The sketches and printed works hang as if they are family members in the home of the thousands of subscribers who anxiously await each weekly issue. Although the gallery space is tight, it is so well-designed that the visitor never feels cramped; there is a lot to see and much to read. After spending a very satisfying Saturday afternoon at L’Alliance New York, I asked Mouly to tell us about the scope and highlights of the show.

Header photograph from the Jan. 21 opening (back row, left to right): Jenny Kroik, Barry Blitt, Ricardo Siri (Liniers), Ed Steed, Mark Ulriksen, Art Spiegelman, Kadir Nelson, Ed Sorel, Peter de Sève, Gracie Lynne Haynes, Victoria Tentler-Krylov, John Cuneo. Front row: Jorge Colombo, Françoise Mouly, Tatyana Franck, Rodolphe Lachat, Gayle Kabaker. Photo credit: Rebecca Greenfield. Installation photos: Leila Abazine, courtesy L’Alliance: New York.

How did the exhibition come to be held at the L’Alliance New York?
The idea emerged through conversations with Rodolph Lachat, editor of my book Blown Covers at Abrams. I had visited L’Alliance New York recently for their Sempé exhibit and was struck by Tatyana’s extraordinary energy in animating the space. I had also attended their animation festival featuring Lorenzo Mattotti, a frequent New Yorker cover artist. With the magazine’s centennial approaching, L’Alliance proved the perfect venue—they were eager to explore The New Yorker‘s history and to highlight my career as the Franco-American art editor over the past 32 years.

With the exception of early New Yorker artists Rea Irvin and Peter Arno’s sketch-to-finish works, all the covers shown were assigned by you. So, what criteria did you use to select the covers in the show?
Since we had this unique opportunity to show the artistic process, we first reached out to artists who still create physical originals—an increasingly rare practice as more artists work digitally. Once we assembled these pieces, natural sections and an order emerged that allowed us to tell the story of The New Yorker cover across its 100-year history, with particular focus on my tenure.

The Rea Irvin and Peter Arno pieces come from my personal collection. My husband, Art Spiegelman, discovered the Irvin at an auction for just $50, while the Arno sketch was a gift from his granddaughter. Most other artists featured in the show represent the new generation I brought to the magazine, who have since become part of its canonical roster.

It was lovely to see Ed Sorel’s covers paired with the late Bruce McCall’s.
The exhibition offers multiple points of entry. A digital wall, Malika Favre’s poster-sized images on the staircase, Christoph Niemann’s work that bridges wall and floor, a vitrine displaying original printing plates, and four variations on Eustace Tilley—all of which help ease visitors into the show. Then, the core of the show begins: the pairing of Bruce McCall’s paintings with Ed Sorel’s drawings allows viewers to focus on each artist’s distinct voice. Having Ed Sorel, now 95, at the opening was particularly meaningful. His 30-year-old drawing of New York as the Tower of Babel even includes L’Alliance New York in the image—a serendipitous connection that made the venue feel predestined.

It was fun to watch the attendees and listen to their comments. Most were familiar with what they saw. Others were unpacking the meaning of the art. What is your hope for the exhibition?
I am proud of having given so many different artists in that room their first break—almost everyone in the show—and opening up those august gates. But what I’m truly proud of is the range of their approaches. My mission as art editor has been to assemble a diverse roster of artists, each working at the height of their powers, rather than establishing a predictable “New Yorker style.” I think that has been my greatest accomplishment. 

When I was assigning covers for The New York Times Book Review, I’d limit the size of the original art. I was surprised to see how large Kadir Nelson paints, and just as breathtaking is Chris Ware’s blue pencil sketch art. How did you feel about seeing the entire show of originals and printed covers before your very eyes?
I’ll put it in the words of New Yorker artist Mark Ulriksen, who said it well: “I was blown away by how small McCall worked with all his glorious lettering and different fonts he painted. I loved seeing how large Kadir works, how Maira [Kalman] has loose borders, how Ana Juan uses acrylic and colored pencil and that [Ian] Falconer used charcoal. It was also cool to see the line drawings for the digital artists and it was only when we went again the next day that I saw the videos of Christoph [Neimann] and Hockney.”

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Tight

“I wanted to create a brutalist sculpture using two blocks of steel inside a C clamp. I always found tools to be very inspirational when creating still life photographs.
I was also inspired by Walker Evans B&W photographic series of individual tools he created over a century ago.

Craig Cutler

Adjectives are tough. I have to represent a certain feeling. I initially thought of things like a tight situation of tightening a bolt. It’s kind of mechanical. I pulled on a surgical glove as they are always too tight. Sure enough, if I didn’t put it on all the way, it exaggerated the tightness. It was fun to draw with colored pencils—a homage to Craig’s red hand (#28).

Craig Frazier

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If in 1965 I had two million freshly minted, crisp green-backs, I would have had the honor of presenting this epochal artist with the dough to fund his film. But when Fred Mogubgub (1928–1989) was making revolutionary quick-cut, limited animation commercials and films (hard to find and all but forgotten today), I was a tyke with $10 in the bank. I was only 15 when I saw this painted sign for the first time and wondered “what is a Mogubgub?” I met him years after he created this billboard. He was then producing quirky opening and closing sequences for TV shows like Tom Chapin’s “Make A Wish”.

When I met Fred in 1970, making his own brand of psychedelic-surrealist comics at The East Village Other, the name Mogubgub sounded to me like a melodic nonsense word or a rare insect rather than an avant garde artist. So what was he doing during the 1960s? Fred Mogubgub was a filmmaker, animator, painter and cartoonist who partnered with Pablo Ferro in two animation studios—Ferro Mogubgub Lew, then Ferro Mogubgub Schwartz— before starting his own studio. As noted on Cartoon Brew: Mogubgub “was an important part of New York’s indie animation scene in the 1960s and 1970s.” His films are exemplary examples of pop art in motion. He was also creator of The Pop Show from the late 1960s, a quick-cut parade of pop icons, featuring “a pre-Playboy, pre-N. O. W. Gloria Steinem” slugging down odd-ball hi-balls.

Mogubgub’s TV work was known for its staccato jump-cuts—an assemblage of cartoons and photographs that instantly flashed across the screen. He made work for Ford, Coca-Cola and Life Savers. He admitted that his subject matter derived from “American objects which stick out from the clichés you get drilled into you in school.” He was given the slogan, “Have you ever heard anyone say ‘no’ to a Life Saver?” by the Beech-Nut people and made a pop commercial. A marketing survey reported that the public recalled this commercial with its raw graphic effects more often than conventional ads.

However, he wanted out of the commercial business. He had film and painting in his sights. Mogubgub’s best known film, Enter Hamlet, was commissioned by The School of Visual Arts: It was Maurice Evans’ elegaic reading of Hamlet’s soliloquy poised against pop graphics. Each word is represented by a drawing, each scene cut to the word.

He was naturally drawn to and most welcome at the East Village Other, in a loft above the Fillmore East on Second Avenue and 6th Street. Routinely, he would arrive late on paste-up night usually stoned, proceed to a lamp-lit corner where he’d draw his stream-of-consciousness work. Like the cover below, he liked to print in two split fountain inks often using hard-to-read yellow; he’d finish a few minutes before the art was sent off to Druss printers in Long Island. There were no proofs. Serendipity was the goal.

