Cyclops v Kronberg: who will reign supreme? More importantly, how red shall the rivers run? Will the lamentations of their children be endless? And do they even have children? I never found out.
I’ve joined up with City O’ CIty and Deer Pile as their resident designer. Looking forward to crafting plenty of awesome posters and more for one the most vibrant corners in Denver.
After many months of planning and editing and illustrating, the book is entirely complete and is scheduled for publication later this Summer.
‘Joonie’ is the product of Daniel Landes, perhaps best known to the public as the founder and president of Denver’s WaterCourse Foods. He and artist Ravi Zupa teamed up for this mythic fantasy combining equal parts Watership Down, Studio Ghibli, and Dune. Author and fellow polymath Jason Heller came on board for the editing duties, and I was recruited to design the entire thing.
In addition to the cover design, I did all interior layout and planning, taking Dan’s apocalyptic, mystical tale and translating it to a product that would feel timeless but not juvenile. I still wish we could’ve done color throughout the book, but concessions were made to keep the manufacturing and retail costs low. I can’t wait to see the physical book when it rolls off the presses this Summer.
Joonie and the Great Harbinger Stampede, sample of interior layout. The goal was to balance an almost storybook presentation with the needs of a serious, adult novel.
Designing The Onion AV Club’s local cover each week was always a challenging exercise in making the most with the least available space. Everything is a learning experience.
A pro-bono poster I did for Wax Trax’s 33⅓ Birthday Bash/Record Store Day 2012. I literally rushed this design out in about 3 hours, which sort of stings as I’ve spent days on designs that didn’t come out this well. The poster ended up being screenprinted and plastered all over town, and led to a lot of ‘buzz,’ as apparently-honeybee-obsessed marketing execs like to say. Mission accomplished.
More Onion AV Club hilarity. Luckily, I had a great editor who gave me free reign to follow a goofy idea to its ultimate conclusion (in this case, addressing the quizzical inclusion of Pretty In Pink into a sci-fi film event). My only regret is not putting a plastic light saber in there, somehow.
Visual design is about solving creative problems and addressing specific challenges. Or, it can just be about making something that has no other reason for existing other than: it looks neat. This would be the latter.
In celebration of Record Store Day and in honor of those awkward, unshaven masses digging through crates and foregoing social interaction in lieu of unearthing a rare Ethiopian electro album from the early 80s, I transformed the Denver/Boulder AV Club’s splash page into a vintage 45. Wrapping text in such an extreme fashion is always tricky, but I thought this turned out quite nice, thank you very much.
BONUS POINTS: Note the now-obsolete Decider brand, the poorly-rationalized rebranding of the AV Club’s local content. They have since become what we all suggested: city.avclub.com.
