I just made a new Facebook gallery showcasing handmade signs I’ve spotted around town.
Handmade signs
July 8th, 2010Sketchbook gallery
June 30th, 2010Last week I created a new Facebook gallery of conceptual drawings and finished products:
July issue; SPD.org
June 22nd, 2010The July issue of Seattle Met is out, but rather than read about it here, why not read about it at SPD.org?
You can see more designs and my commentary in the Newmanology Facebook gallery, published today.
And here’s a video of the issue’s flash mob cover shoot:
Evolution of a spread
June 22nd, 2010Here’s a time-stamped look at the evolution of a spread in the July issue of Seattle Met. Because the feature was pushed from June to July, I got to work on it a little more than I would a normal feature. I spent a small amount of time on it each day for a couple weeks.
June
May 24th, 2010The June issue of Seattle Met hits stands this week.
In case you can’t read that headline, it says Trails:
There’s some nice stuff in the issue:
The iPhone photo I snapped of a guy changing the Lusty Lady marquee made it into the Mudroom:
This month we debut a new look for Style Counsel, swapping out the all-white backgrounds of the past with a wooden floor and the shadow of the subject cast against the wall. I love the look of it:
We shot this months’ Quote Unquote at Nemo’s. I took a couple iPhone photos of the setup:
That’s writer Matt Halverson posing as an employee sweeping up, waiting for the drum solo to end. And that’s my watch he’s wearing.
We just received some SPJ awards for our work in 2009. My designer Melissa Robinson and I got a first place award for the design of the Adult Ed feature:
In that same category, I get a second place award for my design of the Meltdown Survival Handbook:
And Melissa took third place in that category with another design. I got a first place award for the opening spread design of the Heist feature:
And in the same category I got a second place award for my 5 Days … spread design:
And Melissa got third place in that category, for a feature she designed before I joined the magazine. I also got second place for cover design:
José Mandojana took first place for best portrait for his Paul Giamatti photo:
And John Keatley got first place in feature photography for Atmospheric Disturbances:
John also took first place in portfolio photography. And the editors did just as well — we got something like 35 awards in total. It was a great way to close out my first seven issues of the magazine.
Also in June: I’ll be going to Rhode Island for my first time for my first-ever magazine convention, the CRMAs. Should be exciting to meet others in the business.
Year Two, Issue One …
April 23rd, 2010There’s something exciting in those packages — something I’ve been working on for the past six months. In the first issue of my second year at Seattle Met, we introduce my redesigned logo:
I’d never designed a script logo before, and I tried a lot of unconventional experiments to get the right look. I write about it in my art director’s note, which replace’s May’s editor’s note:
I worked with our marketing director to put together a Facebook gallery of more pictures of the evolution:
We decided to ease readers and distributors into the transition by printing a special newsstand edition that has a cover wrap with a scaled down version of the old logo on it:
On the other side of that cover wrap is a note from the publisher, explaining why we decided to change our name from Seattle Metropolitan to our nickname, Seattle Met.
It was an exhausting process, but I’m really happy with the results. The old knockout logo was so difficult to work with. This one should be a lot of fun.
Also in the May issue: I redesigned the table of contents for my second time, this time going from one page back to two:
A profile of a stuntman:
Best neighborhoods:
And a feature about Seattle’s Millennium Bomber:
Now, back to work on the June issue …
Stag Dot in French Pop art
April 14th, 2010At the beginning of February I received an email from Julie Ansiau, a French photographer, artist and mom living in Paris. Until then I was unaware of her work, but as a big fan of Pop art, I immediately fell for her hand embroidered “popquilts”:
She told me she’s participating in a contemporary art fair in Paris this June, for which she planned to embroider a fake concert poster on felt. She wanted to reference vintage Vegas programs, and was hoping to set the headline type in Stag Dot, the font I commissioned for my 2007 redesign of Las Vegas Weekly.