One night at a paste-up session, he invited the staff to help him throw all his expensive camera equipment into the Hudson River early the next morning. He said he was forever finished with making film (although in 1979 he worked on an incredible sequence in R.O. Blechman’s epic animate feature “A Soldier’s Tale”). I oversleep and never knew for certain whether he did it or not. I do know that he was working on a two-story high painting for which he had to cut a hole in the ceiling of his loft. Whether the painting (created in square sections) was ever completed, I do not know.

What I do know, is that he deserves a museum retrospective if his artwork did not meet the same reputed fate as did his cameras. Mogubgub died in 1989 at 61.

If you prefer a slightly higher-quality version, go here.

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Fruit

“When we started this project, we both agreed that the format would be a 4×5 proportion. I have spent much of my career shooting with 8×10 and 4×5 view cameras so l thought this word was appropriate to introduce that camera to the party.

My idea was to use the actual 4×5 film’s edge as a creative tool that would contain the lemons. Once the image was shot I sent the film off to The Icon Film Lab to process and create a drum scan.

The film’s edge is just as important if not more than the actual objects in the image.” – Craig Cutler

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I’ve been an avid collector of the magazine Physical Culture, which was founded in 1899 by Bernarr Macfadden. His life story is the stuff of legends and rabbit holes. Macfadden was the founder of a large publishing company that bore his name, and his flagship was Physical Culture (which was renamed Beauty and Health in 1941 after he sold the rights to it, and renamed as Physical Culture in 1943 after Macfadden regained control). It ceased publication after Macfadden’s death in 1955. His life story (which I urge you to read) is entertaining—but Macfadden is only the entrance to the rabbit hole.

I’ve collected a batch of covers from the 20s, mostly of women in gym or swim suits, showing off their physical prowess and always wondered who was the illustrator. He worked in the prevailing realistic style and seemed to disappear into the miasma of once-fashionable illustration.

Recently, I was gifted the pencil sketches and black-and-white photos of oil paintings below. Each has a rubber-stamped name on the back that initially looked to me like it read “Clay Weaver,” a signature that also appears on Physical Culture covers. Never having heard that name, I contacted illustration historians to determine who this was but no one had a clue. (Google provided two citations for “Clay”, both showing realist paintings circa 1930s that were auctioned.)

One of my expert correspondents, David Apatoff, said that he had no idea and maybe I had misread the name. A correct assumption, which he confirmed through another expert, Fred Taraba, who gave the artist’s name as Jay W. Weaver. Thus began a weekend dig with little to show for it, save one biographical citation read, “Weaver [deceased circa 1960] was a member of the Society of Independent Artists in 1939. He spent time working in Oklahoma and is known for figurative works.” Another added he showed at the Salmagundi Club in New York and yet others indicated that he sold his “fine” (example below bottom) art at auction. Such was a entire life in a few Google words. Sad.

Tracking Weaver to this point has been inconclusive … and frustrating to consider how many unknown 20th-century illustrators’ work is stored in musty and moldy attics, just waiting to be discovered. There’s just not enough room in archives, libraries, storage centers and museum vaults for all that’s been produced … and forgotten.

The post The Daily Heller: Following a Forgotten Illustrator Down the Rabbit Hole appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Level

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Frank Viva is a frequent New Yorker contributor whose work wittily captures the zeitgeist, but he is not acerbic. During President Trump’s first term, he tried pitching some political illustrations without success. Now with Trump 2.0 suggesting the annexation of Canada, Viva, a Canadian, is reconsidering how he can satirically comment on Trump once again.

He is candid about his struggles, and our chat below—featuring covers he has pitched to The New Yorker—sheds some light on how he goes about attempting to sell his graphic commentary.

In your many published New Yorker covers, you do not present yourself as a political artist. Do you have a secret (or not-so-secret) desire to be one?
It’s a secret because I haven’t had much success.

Have you been encouraged to actually take to finish any of the covers you’re showing here?
Sometimes a call for ideas goes out by email that is sent to a group of artists requesting a sketch about a newsworthy story that is unfolding in real time. It can be a story that just happened, or a story that is brewing but may or may not happen, or a story that is happening but might go one way or another. Sometimes the cover has to be turned around in a day or two. They always try to respond to a sketch if they can but you get the sense that it’s pretty hectic when that happens. The typographic “U” cover and the Schulz cover are responses to emails requesting a sketch. The rejection of the Schulz cover came with an encouraging note. I was happy with the typographic idea, if not the execution. Artists are also encouraged to send sketches throughout the year if an idea occurs to them that they think is worth consideration.

You told me that you have an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). We’re showing your unpublished work now because he’s back. How are you coping?
I’m coping better this time. Although I did suffer from TDS during his first term, I seem to have built up some immunity over the last four years.

You also said, “I have inadvertently documented my descent into TDS madness,” and you’re considering re-pitching your earlier political ideas. What happened to your pitches last term?
The political cover ideas I have pitched since the beginning of Trump’s first term are a motley collection—some are rough pencils and others are close to publishable (technically), while the rest are somewhere in between. A few of them deal with Trump-adjacent topics like Ukraine and Roe v. Wade. Many were a reaction to one of the countless outrageous things that Trump said or did, soon forgotten because of the next wave of craziness. Several are more recent and were sent during the current election cycle.

Do you have limits or proscriptions as to how far you will go with your satire?
The toilet image [below] was from the first term, and I can’t see sending anything along those lines now. The Eustace Tilley sketches would never work because Eustace is a beloved mascot. I should have known that before sending them. I’m trying to narrow and refine my focus as I stumble along. Almost all of these suffer from not having had an engagement with [cover director] Françoise Mouly. I always hope that she will see something worth sharpening or exploring further.

You are not a satirist per se, right?
My published covers to date have all been sort of genteel, so I had no reason to expect that I could switch lanes once Trump was first elected. I was obsessed. I can see looking back that most were not good enough. It has been a journey of stubbornness and stupidity. Stupidity because I was risking annoyance at the receiving end.

How do you feel—and what is your strategy, if any—for dealing with Jan. 20 and beyond?
Like most journeys, it was not a complete waste of time. In the last few months I have submitted political cover ideas that were better-received and even considered (if only briefly) for publication. By submitting ideas and then seeing what was chosen week after week, I gained a better understanding of what could work for me. A unique voice is important. In my case this includes the use of typography, or an unexpected approach that the best of The New Yorker’s great political cartoonists would be unlikely to propose.

And what do you think that is?
Perhaps the best typographic sketch is the one with the central ‘U’ in “TRUMP” used to represent a chasm dividing the nation. The most promising reaction I received was the Charlie Brown and Lucy football cover, pitched shortly after Kamala entered the race and was seemingly doing better in the polls than Trump.

