True Crime

I’ve always loved, loved, LOVED the covers that graced all the various pulp magazines from the ’20s through the ’40s. Their incredibly eye-catching blends of lurid images, imaginative, fun letterforms and brilliant color palettes always spoke directly to my pop sensibilites, and has had an immeasurable influence on what I do. So I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I was bubbling over with perspiring enthusiasm when I accepted this assignment from Josh Baker at Taschen America: he asked me to design the cover for “True Crime Detective Magazines: 1924-1969“, Taschen’s 336 page tome on that particular pulp genre. They wanted a cover that was a direct reflection of the hundreds of pulp covers contained in the book. Particularly challenging was the integration into my design of ten separate blocks of information. I pored over hundreds of pulp covers looking for stylistic clues to help me design all these separate elements. I also searched for ways to keep them organized in a cohesive design. It was necessary to employ a variety of techniques including hand-lettering, straight typesetting and combinations (in varying degrees) of both. One thing which really helped the success of this cover was being able to use the smolderingly hot femme fatale illustration (from Real Detective—January 1938) which I was given to work around. The finished cover can be seen above (together with a few prime examples of the book’s contents).

“Cry-Baby” on Broadway

I was asked by Moira Deakin, Creative Projects Manager at Serino Coyne Advertising, to design a title treatment for the Broadway musical adaptation of the John Waters film “Cry-Baby”. I did seven design solutions including the four you see below. The producers of the show selected the one at the bottom. For reasons unclear to me this design was eventually adapted and changed slightly, but still remained fairly faithful to my original intent. Unfortnately the show closed recently after only 45 previews and 68 performances.

I was quite proud of all the work I had done on this title treatment. I’ve put together a Case Study PDF of the steps I followed from start to finish on this project, which can be downloaded from my page of downloads.

Two Magazine Covers for August

Just completed (almost simultaneously) 2 magazine covers. The first one for Cincinnati Magazine. Cincinnati is the home of Tide laundry detergent, and so Art Director Grace Saunders suggested using the classic Tide packaging as a jumping off point for a cover on environmental awareness in that city. I suggested that they really go “green” with the graphic, making the familiar orange, yellow and blue iconic image more of a statement by using an unexpected color treatment. The “Fresh” graphic was hand-lettered while the various subheads were created with different fonts including my recently released DeLuxe Gothic which adds lowercase characters to Morris Fuller Benton‘s classic font.

The second cover was completed for Art Director Jed Davis for Promo Magazine. Because of time constraints, I was forced to rework an illustration of a batter I had originally created for my silkscreen poster celebrating the release of my font Metroscript. The cover story was about how stadiums these days are having to come up with ever more creative ways of attracting people to ballparks—including promotions like having Elvis impersonators parachute into the stadium: thus the Elvis themed “scorebook”–like cover.