Although typographer Christian Schwartz now sells Stag Dot, Julie was working with a tight budget, and didn’t want to spend $75 to use just three letters. Eager to see what she’d do with it, I happily sent her a copy to use for her piece. Two months later, Julie sent me a photo of the final product, and was thoughtful enough to include behind the scenes shots of the making of her newest popquilt:
I love it! I’m honored to see Stag Dot in Julie’s work. And I feel so flattered that other people found a creative use for a font I honestly thought wouldn’t have a life outside of Las Vegas Weekly. I’ve now seen Stag Dot in Esquire, on the cover of Bostonia, and as the logo for BBC radio personality Terry Wogan’s website. I get a thrill out of it.
Las Vegas Weekly
April 11th, 2010I was really excited to see the cover of the latest Las Vegas Weekly (April 8-14, 2010), featuring the guys from Pawn Stars, my current favorite show on TV:
I love the colors and energy of the photography and design — it reminds me of a great Rolling Stone cover. And each character is perfectly represented here. I’m really envious of this one.
(By the way, I snapped this shot of the Old Man with my iPhone on Christmas Eve, when I took my nephew, a fellow Pawn Stars fan, to the pawn shop:)
My buddy Ryan Olbrysh, who’s been art directing the Weekly for about a year now, is only the fourth art director the Weekly’s had since it launched in 1998. Here’s a little history, if you’re interested.
Lynne Adamson was the art director for the first year, after Greenspun Media Group bought Scope magazine and relaunched it as Las Vegas Weekly:
Back then I was attending film school at UNLV, and working as a junior model builder for Steve Wynn’s Atlandia Design. The model department served as Steve’s toybox, and we were the final stop of the personal tour he gave to friends and associates. Our highly detailed models always drew gasps from Steve’s astonished audiences. This Bellagio model was the first one I ever worked on (along with a team of extremely talented senior builders), and it remains my favorite:
I’d been a casual reader of Scope, but I hadn’t heard about Las Vegas Weekly until a fellow film student told me that my film, Pictures of Girls, had been referenced in an interview with UNLV Professor Francisco Menendez. I never found the interview — not even with subsequent access to their archives, which were managed pretty poorly those first couple years — but I became a casual reader of the Weekly after that.
In 1999, publisher Chris Rohland (who would later work for the New York Press, and was publisher at the time they “secured their place in hell” by running a 2005 cover story called “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope”) brought in his friend and fellow Texan Bingo Barnes to take over as art director. Bingo promptly redesigned the publication and its logo. Whereas Lynne’s design emphasized the word Vegas:
Bingo’s logo emphasized the word Weekly:
Here are some of Bingo’s covers:
Bingo liked to do scratch board illustrations, and executed many of his covers in that style. This one was featured in a Print Regional Design Annual in 2001, and Bingo was interviewed as an ambassador for graphic design in the Southwest:
In March of 2000, when MGM Grand announced plans to buy Mirage Resorts, and Steve Wynn left the company to strike out on his own, I feared Atlandia Design’s model department would quickly close its doors. After all, the models we produced were extremely expensive, and were becoming less vital as 3d software became the standard. I interviewed for a graphic designer job with Bingo and Lynne (ten years ago this month), and in May of 2000 I began working for the Weekly. (A month or so later, my colleagues at Atlandia Design each received handsome severance packages when the department shut down. My former boss went on to form Pentagon Studios, and still builds fantastic architectural models today.)
Bingo was quite a character, as you might imagine by his self-applied name. Here’s a shot of him in a kiddie pool in his backyard, taken a week or so after I started working with him. He’s The Dude-looking guy in the swim mask and American flag cape. (I’m the pale guy with the red hair standing next to him; Lynne’s the woman with red hair, under the umbrella.) His concept for this cover is: “The Weekly’s staff in a kiddie pool, looking pissed.”
