This issue was jammed in between a couple of HUGE projects that required way more time than client connection and as a result I really didn’t get to spend as much time as I normally do on it. But, that’s not to say that the time I did spend wasn’t worth it because I really love how this one turned out. The cover and feature story is about how as you get 10 or 15 years into your career you can get stuck (actually that’s exactly how my editor pitched the story idea to us). So we kicked around a bunch of ideas and none were really jumping out as “the one” so we went back to that core idea of “being stuck” and it just worked. I developed some sketches for how this could carry across the cover and feature spread and we set about shooting it all.

So above is the cover and below is the feature spread and the final page of the feature (and facing page). The idea is the we go from a close up on the cover to a full length shot where we see the guy trying to squeeze through the headline type that he’s obviously stuck in. I orginally intended to have a really simple use of type and colour but it seemed really creepy, so we pushed the design and colours into a more “comic booky” design and that solved that problem.

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This issue’s cover and feature story was about the new 4-year strategy for The Co-operators so the trick was trying to find an interesting way to present this. Maybe it was because I was just back from my vacation to South Africa and had spent a lot of time in airports, but for some reason the “preparing for take-off” headline just seemed to sell things best. The cover above was shot in studio and editted by my afterwards to add some visual pop to it.

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One of the reasons I’ve been so busy lately is that I’ve been doing a lot of extra illustration work which is really exciting. Anyway, above is the original artwork for a piece I did for The Co-operators for a strategy piece. They came to me with the concept already fleshed out, so it was really my job to make it interesting. Below is the revised painting to incorporate different colours and maple leafs for a more Canadian feel (?) and then the final piece is the art in layout. It’s nice to see how your art is handled by other people because they make decisions that you wouldn’t. I wasn’t so sure about the revised colours, but in layout I think it works pretty well – I still love how the original turned out though!

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The cover and feature article this issue is actually a bit of a set up for the next issue which covers the new 4-year strategy for The Co-operators. So this one is focussed on the market research that’s informing the decisions about the future. As always, there were a bunch of competing ideas, but the “giant eyeball” won out. I’ll admit, it’s kind of freaky, but it definitely gets attention.

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Well it’s been awhile… I’ve been swamped with a ton of other things going on and keeping the site up-to-date with the latest work that I’ve got hasn’t been high on my list of things to do. And really, that’s a shame because a lot of what’s been occupying my time has been design and illustration work and I really need to post some new work to get back up-to-date. Anyway, I’m going to try to make an effort to post some new stuff from the past several months and we’ll see how it goes!

See you in a couple of months again…