Keep the holidays calm and bright

Our On Parenting blogger Janice D’Arcy talked to a bunch of experts about how to handle various family dilemmas that come up during the holidays. I hired Michael Hirshon to do some light-hearted illustrations around some of the dilemmas mentioned ...

20 gift ideas for less than $50

After talking with the reporter about the gift guide she’d created, I realized that the price point was what differentiated it from past gift guides. I brainstormed 10 or 15 different ways to approach the story and began leaning toward ...

Warm hearts on cold days

Like last year, Local Living’s Thanksgiving day cover story featured struggling food pantries and ways for readers to volunteer in their communities. My challenge: do something different with the same story and no money. I called on Felix Sockwell, whose ...

No space? No money? No experience? No problem!

The challenge this week was do something different than last year with essentially the same story idea: holiday entertaining tips. With hardly any budget remaining for illustrations this year, I chose to use stock photography to create something lighthearted. The ...

Pure Gold

Last week, I had the pleasure of art directing the photo shoot of Mitchell Gold’s DC loft. A week prior to the shoot, I visited the condo with reporter Jura Koncius, which allowed me to visualize the space and come ...

2011 Virginia voters guide

I worked with Harry Campbell to create this concept for the Virginia voters guide. The challenge was to create an original cover that was different from the previous Virginia voters guide cover that ran only two months prior. I had ...

A kid-friendly commute?

To illustrate this story, I took one of Metro’s rail maps and stripped away all the text and lines, leaving just the stops. I tried versions where I drew in the lines with crayon, but finger paint was much more ...

School year survival: 8 strategies for parents

After doing a full-scale back-to-school issue three weeks prior, my challenge was to come up with another way to tell the back-to-school story. The cover story offered advice for how parents can navigate the school year, since it’s not just ...

Virginia voters guide

The illustration by The Heads of State works on two levels: it signaled to Virginia readers that we had information about their candidates and also keyed to our voters guide cover story.

Back to school 2011

I worked with illustrator Jared Andrew Schorr on Local Living’s back-to-school issue. I asked him to illustrate the cover headline as well as the table of contents and department labels to give the issue a cohesive feel and to set ...

If this is hard to read …

I wanted to come up with a clever way to draw readers into our consumer-friendly package on eye care, so I decided to present the headline as an eye chart. Wanting to emulate an eye chart to the letter, I ...

‘They think they will live forever’

I began working with two images the photographer shot for the cover: a detail from a street-side memorial and a look at the hilly road that was the site of several car accidents. The editors gave me headlines for each ...

Aging’s evolving puzzle

When I first learned that we’d be doing a story on seniors, I had the idea to do a typographic cover since no single photo would be able to represent the 12 distinct communities we covered. After meeting with the ...

The myth of the terrible teen

Inspired by the idea of a defaced yearbook, I hand lettered the headline and drew devil horns on a stock image of a teenage boy. For the inside display, I drew a halo over the same teenager since the column ...

Healthy U.

The story compared area college dining halls in terms of healthy offerings. One local university in particular had a healthy dining program so I had the reporter ask the nutritionist to put together a healthy meal in the dining hall ...

Get ready to grow

I collaborated with illustrator Julie Notarianni to create a seed packet to kick off our spring gardening coverage. She painted the packet texture and central vignette (even incorporating the garden writer in the scene!). I added the border and seal ...

How to do spring break smart

I wanted to give this cover a nostalgic, literary feel since many of the writer’s ideas had to do with reading, getting back to nature and enjoying the simple things in life. After designing the headline, I felt like the ...

Renew, reuse, refresh

The story offered lots of tips for updating your interiors on the cheap, using what you have. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a photo for the cover, so I started looking through stock photos. When I found a green sofa, I immediately ...

2011 legislative preview – D.C.

I created three versions of this cover — Maryland, Virginia and D.C. — using type to highlight the issues that would be facing the state/district in the coming year. Similar to a word cloud, issues that had more significance were ...

A Family Almanac Christmas

Time for giving

I worked with illustrator George Bates for our community news story about how to help families in need during the holidays. I hired him because I loved the way he had incorporated small figures to create larger shapes in his ...