Cartoons are not great weapons when your audience, including me, is in an echo chamber. Half the nation loves Trump or MAGA. Another percentage is just settling in for the time being. What is the goal of your satiric politics?
In his first term, I had no goal in mind. Each sketch was just an expression of my exasperation. It’s true that the audience for political cartoons is, as you say, an echo chamber. These days, that’s probably true of most forms of political discourse. I’d like to be among the less-engaged percentage you mentioned and just settle in for a while. That would be the smart way to go. During his first term, I did have an acute case of TDS. Not so much now. The Trump enterprise seems more surreal than menacing this time around. Like a bad sitcom rerun with the same tired jokes and a similar cast of characters chewing up the scenery. I think the recent sketches that I submitted during the 2024 campaign are more measured than the ones from his first term. I feel more capable of providing a detached perspective—and with any luck, a bit of humor. So I do have a goal now: to try to use what I’ve learned. We’ll see how that goes.

Do you feel “good” about these ideas?
I find it difficult to come up with a good idea that also works well as a composition. And I’m up against some of the most talented artists around. A New Yorker cover is one of the most coveted gigs around and everybody wants to have a go. Some days I feel inspired to keep going. Some days I feel tired and inadequate to the task.

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I am proudly in the category of those smitten with Gerner’s way of seeing the world. To learn more about how that point of view came to be and is executed, I reached out. His responses to my questions are below, lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Can you give some insight into your creative journey, and how that’s led you to where you are today?

I grew up in the east of France, accompanied in my artistic research by my father, a drawing and art history teacher, and by my mother, a lexicographer. I benefited from an environment made of many images and books. I was a student at the Nancy School of Art from 1988 to 1993, where I participated in graphic design, drawing, engraving, and screen printing workshops.

After that, I moved to Paris, and very quickly began to make many drawings for the press and for children’s publishing. Then I lived for a year in New York, where I was able to meet many artists—cartoonists, sculptors, painters—explore the contemporary art world, and meet art directors of the New Yorker and the New York Times.

Back in France, where I lived successively in Paris and Lille, I continued my work in publishing by making experimental comic book projects. Following this work, I was invited to exhibit in the Anne Barrault Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Paris. Since 2004, I have been making many exhibition projects in partnership with the Anne Barrault Gallery and others, along with art centers and contemporary art museums. My book projects can become exhibition projects, and vice versa.

How did you develop your unique illustration style?

I believe that my graphic writing comes from both the codes of graphic design and the pictorial references of illustration and visual arts. I grew up with books. My relationship with the image is always done according to the criteria of print. I examine images to understand their narrative and technical principles.

Simplicity is complex and sometimes allows multiple readings.

I sometimes work by covering; I apply ink or paint to synthesize my drawing forms in a way that gets closer to a principle of the graphic alphabet. Simple and abstract forms associated with each other, construct figurative representations. But simplicity is complex and sometimes allows multiple readings.

What illustrators and artists have been most inspiring to you in your own practice? What other influences have helped shape you and your artist point of view?

During my childhood and apprenticeship, I was heavily influenced by my father’s vision and drawings. He was very critical and always had a very fair opinion. His own graphic writing was close to contemporaries like Saul Steinberg or Tomi Ungerer. I still appreciate many cartoonists from that period, but I am more influenced today by artists who work in fields far removed from drawing, press cartoons, or publishing. 

I am very sensitive to the work of certain artists like Ellsworth Kelly, and On Kawara, and more generally to contemporary art. I am also interested in architecture, typography, archaeology, forms of contemporary literature, and even botany. 

What is it about birds and dogs that you find particularly compelling to draw?

The idea of ​​making a series of bird drawings came through color: it was about experimenting with the infinite compositions and superpositions of colored lines. Since my childhood, I have always drawn birds: two lines for the beak, two lines for the legs, and in the middle of the body, then the tail and wings can be placed in a certain disorder.

Dogs stood out to me for their sculptural and abstract character. Any mass of hair with a nose, and possibly two points for the eyes could be similar to a dog. It was, therefore, more a question of working on silhouettes and textures.

These two types of animals made it possible to build a series and, therefore, to work on a principle of variation. Through their shapes or colors, they are also very graphic animals.

What’s your typical process like for drawing a dog?

Drawing a dog is a bit like drawing a piece of clothing, a mossy texture, or a furry shape. Any abstract shape composed of a principle of lines can lead to the representation of a dog. It is one of the only animal species with so many variations of breeds, with such specific defining characteristics and gaits. It’s a very rich field of experimentation and discovery for a drawer. 

Sometimes I discover a new dog and draw it immediately. Other times, I invent a shape that will lead me to an imaginary dog. Today, I don’t necessarily know which dogs are real or imaginary among all of those I have drawn.

What are your main tools for your practice? What sorts of pens, markers, pencils, paper, etc. do you use?

For my series of color drawings, I use felt-tip pens with pigmented Indian ink (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen brush). For other drawings, often done with black lines, my favorite tool is a brush dipped in black Indian ink (Talens Indian ink).

Making simple and direct drawings of animals, in black or very colorful lines, without narrative captions, seems to me perhaps to participate in a universal understanding.

Why do you think your illustrations have resonated so strongly with the masses?

Making simple and direct drawings of animals, in black or very colorful lines, without narrative captions, seems to me perhaps to participate in a universal understanding. But this is only part of my work. Many other drawings are more complex and more experimental in their forms and, therefore probably more confidential. I like to work both for different audiences, for printed editions, or for wall exhibitions.

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The loathsome act known as witch-hunting continues in today’s vernacular as a shorthand for immoral and extra-legal hounding of persons suspected of some broken social more. It Happened in Salem (Creative Editions), with its cinematic noir-sounding title, is a book about the past for the present, smartly written by Jonah Winter for middle-grade students, with elegant illustrations by Brad Holland.

The subject of witchcraft is perfect for Holland’s blend of emotional intensity and human sensitivity brought out in gesture and color—and he tells us more about the process below.

Creative Editions is known as a children’s book publisher that has released books on difficult subjects, including the Holocaust, and now the Salem witch-hunts. It is difficult to think of the trials as being easily explained to children. How did you feel about the tone of the manuscript when you first read it?
Well, the first thing to dispel is the assumption most people make that witchcraft trials were common in colonial times. They weren’t. Of course, there were incidents where people were tried and hanged as witches—it was a holdover from the country’s Old World heritage. But the events that made witch-hunting so infamous actually occurred only during a period of about 18 months, and mostly in and around Salem. So, I think the author presents that accurately. It was a local epidemic of mass hysteria that ran its course and then, when it threatened to harm some prominent people, was suddenly shut down.

The manuscript and your illustrations do not hide the injustice and corruption of the period but vividly reference the continuing comparisons to the present.
Well, yes; in fact, my first thought was that the country had gone through something similar during the children’s daycare scandals of the 1980s. All that hysteria that started on the afternoon talk shows about how children’s preschool centers were hotbeds of satanic abuse—with crazy charges that people were slaughtering kittens and summoning the devil or flying through the air like witches. Innocent people lost their jobs and reputations; a bunch of them went to prison. And then suddenly, just like the Salem hysteria, the craziness ran its course and, with a few exceptions, the media dropped the whole thing as if it had never happened. I thought at the time that it was just like the Salem witch hunts, except that it went on for nearly a decade and was far more widespread—and it wasn’t happening in some colonial dark age, either.

