Benjamen Purvis

Last week I created a new Facebook gallery of conceptual drawings and finished products:

I 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.