a blizzard of pages from the sketchbooks of some of the brightest names in design and illustration. I’ve been watching my colleagues here as they’ve been hanging the show over the past couple of weeks, and it looks great. The wall is literally covered with countless amazing doodles, and it really captures that immediate, raw energy of unconstrained sketching, the instantaneous transmittal of ideas to paper via pencil. It’s going to be a fun show, and best of all it’s free.

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In Today’s Times

Fun fact: page A20 of today’s New York Times features an illustration that I did for the letters column. It’s my first illustration to appear in the paper — not that I really consider myself an illustrator, but I did study the trade at art school, so I’m pretty happy when I can provide some resolution to those hopeful early years of dreaming about appearing in the Times. This piece accompanies reader letters responding to an article that ran on 18 Mar about jurors triggering mistrials through unauthorized use of search and social media. It’s a simple idea executed as simply as I could manage.

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Patrick Thomas at The New York Times

Oof, I’m embarrassingly late on posting about this: English-born, Barcelona-based illustrator Patrick Thomas will be featured in a one-man exhibition at The New York Times building here in New York City.

This is something that is going to happen very soon. And when you see me say “very soon” in this context, you should read that as “The show’s opening reception is tonight, at 7:00 PM, hors d’œuvres served.” So if you’re here in the city and have a penchant for gorgeously screened, conceptually challenging graphic design as commentary, you should R.S.V.P. and come on by, meet the artist and mingle a bit with the Times art department. I’ll be there.

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Doodles from the Edge

Because I’m a little exhausted — okay, I’m a bit burnt out — I’m posting a kind of a throwaway piece today, something to tide over hungry readers until I can put myself back together sufficiently to hammer out a full fledged post.

Herewith, a collection of doodles from the margins of my notebook, accumulated over the past eight or nine months. For all things Times-related, I use one notebook per year — a Moleskine Cahier Notebook — and so everything goes into its pages, including the random drawing I’ll do when a meeting is, ahem, less than fully engaging.

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Crumpled Up

Lately, I’ve been trying to turn down invitations to collaborate on other people’s projects because I feel that I can ill afford the time. With four speaking appearances coming up in the next six weeks and no shortage of other distractions, I’ve been cramming like mad in preparation.

But not long ago, Chris Vivion and John Loomis of Blue Eyes Magazine asked me to design title cards for two of their routinely beautiful online exhibits of documentary photography: “Borderland” by Carolyn Drake, a look at Ukraine at a crossroads between the traditional and the modern; and “City of Fathers” by Dan Seltzer, a visit to Hebron, where a few hundred Jewish settlers live amidst 150,000 Palestinians. It was just the kind of challenge that I like: it revolved around substantive content and entailed a conceptual mode of thinking — illustration, of a sort.

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Illustrate Me No More

When Liz Danzico and I launched our new site A Brief Message last week, it was also effectively the end of Illustrate Me. That project, which started in May of last year and ran more or less into early this year, was my first attempt at trying to actively integrate illustration into my online work; each month I invited a designer or illustrator to create art to accompany the previous month’s archives of this site.

I had a great time doing it, and I was lucky enough to get some truly wonderful contributions from some terrific artists. Ultimately, however, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t yet and was unlikely to ever reach a point where Illustrate Me achieved that satisfying effect that I look for in the meaningful use of any illustration.

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