Your images are so perfectly suited to the original Salem, with a decidedly timeless quality. Did you know what you wanted to paint from the outset?
Well, yeah, sort of. To begin with, I was determined not to give the story any kind of spooky glamor, the way movies often did. There were never any real witches, after all, so this was a cautionary tale, not a Halloween story. Back in high school, I had read all of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, so I had a definite background of that era to draw on. And I did start by researching the subject. I found photos online of Salem’s so-called witch houses, and paintings and reconstructions of colonial interiors. I even found articles about the spot in the woods where archaeologists think the hangings took place. But with the exception of historical dress, I thought too many period details might make the story seem like something that happened a long time ago and couldn’t happen again. That’s why in several paintings I just showed the figures against neutral backgrounds. I thought it might make it easier for readers to identify with.

Did you create the images with kids in mind or were you directed in that direction?
No, the pictures were all my ideas and the publishers didn’t ask me to change a thing. The only issue they ever did raise was whether we should show the hangings. They were obviously concerned that that might be too upsetting for kids—and in the beginning, I had wondered about that myself. But ultimately, I concluded that kids these days probably see images in movies and video games that are a lot more violent—more grotesque even—than the matter-of-fact way I was showing what had actually happened. So, I decided to just trust my instincts and do what I thought would tell the story honestly. The publishers were totally supportive, and I was very grateful. I worked throughout with the art director Rita Marshall, and she was terrific.   

The images have an age-neutral quality, in the sense that very young kids might not get it, but mid-range kids who can read on their own or have parents who will read to them, are they your target audience?
Well, my own thinking is based on my background. When I was a little kid, I used to go with my dad on Friday nights to the local soda fountain where we’d get the latest issues of Life, Look and Collier’s magazines. Then we’d go home and he’d read the articles to me and encourage me to follow along. My mother would come by and say, “Walt, you can’t read things like that to a kid,” and dad would just say, “hell, you can read anything to a kid.” So while there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally bring up to a child—you have to have some common sense—in general, I tend not to talk down to them. I know that a lot of what you tell a kid will go in one ear and out the other. But if something they don’t understand really makes an impression on them, I trust that it’ll stick in their heads until something in their experience causes a light bulb to go off. In the end, I think it’s okay to let kids wonder what some things mean. It’s like buying clothes for them to grow into.

The hanging of a condemned witch is the most indelible painting of all …
Well, it’s certainly the one that gave me the most trouble. I’ve lost track of how many pencil sketches I did for it. And there were two painted versions that I worked on for days and threw out. But then I started over and finally hit on this one. The text on the facing page was about how many people had been hanged. So at one point, I had an image of several people dangling from a tree. And even in this version, I once had five. But then, suddenly on impulse, I just painted them all out but one. Then I redesigned the tree into a kind of an X on the page, with the figure of the woman at the intersection of the X. It was a sort of design solution to keep the image simple. And it seems to make the picture more moving. I don’t think I could have thought that out in the beginning though. It’s just that as I worked on it, it kind of worked itself out.

Also, I cannot get the slave girl — both text and image — out of my head. It is, well, so surprisingly serene.
Yes, I think that’s really my favorite painting from the book. And it’s based on a real person, too, except that nobody knows what the woman actually looked like. According to legend, her name was Tituba and she was the first person to be accused of witchcraft. Originally from Barbados, she had been brought to Salem as a household slave by the town minister, Samuel Parris. It was his young daughter and niece who first accused her. In the beginning, she denied the charge, but finally confessed—allegedly after being beaten—and to save herself, began telling preposterous stories that implicated two other women as witches. That’s how the mass hysteria began. It lasted for about a year and a half. Tituba was imprisoned for the whole time but was never tried, and when they finally released her, she disappears from history.

What other images do you feel have the most impact amid all the powerful ones herein?
I think the strongest picture is the last one, the little girl cherishing the voodoo doll. It began when I was doing research for the way kids dressed in those days. I kept finding old daguerreotypes of little girls holding a beloved doll. Apparently, that was a cliche of early photography. So that immediately gave me the idea for the painting. I researched voodoo dolls and used bits and pieces from several of them. And then I decided to make the girl so young and innocent-looking that her expression wouldn’t be much different from what you’d expect from a dog or a cat. The idea of poisoning and weaponizing a little kid’s mind is so obviously evil that, to me, that was the real story behind the story of the Salem witch hunts.

Do you think that an audience that has never known about the Salem trials will accept this knowledge?
Well, I suspect that like most things in life, different people will get different things out of it.

I have to admit, although I have knowledge of the trials since elementary school, and grew up hearing about modern witch hunts for Reds and fellow travelers, your book has reinforced my trepidation of these things happening again. Did it have a similar effect on you?
Well, imagine how much more damage they could have done in Salem if they had had the internet, social media and artificial intelligence to work with. They could have turned what was essentially a local scandal into a global one. Which brings us up to today. Unfortunately, the one thing you can learn from history is that most people never learn from it. Human nature is pretty intractable, so things that happened once upon a time are always likely to happen again. I suppose that’s why we need cautionary tales.

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Dark

Since Craig did a self-portrait (26/52), I thought maybe this was a good reason for me to do one. I took an iPhone photo with a single light and drew it in graphite. I kept darkening out information until the bare minimum remained.

– Craig Frazier

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Okay, first up, I’ve found myself on the New York Times’ 73 Best Illustrations of 2024 list, for my front page of Sunday Opinion back in April. I’ve done a few NYT things recently, but this one was a real joy, working alongside art director Akshita Chandra.

Second, a big thank you to The Casual Optimist (aka Dan Wagstaff) for including my cover for Antonia Hylton’s Madness in Notable Book Covers of 2024. I always look forward to this list – Dan has an amazing eye for what’s going on in the field – so it means a lot to find myself on there.

(Look, I know there’s a pattern forming, but just to clarify: I don’t only do American-politics-in-black-and-white. Other rectangles are available.)

Finally, my annual selection of the year’s best film posters is now up on Creative Review. It’s the usual mix of obvious frontrunners, bizarre omissions of your personal favourites and at least one film that you have never even heard of. This is my seventh year of doing this (find previous lists here), and I should probably see if there are any particular patterns forming. One that I’m certain of, and always a good starting point for a shortlist: what was Willem Dafoe in this year? The man is a magnet for great poster art.

That really is all, I swear.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image: New York Times Sunday Opinion illustration, by the author

The post Meanwhile No. 225 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Cold

and Colder

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Meehan has mastered the art of revealing the beauty in the old, rusted, and decaying. Through a meticulous process she’s developed that manually replicates the CMYK inkjet printing process, Meehan reimagines old signs with layer after layer of water color ink and care. “There’s something entrancing about directing the flow of ink as it settles on textured paper,” she writes on her process. “It allows me to capture intricate details and maintain a hint of wild spontaneity.”

When I came upon Meehan’s work, I leapt at the opportunity to learn more about her and her practice— for obvious reasons. Her work is like catnip to me, and I needed to dig deeper into the artist behind these watercolor layers. Meehan’s thoughtful responses to my questions about her background and process are below.

Where are you from and where are you currently based?

I’m a tumbleweed. I spent my childhood in Santa Fe, NM. My formative teens and twenties were used up kicking around North Carolina. Then I had a small stint working for a design firm in Seattle. After a series of untimely family tragedies, I’ve found myself in the small midwestern town of Urbana, IL where I’ve been for the last few years. 

