posted: April 20, 2011

I just finished a one-year stint doing a column for Bon Appetìt magazine, for The Foodist column.  The Foodist is also known as Andrew Knowlton, a food critic who appears from time to time on Iron Chef America.  Basically, the column is a place where readers write in questions for Knowlton about food; the magazine would choose one of the questions for me to illustrate.
 
The column was always a chance to have fun with food items, the concepts always not too deep but more oriented towards a light-hearted solution. At left, Halloween candy!

We just got the latest issue in the mail, and Bon Appetìt has been completely redesigned.  It also moved to New York from Los Angeles, and has hired a new editor in chief.
 
The redesign looks great!  Although they dropped me and a few other regulars (we always looked forward to Neiman's column, where he did a groovy one-color image), it's good to see them still using some illustration within it's pages.
 
This one here at left was about how restaurants are at the mercy of bad reviews on yelp.com.

 
 
So, these are a few of the images that I did for the column.  Always had to fit within a square and be a silhouette.
 
Anyway, sad to see this gig come to an end.  I love drawing anything to do with food!

posted: April 7, 2011

I just did this drawing for Mihn Uong and Bernadette Dashiell at the Times, for the Dealb%k section.  A half page drawing, as an independent commentary.  I haven't seen the print edition, but apparently it ran in b/w.

I always enjoy fooling around with typography, so this was extra fun for me. Years ago I had a huge and sort of crummy letterpress in my studio and would scratch up fonts from yard sales and whatnot, print 'em out and scan them. So, I use some of those, combined with others that I find in old books and newer typesets and stuff.
Wordclouds are a fascinating recent invention.

Having gone to high school in Palo Alto in the early 80s, it's been amazing to see the growth of Silicon Valley somewhat first hand.  Later during art school, I'd return home in summer to a place called Villa Montalvo, where my father worked as the director.  Montalvo is an arts center and artist's residency located on 300 acres of land which was originally the summer home of James Phelan, the famous SF politician from the turn of the century.  With the job, my family got an apartment on the top floor of the mansion, so I'd return from NYC to this opulent house and grounds for the summers.  It was ridiculous.  Anyway, Montalvo rented out it's facilities to private weddings and parties.  One such party was the launch of none other than - the Apple MacIntosh!  Apple was just down the road, still is I think.  Anyway, it was a strange party; what I'll always remember was that they had some guy dressed up in blackface as Michael Jackson.
There was a bit of editor pull-back about the inclusion of the skateboard, but Minh went to bat for me.  Thanks Minh!!! Skateboards are going crazy around here right now, the techies like the little manual scooters too - which I considered using instead.  Maybe Jobs' next thing will be the iSkateboard. Maybe you could read the Times on it's deck?

posted: April 5, 2011

These are a series of posters I just recently finished for Pheonix, Arizona's power & water utility Salt River Project.  The idea for the campaign centered on the "magic" of on-line payments.