Bingo and his wife left Las Vegas for Idaho in 2001, when they purchased Boise Weekly. Bingo’s wife served as publisher, and Bingo served as editor and art director. Lynne Adamson once again took over as art director of Las Vegas Weekly:
A year later, the company made Lynne its advertising creative director, and had me handle the duties of the Weekly art director. I jumped at the opportunity, even though I wasn’t given the title or pay. Unlike my predecessors, I began photographing or illustrating nearly every cover myself, and was even providing ideas for cover stories. I pitched profiles on Rudy Ray Moore, aka Dolemite, and Star Wars costumers that summer:
I shot this cover in the bathroom at a strip club:
And I had Mormon missionaries strike B-boy poses in a hot Las Vegas alley:
I began redesigning the logo that summer — we wanted something more diverse. My redesigned logo also emphasized the word Weekly, but it was in a less idiosyncratic style than Bingo’s. Mine was meant to work well with light covers and heavy covers. It was the first logo I’d ever designed, and it debuted in October, 2002:
(My 3d version is most commonly used on subsequent covers:)
I became the Weekly’s official art director that same month. But unlike my predecessors, I had no dedicated designers — just minor help on production days. And my post-9/11 art budget was less than $200 per issue for the next two years — so I had to photograph or illustrate almost all original content myself just to get by. And I was designing almost every page, working 50 to 60 hours a week on average. It was intense, but a great way to develop as an art director.
I used my brother for this one, and photographed it in my mom’s living room:
I shot this one in front of the model’s garage door, in drizzling rain. It went on to win Gold and Judge’s Choice awards at the Las Vegas AIGA competition that year:
This is one of the rare times when I used a stock photo. Since I took a lot of pride in avoiding stock, I went crazy with the type to compensate for it:
Over the years I tried to diversify as an illustrator, so that readers didn’t get the impression that they were looking at the same guy’s artwork on the cover every week:
And I worked models onto the cover on a regular basis. For one thing, they were available at no charge, and always boosted circulation. But my main intention was to playfully reflect the sex-obsessed identity of Las Vegas. The idea came to me in my first year as art director: I live in a city that promotes itself to the world as being sexy and adventurous. Locals don’t even think twice about taking their kids to the movies at a casino (almost every movie theater in Vegas is in a casino), passing half-naked cocktail waitresses who are serving alcohol to gamblers. I am not the art director of just any weekly arts and culture publication; I am the art director of a Las Vegas weekly arts and culture publication. I want my magazine to look like its city …
So I often put half-naked girls on the cover. And I usually did it while paying homage to other areas of graphic design I loved:
The Blaxploitation movie poster:
Pulp magazine covers:
Propaganda:
Biblical references (Eve in the Garden of Eden):
I even referenced one of Bingo’s old Las Vegas Weekly covers:
We quickly earned a reputation for having scantily clad women on our covers, and I have to admit: I resented it a little, even though I was largely responsible for it. I just hated the idea that people were overlooking the thought and effort that went into those things, that they weren’t appreciative of the idea that I was reflecting Las Vegas — that they were just seeing half-naked girls, and dismissed their creativity. I would have preferred to have had a reputation for having imaginative, spirited covers. After all, I put just as much thought and effort into making my guy cover photos memorable:
Still, I didn’t shy away from the whole scantily clad women reputation. When I shot the Lucy the Slut puppet from Avenue Q, I persuaded the producers to let me photograph her topless. I wanted to give her the Las Vegas treatment, even if she was just a puppet:
(By the way, the show’s producers loved that photo so much that they made it a two-page spread in the official Avenue Q book.)
Some of my favorite covers didn’t involve people at all. I love how my Fandango-inspired puppet turned out:
And my craigslist-inspired type cover still amuses me:
By the time I got laid off in October of 2008, I’d photographed or illustrated over 200 Las Vegas Weekly covers myself. And in the days before my leave, I’d been working on a special logo for our tenth anniversary cover:
I even had a large X made from red plastic, using a laser cutter like the ones we used at Atlandia Design. The idea was to have three different covers, with a different person holding the X on each one.
The tenth anniversary issue came out in December of 2008, two months after I got laid off. The cover did not feature my custom logo, or the red plastic X. They’d decided to go a different route by then. But, to my surprise, the cover did reference twenty covers I’d photographed or illustrated during my time as the Weekly’s third art director. (And others that I’d art directed, but didn’t personally photograph.)
It was illustrated by Jerry Miller, an old colleague of mine from Atlandia Design:
Anyway, I’m happy that Ryan’s my successor at the Weekly. Not just because he’s a great friend of mine, but because he has the same kind of passion for the publication that I had. The first thing I do when I get to the office on Thursday mornings is check to see what Ryan’s done with the latest Weekly cover. I’m excited to see where he goes with it.