What’s your art background? Can you give a bit of insight into your creative journey that’s led you to where you are today?

Keeping with the tumbleweed theme, my creative journey has been anything but linear. I dropped out of art school twice. A couple of years were spent as a tattoo apprentice. Then I went to fine woodworking school and got a job as a furniture prototype shop manager. But there was no creative freedom, so I went back to school (again) and ended up with a BFA in Scenic Design for Theatre and Film. Then I realized I really didn’t like working in the theatre or in film. So I talked my way into the graphic design field. After absolutely bombing out trying to work in-house for corporate businesses, I started a freelance design, branding, and illustration business in 2013, which I still operate today. All along I’ve maintained an ongoing practice of making my own drawings, paintings, sculptures, paper models, etc. 

How would you describe your personal artistic aesthetic in your own words?

It’s funny, a lot of my freelance work involves working with companies to help them establish their visual brand aesthetic and develop the language to clearly talk about it. But I have a hard time doing that with my own projects. The body of work I’ve focused on for the last three and a half years does have a clear aesthetic through-line, though. If pressed, I suppose I’d maybe say it’s something like: “Pop Impressionist Architecturally Drafted Semi-Realistic Kinda Comic Found Object Portraits.”

Something concise and catchy like that.   

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the look and feel of mid-20th century design. Its bold color palettes, sharp compositions, and visual optimism have always lured me in.

Where did your fascination with old neon signs originate? Is there a particular sign you remember that started you off on this path?

I don’t know where exactly the fascination began; maybe it was growing up in close proximity to Route 66. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the look and feel of mid-20th century design. Its bold color palettes, sharp compositions, and visual optimism have always lured me in. Though I know better, a part of me is a sucker for its false promise that everything will be ok. Nothing tells that lie better than mid-century product packaging and signage design. 

What is it about old neon signs that you find compelling enough to want to replicate, with what is clearly a lot of love and care?

While I love mid-century design for all the reasons above, I also love to see it in decay. It says, “This sign was built to last. It survived globalization. It’s outlasted whoever might have originally bothered to keep it maintained. It may be rusted and busted, but it’s still here.” I find that longevity comforting, and I feel compelled to pay homage to it. 

 One reason I studied Scenic Design is because I love the story behind the story. When the actors are removed from the stage, the set can still be its own character, whispering hints of its own life. The same is true with old signs. Wear and tear can tell their own story. I love the mystery of that. I get lost in imagining the lifespan of an old sign and the locale it marks. Broken bulbs, bullet holes, patches, and water stains all send my imagination spinning to wonder, “What happened here?”

Wear and tear can tell their own story. I love the mystery of that. I get lost in imagining the lifespan of an old sign and the locale it marks.

So many old signs started out as expertly designed and engineered objects of mass communication. As a chosen subject matter, they give me a head start to create something visually engaging and relatable. It’s honestly a bit lazy on my part. The original designers and builders did the hard work. The sign itself is an object of beauty and intrigue. I’m just shining a light on it with my ink portraits. 

Though I don’t only paint neon signs, they are a focus. By calling attention to some of these relics, I hope to also raise awareness that neon bending is a rare art and skill that needs to be cherished and protected from extinction. Cheap ugly LEDs are quickly replacing the few remaining neon signs that are left, and the skilled neon benders who are still working are getting cut out of the unique and amazing work they should be doing. It’s a disheartening result of late-stage capitalism that really gets me down. In my branding work, I’ve had the opportunity to advocate for using real neon on several restaurant buildout projects, and was even able to participate in the design of a couple of large scale neon signs for clients, which is gratifying.

By calling attention to some of these relics, I hope to also raise awareness that neon bending is a rare art and skill that needs to be cherished and protected from extinction.

What’s your typical process for recreating a sign? What materials do you use? About how long does one reproduction take? 

I work from photo references, either those I’ve taken, or those borrowed from friends. Each sign portrait starts by laying down a detailed pencil outline. Then I build up the image in four layers of transparent ink: cyan, magenta, yellow which are mixed with water and brushed on like a typical watercolor,  and then black outlines, applied with a dip pen. My process is a riff on the typical CMYK inkjet printing process.

I usually make a high resolution scan of each color layer as I finish it, so I can later create animations of the colors building up. I try to show my process from different perspectives on my Instagram feed. I post timelapse reels, and short form stories showing each piece coming together. Each piece takes me ~20-30 hours (including all the post production reel-making).

This forces me to embrace imperfection, and to try to be highly present at all times. It’s become a kind of meditation for me, even more than something I consider “art.” It’s a practice; a habit I don’t want to break.

In my job as a designer, I spend a lot of time in the digital world, with my finger on the delete button, doing and undoing. What drew me to working with inks is that there is no ‘undo’. Every choice is permanent. Not only are the inks indelible, they are semi-transparent. Unlike acrylics or oils, there is nowhere to hide if I fumble. This forces me to embrace imperfection, and to try to be highly present at all times. It’s become a kind of meditation for me, even more than something I consider “art.” It’s a practice; a habit I don’t want to break. 

What message are you trying to convey with your work? What experience do you hope viewers of your pieces have when looking at them?

A day spent roaming the aisles of a junk shop or cruising the deserted main street of a small town is a day well spent to me. There’s value in taking time out to observe and imagine. I hope my work encourages people to slow down and ponder the details of their surroundings; to consider the hidden history of the ordinary places and objects they pass everyday.

I hope my work encourages people to slow down and ponder the details of their surroundings; to consider the hidden history of the ordinary places and objects they pass everyday.

Additionally, I’d like to be an example to younger artists (and those who are just out of practice) to not dismiss the importance of working with real materials. Pick up that brush, that pencil, that clay, that needle and thread, and go for it. It’s so easy to talk yourself out of spending time on creative pursuits, or to just dive into the world of digital creation, never getting your hands dirty. If you are fortunate to have access to them, working with real tangible materials is a priceless experience. 

Do you have a favorite old sign that you’ve recreated?

On my work table right now, I’m chipping away at my 50th sign portrait. Looking back on all 50, I truly love them all equally. But, the very first sign portrait I did has to be my favorite. It was of an old Sealtest Ice Cream sign, completed in April 2021. It’s the one where I first proved out my 4 color layer process. When I was working on it, something clicked that said, “Do this. Keep going. Do more.” And, almost 4 years later, I’m still following those orders.

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Jules Feiffer is 95, and his most recently published book is a graphic novel for children titled Amazing Grapes. It is a fantasy about a trio of siblings and multi-dimensional time and space travel, aided and abetted by various degrees of menacing monsters. Each episode in this complex story exposes the kids to untold dangers as they search for their mother, who is stuck between dimensions. It is a chaotic amalgam of characters and narrative twists, and Feiffer—who has written and illustrated conventional children’s books, among novels, plays, screenplays and all manner of imaginative endeavors—has yet to embark on a project as unique as this. He is 95, but making this book keeps him, he says, “7 years old.”

Over 40 years have passed since I worked with Feiffer on a collection of his weekly Village Voice comic strips. He was among the best political satirists. Around age 50, he turned his passion toward children’s books and graphic novels for adults. Now, he has almost completed his graphic autobiography. I can’t wait for it.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Feiffer about the work he is doing right now—and his surprisingly infectious optimism, despite suffering from an incurable degenerative macula disease that is stealing his eyesight and that of many other illustrators of his generation.

