I believe
My wife is a Hong Konger so I’ve had the chance to visit Hong Kong enough to feel a connection to the city. As you can imagine, the news has been very heartbreaking regarding the protests. Christopher Mok is opening a new gallery in Hong Kong and asked for a piece for an exhibit dedicated to the protests. Naturally I said said yes.
In my book, creating protest imagery is a tricky balance. Many ideas can be too simplistic but you need an immediate image to catch the eye. Demonizing an opponent makes for great visuals, but often seems like a creatively lazy way to communicate. Offering solutions like “peace” lose meaning because it is easy to call for peace but often impossible to achieve peace.
The solution I chose was trying to find a space where an emotional connection could happen. The main emotion a lot of my Hong Kong friends feel at the moment is heartbreak. My approach was hope in the face of impossible odds. As long as there is hope, there is a chance for the landscape to change. The Terracotta army of China was the inspiration for the metaphor of almost impossible obstacles Hong Kong faces. The yellow umbrella has become a symbol for this hope.
Much thanks to Chris for inspiring me to create a piece for a city that is near and dear to the heart.
Fly me to the moon
Laura Baer at New Jersey Monthly called requesting illustrations for a series of stories about the future of education. Since the story was about reforms in place and ready to be launched, a playful space metaphor seemed the perfect idea. Since I went to elementary school in the 60’s the space program was a symbol of progress and hope.
Much thanks to Laura for letting me channel the inner school child for this assignment.
Ghosts in the mobile machine
Computerworld Magazine AD Stephen Sauer called with a fun project for a series of spreads about mobile security. Security is always a fun subject for me because it usually comes down to facing or avoiding fears. Since this project was for an online publication, bold colors seemed perfect and the background was kept very simple to give the designer options for working with type.
I have a nice relationship with ComputerWorld and they always seem to select my favorite sketches.
Here’s the art:
And here’s the final spreads:
Look out below
An email popped in my box from my financial advisor about the Alibaba IPO. Many clients were interested and he advised against it because he felt people were too enthusiastic. By coincidence I had received an assignment from Dan Smith from the Wall St Journal about the phenomenon of IPO’s shooting up at the beginning only to fall sharply after the excitement was over. It was a quick assignment and fortunately a story like this is always a metaphor for risk or danger. Most of the mistakes people make are looking in the wrong places for danger only to be surprised.
Balloons seem to be a theme for me this year and it seemed perfect for a story about unbridled hope. A nice accident was the choice of red thorns. I sometimes use red to communicate danger but it is also a stock symbol for down markets.
Much thanks to both the Wall Street Journal and my advisor for seeing eye to eye.
Training day for Sphere Magazine (Hong Kong)
Working for Hutchison Whampoa’s Sphere Magazine is a huge undertaking for an illustrator. You are asked to illustrate the cover plus a series of illustrations for 2 to 3 articles. Besides creating a series for an article about cities of the future, I was also asked to create a series for an article titled, Training Day. Since the article was about training to prepare for any disaster, my inspiration was loosely based on monster movies from Japan. I always loved how everyone ran into action in uniforms and safety helmets when the alarms went off. Since the client had concepts for the illustrations, this was a way to make it work with my style.
Greg Crandall, publisher of Hong Kong Media, is a friend of many years and we were both excited to have a chance to work finally work on a project. It was almost like we were playing make believe at work.
Clean money for Time Magazine
Andree Khalmorgan called with an assignment for Time Magazine about Wall Street’s infatuation with clean energy. Clean energy has become big enough to catch Wall Street’s eye and financing they can provide could be a huge boost for the growth of clean tech.
Andree and I go way back to Businessweek days so it’s always fun to reconnect and nice to work together again. I thought it might be fun to do a humorous image of solar panel and windmill characters with money raining down. Having lived though the go go tech years of the 90’s it’s easy to see the impact Wall St can have when they love a sector.
When I was a child watching movies, an animated ad with dancing drinks, popcorn and candy would sing along to the tune of “Let’s all go to the movies”. This must be the reason I love humanizing inanimate objects.
Cities in the sky
It has been a good year for working on assignments requiring multiple illustrations and when long time friend Greg Crandall called with a request to illustrate the entire issue of Hutchison Whampoa’s magazine, “Sphere” I quickly said yes. Greg is the owner of Hong Kong Media LTD and we have history going back to the 80’s. We both worked with many of the same magazines born during the tech boom so it was only natural the assignment would be about designing cities for the future. Much to my delight, they requested a Jetson’s like approach to the art. Once again I was more than happy to comply.
It’s not often you get a request to indulge your childhood pleasures.