Oh, and when I return to Las Vegas to visit family and friends this July, I’ll be staying at my old buddy Steve Wynn’s place. Well, Wynn resort, anyway.
One year later
March 24th, 2010I close out my first year at Seattle Met with the April issue, which hits stands this week.
Here’s an illustration I did for the Mudroom opener:
I sketched out a concept for an article about restaurants leaving Belltown for South Lake Union, and had my intern Maya Kimmel get started on vector signage in Illustrator.
I swapped around the order, dropped in neon lettering I made for my Las Vegas Weekly redesign back in 2006, then added lighting effects in Photoshop.
Here it is on the page:
My intern Lia Cerizo illustrated Milton and the background for this piece. Then I assembled them into a single file and added type, graphics and distress.
I worked with my designer Melissa Robinson for this road trips opening spread. I thought it’d be impactful to explode the headline and folio into something huge and unexpected.
Melissa handled the rest of the feature herself. Turned out really nice:
For her first assignment with the magazine, my photo intern April Brimer came up with a great concept for these shots she took of an actor who’s performing in a one man show:
Although I shot plenty of models for Las Vegas Weekly, it was never fashion photography. So for this issue I participated in my first fashion shoot, photographed by Melissa O’Hearn:
Laura Cassidy, the fashion editor, had the idea to work plants into the shots. I suggested we go extreme and abstract with the plants, and had the photographer shoot through leaves that were almost touching the glass of her lens.
The result is this blurry, colorful frame:
For this photo, I had her shoot with a scarf pressed up to her lens, obscuring half the frame:
It was a fun project, and much less stressful simply art directing the photos, rather than art directing and shooting the photos. This was the first feature I’ve designed that has substantial white space, too. I was a little nervous going into this, but now I’m really looking forward to my next fashion feature.
For our new feature Quote Unquote, we get to know Keli Carender, aka Liberty Belle. She’s credited with launching the Tea Party movement last summer. Photographer John Keatley had the great idea to put her in period clothing, rented from the University of Washington’s theater department. I added, “We should make it look like an old painting, and have her drinking hot tea!” (I added the texture to the background and steam to the cup in Photoshop). Here’s how it turned out:
I also shot video of John taking this photo:
The day after that shoot, I went to work a little later than usual, and was lucky enough to snap a photo of something I’ve been hoping to get since I’ve lived here: The guy changing the Lusty Lady marquee.
Looking forward to exciting new things in my next year at Seattle Met …
Naked, Las Vegas
March 4th, 2010On Monday my buddy Ryan, who’s got my old job as art director of Las Vegas Weekly, pointed me to the trailer for the movie Stripped, a documentary that follows photographer Greg Friedler as he compiles the fourth and final book in his “Naked” project — a series of before and after pictures of people clothed, then naked. The trailer includes a couple shots of Greg reading from the August 09, 2007 issue of Las Vegas Weekly:
Not one of my favorite Weekly covers. The brown paper band wasn’t part of the original concept; I just wound up using it because the original concept didn’t fly:
I also hate how Photoshopped the girls are in that final cover. I was trying way too hard to imitate Jill Greenberg’s look back then.
I was thinking of that cover in December, when I was working on Seattle Met’s “Love & Lust” cover. I wanted another chance to do that brown paper band, this time with intent:
(I was also concerned about repeating myself with that device, but my editor told me not to sweat it too much.)
While I’m on the subject of one of my Las Vegas Weekly covers appearing in a movie, I thought I’d re-post my favorite known occurrence: My “Celebrity Stalker” cover (illustrated by Dan Sipple) –
– in a scene from the porno movie Big Tits at Work:








































































































