I finished Amazing Grapes, and I must tell you, I dreamed about it last night before this interview.
Yeah, what do you think?

I think it’s wonderfully absurd.
… And it was a lot of fun to do, too. My method of working has changed over the years since you and I [worked] together.

How so?
I don’t want to know what I’m going to do until I start doing it, and a voice says, “Do this, and do that.” I take instructions from some unknown voice that basically directs me. I don’t know what the story is going to be until the voice tells me what it’s going to be. I like to be ignorant of what’s about to happen—the book, in a sense, instructs me on how to write and draw it.   

This is not your first graphic novel. How did this book come about?
I did a series of three noir graphic novels, and I felt it was time for me to write a story for children that was a little more complicated and a little more mysterious than the usual. I didn’t know quite what it was going to be. So, I started with the mother looking out a window, but I didn’t have a clue why she was doing that. Then the story started to tell itself. I had not planned on the interstellar travels or going from planet to planet. I just took instructions from the book and it told me where to go.

Did any of your editors have any input into the book?
Not really. The essential editor on these books of mine is my longtime editor, Michael Di Capua; Michael and I have had this lovely relationship since Sendak sent me to him 100 years ago, and so we trust each other implicitly. He knows how my mind works and how I think, and so he went along for the ride just as I was going along for the ride.

In the beginning of the book, you introduce the father, who simply leaves his wife and kids without any money.
The only thing I was sure of in terms of all of the characters, is that he was a bad guy. I didn’t know anything about the mother, other than she liked to look out the window and stare into space. Another thing I knew throughout is that there are a brother and two sisters and it’s their competitiveness and rivalry with each other that dominates over everything. So, they can be in the middle of space travel and awful things going on, but they’re concerned with what goes on in the relationship, mostly.

I thought that would be a lot of fun, and it was. And they seem to be looking for some sort of anchor with their mother, who doesn’t seem to want to be the anchor (we find out why later—she’s actually a creature from outer space and didn’t know it). At the end of the book, she has found her proper place, which is not to be with her children, but to be back in the planet that she fled from when she was little. But I didn’t know any of that was going to happen.

How did you decide on the title Amazing Grapes?
I was so affected when President Obama got up in the 2015 memorial for the Charleston church shooting, where the children were killed, and out of nowhere he started singing “Amazing Grace.” I mean, everybody in the country’s jaw dropped. I still have tears from that; I found it one of the most moving memories in my bank of memories, and it became a key signifier of the book. It’s what allows the characters to be free, and it’s a sign of hopefulness. It’s a sign of survival amidst all the perils that face you. It’s a sign about hope.

Why did you make such a sharp pivot from politics to doing children’s books?
I still deal with politics now and again. I’ve gone through so many shifts, changes and alterations and a sense of despair and discouragement—none of which I feel right now, by the way. Then there was my personal life, which was in repeated states of cataclysm. My work, whether it’s a cartoon, children’s book, play, a story that combines all of the above, is, in some ways, disguised as autobiography. I take what is on my mind and let all the things just happen, and they come out, and I try to structure them into a work of art and a work of amusement.

… And a work of exorcism?
Absolutely … a work of exorcism. But everything I’ve ever done is to get me out of the trouble I did. From the time I was a kid, cartoons [were] my own psychotherapy. You know, I’d be working through … well, I didn’t know what my problem was that I was working through. There’d be these aha moments over the years, and whether it was a children’s book or whether it was a play or whether it was a Village Voice comic, the older I’ve become over the years, knowing this self-analysis and feeling this way, the more playful my work has been to me and has become. And now, as much as anything else, it is a continual round robin of play. And when I made that discovery some years ago, it opened doors I didn’t even know were there, and I’m very grateful for that. And the doors will continue to continue to be open. I mean, I’m 95-and-a-half, and I’m still a 7-year-old boy.

One of your characters is a dog who is really a cat. In his dog guise, is it Virgil, the guide who takes us through your version of Dante’s Inferno?
I stole the dog from Walt Kelly [the creator of Pogo]. In his version, “man’s best friend” is leading people down the wrong path, and was always speechifying. And Kelly, who never had a nice word to say to me in my entire career, I decided to pay back by using his dog in my book. The dog is named Kelly.

Walt Kelly was also a strong voice against McCarthyism, wasn’t he?
Kelly taught me a lot about the cartooning world that I was finding myself moving into at the same time he was doing Pogo. He was the editorial cartoonist for the New York Star, which was the successor to the newspaper PM, and he was doing some of the toughest, most radical and imaginative cartoons on McCarthyism and the whole spirit of McCarthyism. He was much tougher than [Washington Post cartoonist] Herblock—and meaner. He just knocked me for a loop and strongly influenced the kind of politics that I moved toward as I was getting older and coming of age. Kelly was a great hero of mine.  

Is it accurate to say that Amazing Grapes is a kind of coming-of-age book for the 95-year-old you?
You know, Steve, they’re all coming-of-age books. To me, they are all books of self-discovery. They all were stories I was telling, none of which I understood as I was telling them, that explained themselves to me as they, in a sense, wrote themselves and instructed me how to write. And that process is still going on. That is one of the things that I’ve learned over the years.

How has the macular degeneration changed the way you draw?
It doesn’t so much in some ways; as it always has been with my craft, the limitation becomes a plus. Instead of thinking of it as something that prevents me from doing what I want to do, I change it into something that frees me into doing something I’ve never done before, which is in many ways more innovative and fun—and fun is an important word in all my life. I’m out to surprise myself. I found a way to make them work for me, and I’m still doing it with the blindness. I had macular degeneration when I did Amazing Grapes but I hadn’t developed to a point where I thought I might lose my eyesight.

I was taking shots in the eye and stabilized during that period, and then it destabilized for a while, and I stopped taking the injections, because they stopped doing any good. But at the same time they allow me to do some of the best work I’ve ever done. So screw it.

The post The Daily Heller: Jules Feiffer at 95: “Doing the Best Work of My Life” appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(This post was originally published on Dec. 24, 2018)

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Dream

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Goodman, known for his bold, playful illustrations, has reimagined the iconic Rao’s label by infusing it with festive holiday charm while staying true to the essence of the brand. Vibrant doodles of basil leaves, garlic bulbs, and tomatoes dance alongside snowflakes and other seasonal touches for a label that’s as flavorful as the jar’s contents—crafted with simple, high-quality ingredients like whole peeled Italian tomatoes, fresh onions, and garlic.

This creative collaboration isn’t just about a pretty package, though. Rao’s Homemade has launched the limited-edition jars in celebration of their 12 Days of Holiday Giveaways. And if luck isn’t on your side, you can snag the jar for $10.99 at raos.com starting December 11th—until supplies run out.

Here’s the cherry tomato on top: 100% of proceeds from the jars will go to City Harvest, a New York-based charity that rescues and redistributes food to feed millions of New Yorkers in need. So, not only will your pantry be stocked with something delicious, but your purchase will also help fight food insecurity this holiday season.

This limited-edition jar represents more than a clever marketing move; it’s a testament to the creative possibilities of branding when it goes beyond the expected. Rao’s is bridging the gap between its rich heritage and contemporary culture by collaborating with a celebrated artist, proving that holiday campaigns can be both heartwarming and head-turning.

So, whether you’re a fan of art, great marinara, or giving back, this is one limited-edition offering worth savoring—both for its flavor and its purpose.

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Red

Probably the most used color in my design career—possibly the most beautiful and powerful color. I had just sketched an idea (book and letters) and rather than use multi-colored letters, I decided to solve this problem by coloring it entirely in red. The accidental bonus was the other read.

Craig Frazier

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Peet’s invites customers to slow down and reconnect with loved ones. Grab a complimentary Sparkling Tiger’s Eye, The Bestie, or The Derby mocktail from their special holiday menu, and you’ll also receive a beautifully postmarked postcard featuring Congdon’s vibrant design.

“Partnering with Peet’s Coffee this holiday season has been such a joy,” says artist Lisa Congdon.

For me, both art and coffee are about bringing people together – even when they’re miles apart.

Lisa Congdon

The postcards are more than just a festive touch. Each one includes a $10 discount to Peets.com, and digital versions are also available online, ensuring everyone can spread holiday cheer near or far.

“With an increasing desire for real connections,” says Jessica Buttimer, Peet’s SVP of Brand, “‘Postcards from Peet’s’ invites Peetniks to slow down and cherish the people who matter most.”

Ditch the stress and embrace the warmth of the season at your local Peet’s with a nostalgic dose of holiday cheer, courtesy of one of our industry’s most celebrated artists.

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Having mastered the art of graphic props and setting the gold standard for the industry, the Dublin-based Atkins recently decided to explore a new avenue: the wonderful world of children’s books.

Released in October and available now for the Christmas season, Atkins’ first-ever children’s book, Letters from the North Pole, is geared toward kids yet engaging for readers of all ages, due to her signature level of craft and keen design eye. The interactive hardcover book features gold foil embossing on the front cover, and five letters from Santa Claus inside that children are meant to pull out from envelop-pages to read and enjoy.

The concept of the book is perfectly suited for Atkins’ skillsets as a graphic prop designer, specifically tapping into her ability to make props for the letters from Santa. Atkins also has a background in writing, having previously published a book of poems and then a book about her practice as a prop designer, Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps, in 2020.

In this way, Atkins was precisely the person to envision and execute Letters from the North Pole. I spoke to Atkins to learn more about her background in prop design for film, how that informed her experience of writing and designing this book, and to glean more intimate details about the book itself. Our conversation is below, lightly edited for clarity and length.

As a sign painter myself, I’d love to hear more about the influence of sign painting on your work as a prop designer. You recently posted a lesson you’ve imparted at design conferences on your Instagram, which read: “How I stopped designing like a designer and started thinking like a mediocre sign painter in the rain.” Can you share more about this? 

I always think that one day, when I quit my job, I’m going to retrain as a sign painter. The reality is, I’m not a sign painter at all. I’m not really good at any one thing, I’m a little bit good at lots of different things. I copy sign painters, I copy lettering artists, I copy old typewriters. So much of my work in film is about being able to imitate a certain look, but not necessarily about being an expert in that area. I would love to do sign painting properly, but I never have done, actually. 

I love making lettering for film sets. The way I do it for film is I draw the lettering, either hand lettering or using type, and then I will hand those drawings over to professional sign painters, and then they paint it for me. Because I’ve done so much of that, I’ve really fallen in love with sign painting. 

A lot of the time, you don’t actually want it to look like it was painted by the best sign painter in town. It’s supposed to often look like it was painted by the guy who owns the shop or the person who’s made a handmade poster and stuck it up on the street. A lot of this stuff is supposed to look like it’s come from the vernacular rather than from professional experts. That’s really fun because you can play with that. You can do things that are supposed to look a little bit naïve and homemade, but they’re still supposed to feel pretty. We’re designing things for film, and you’re asking an audience to sit down in front of the cinema screen for two hours, so you want things to have a certain aesthetic appeal to them as well.

It’s like your work reflects the off-screen characters, who may not be visible in the film but still make up the movie’s universe. The character is only present through how you’ve portrayed their sign. That’s such a deep-seated layer of the details that go into a movie. 

You have to get into character for everything you make. Most of those things you’re making are not for characters in the movie. It’s for the people who own the shops in the background of the movie, the chemists who put the labels on their old poison bottles, that kind of thing.

Why did you want to go from this world of film graphic design to that of children’s books? 

I’ve been interested in children’s books for a long, long time because I loved them as a child, but also because we read so many of them now in the house with my two little kids— they’re three and eight. 

I had always been interested in making a children’s book, but I’m not an illustrator, I’m a graphic designer and a writer. It had never really occurred to me to make my own children’s book, but then Magic Cat came to me with this idea they’d had about a book about letters to Santa Claus, and they asked me if I would design the letters that Santa writes. Of course, that’s totally up my street because it’s the kind of thing I do for film all the time, so I was immediately interested. 

It also happened to be last year during the writers’ strike, so there wasn’t a lot of shooting going on, and I wasn’t on a movie at all for the first time in ages. So I had loads of time, and I really wanted to write the book as well, so that’s how it ended up coming about. I wrote the book and designed all the props and graphic bits and pieces, and then worked with the illustrator Fia Tobig who drew all of the beautiful pictures of the children.

What was the writing aspect of the book like for you? Was that also uncharted waters?

I have written quite a lot over the years in a kind of personal way. I wrote a book of non-fiction about graphic design in film a few years ago, and years and years ago, I wrote a personal blog and some poetry— I had a couple of poems published a decade ago. So, in a small sense, I had written quite a bit before, but I had never written for children, so that was a first. 

It was really fun because I had to write in Santa’s voice, and I decided that Santa Claus would always write in rhyme. So then I had to write rhyme in verse as well, which was a good, tricky experience.

Each of the children in the book has a different voice too, in how you’ve written their letters to Santa. 

I suppose I have experience in that from film work. When you make props in a movie, nobody is really writing the content for you. Sometimes, you can take a little bit from the script, but a lot of the time, graphic designers making film props have to create that content themselves. So I have written fake love letters, telegrams, little notes that characters have to pass between each other; all that stuff needs to be written. I had always really enjoyed that, I love writing content for things. 

You mentioned that you read all the time to your children, and grew up loving children’s books. What are some of your favorite titles and authors that maybe inspired you for elements of Letters from the North Pole? 

I drew heavily from Janet and Allan Ahlberg who wrote countless books. They wrote a book called The Jolly Postman, which this book borrows from quite a lot because it has all the pull-out letters. I always loved reading those books as a kid, and I read them now to my kids as well, because I love reading books that rhyme, and I think the kids love it as well. There’s just something really lovely about this wholly unexpected rhyme at the end of a sentence. 

I love Benji Davies books: The Storm Whale, all the Bizzy Bear books. I read loads and loads of Shirley Hughes as a kid, and, again, I read all of those books to my kids now. But those books are all quite old now, they’re like, 40 years old.

There’s something so beautiful about how children’s books can be so timeless because so many important themes and lessons about life in many children’s books transcend generations. I also love how the physical copies of the books we read as children we can read to our kids one day. We pass them down as a sort of heirloom. 

Absolutely, I did want to write something that felt timeless. I don’t think I was overly conscious of it, but certainly, all the books that we love here in the house feel timeless. 

Life has changed drastically for kids over the years, but certain bigger-picture ideas, like being a good person, that are often reflected in children’s books, remain the same. I think Santa is timeless, and the idea of sending letters to the North Pole is timeless. 

I really wanted to make a book that was like an introduction to Santa Claus, that kind of went back to basics. We only know so much about Santa. When I was a kid, I started questioning his existence, like, How does he get around the world in one night? Don’t his reindeer get tired? If I stay up late will I meet him? I remember my mother always had the same answer for me. She always said, “There’ve been a lot of books about Santa Claus, there’ve been a lot of songs written about Santa Claus, but the truth is, nobody knows what Santa looks like, because nobody has ever seen Santa in real life.” 

That was what I needed to keep the magic alive, it was the not knowing. So with the book, I really wanted to do that; to give the kids that are reading it just enough information so that they’d be hooked into the mystery of it all. When the kids ask the questions in the book, Santa just deftly bats away the questions with these answers. I think that sometimes the less you say, the more magic it is.

I think the rhyming is part of that too. There’s just something sort of magical about rhyming, in a way, and that ties into the Santa mystique you’ve created with his character.

When I was little, my grandfather used to write me letters; he typed them on his typewriter, and they always rhymed. Rhyming makes it more magical somehow. I suppose it’s a cover-up, too, isn’t it? Santa is actually just your parents, but if they make it a little more whimsical it’s less likely you’ll be like, Hang on a minute, that’s you!

I know your film graphic design work, a lot of the process involves tons of historical research; looking at old artifacts and archives to accurately recreate them. What kind of research went into the designed elements for this book, especially in terms of the letters, their postage, and the diagrams for the toys illustrated in them?

I went looking for loads of old vintage letters. At first, I was going to write Santa’s letters as handwriting, so I was looking for a kind of handwriting style that would feel like it came from this elderly gentleman in the North Pole, but it also had to be legible for children to be able to read it. In the end, I settled on a typewriter instead, because it felt right to me that Santa would have his own typewriter, and it also made it super legible. 

You get those ideas by looking at real things. I have a collection of old letters that I’ve found or bought over the years, and I’ll go through my boxes of stuff, and I’ll cherry-pick all the little bits that make sense. Handwriting varies so much from different people and different times. One of the things we run up against in film is legibility, because older handwriting, cursive handwriting, is actually very difficult to read now. I did do some handwriting in the book for the envelopes. I made that handwriting quite calligraphic and fancy for the envelopes that Santa had addressed to the kids. That felt like a good place to do it because there isn’t too much text there that needs to be read. 

Each of the gifts that the children are asking for in their letters to Santa are so unique, clever, and fun. How did you come up with those? 

I wanted them to be inventions that children think up. The children were going to think of their own toy invention that they wanted Santa to put into production in his workshop for them. So things like a detective’s briefcase that’s full of disguises, and a teddy cam, and fake nose and glasses so that kids could start their own private investigator business, a robot who tidies your bedroom— you couldn’t make a book like this without a bedroom-tidying robot, because that must be one of the most useful things you could have as a child.

The toy ideas in concept are so much more interesting than a doll or a football, but they also make for much more visually compelling illustrations. All of the diagrams and figures are so detailed and rich. The toy ideas invite much more exciting visual representation and exploration. 

Yeah, I wanted them to be inventions that Santa would then have to get one of his industrious elves in his workshop to draw up, and he would have to make a proper technical drawing of this invention, like a blueprint. 

These toy inventions and their production definitely add to that sense of magic you’re trying to capture throughout the book. They have a sort of magical realism to them. 

Exactly. When I first started coming up with this idea, I thought that the children would do drawings of their invention, but then it just felt more fun if the kids had the idea, and Santa had them drawn up. I thought that that would help spark the reason for imagination. I’m hoping that when a kid is reading this book, they’ll start thinking, Oh, what would I invent? If I was going to ask Santa to put something into production, what would I want?

When I was writing and designing this book, I was constantly thinking of the child that it was being read to, and what the kid would like, and what kind of drawings the kids would like, what kinds of toys they would like to think about.

Can you point to a favorite design detail or easter egg in the book that you’re particularly proud of? 

When I first started designing the book, one of the things that I was really thinking about was not wanting to give away too much about Santa to keep the mystery alive. So I decided that we wouldn’t show Santa in the book at all, except for in the postage stamps. Santa is someone who often appears on postage stamps, especially vintage ones, so I think it’s kind of nice that he’s just there on the stamps. I thought that was a nice way to show him without really showing him. It just keeps him that little bit enigmatic. You don’t actually see him anywhere else in the book until the very last page when you see him silhouetted in the doorway of the workshop, and then on the vignette you see him flying off in the distance with his reindeer. 

When working in film, you’re really just working to a script. You’re making everything that’s required of the film script. There is room for creativity there as well, you have to film in the gaps a lot of the time, but this felt very different to me. I had to think in a much more creative way for this, and it felt much more personal as well. 

The post Graphic Prop Designer Annie Atkins Takes her Talents to the World of Children’s Books appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

London-based Lucinda Rogers interprets and represents NYC and here she reports on why she does. And what fills her impressive new book of drawings, Lucinda Rogers New York.

What is the best part of drawing New York City?
The beauty inspires me; the combination of strong colors all around (red-brown and grey-blue for buildings, blue for the sky, signs red, cabs yellow, green subway ironwork and trees, black for night and water tanks); the enveloping feeling of Manhattan; the way you can see so far into the distance; the sun shining on the tops of tall buildings when you’re down below in the shadow. Seeing something to draw everywhere.

How long have you traversed NYC to find your subjects?
I’ve been going there regularly to draw since 1990 and, at the start, walked around different areas one by one. Some subjects I saw by chance while on the way somewhere else. Or I may go to a neighborhood on purpose to look for a subject. For example, Orchard Street, knowing it a bit in the 90s I went back in 2002 to see whether things were still the same and report on it. In 2018 I went to look for any remaining meat packing companies in the meat district and drew one from the High Line.

What part of town is the most interesting to draw? Why?
For a long time, I always returned to Canal Street; it’s the combination of human activity and buildings and being on the edge of different neighbourhoods. It used to be full of sellers on the street and plastics stores. The heavy traffic and giant trucks never put me off. I like it all the way along: the big solid buildings around Canal and Sixth Avenue, the edge of SoHo, the part of Broadway going south from Canal, Lafayette Street, Chinatown. The art store Pearl Paint was also on Canal Street, where I went regularly.

The book of drawings is more than a sketchbook, it has a documentary quality. What is your intent for the book and an entity or object?
Each drawing was done at a particular moment for its own reasons, but by putting the collection into a book that spans 30 years, my intent was to show aspects of New York over a period of time, to enable you to revisit parts of the city through the drawings, like time travel. They are mostly large – about 30 inches on the longer side is typical – and can take up to eight hours to draw, sitting in one place and not using photographs. I do not call them sketches, apart from my first short visit in 1988 when I drew in pencil in a very small student sketchbook.

[NB a reproduction of that sketchbook was published this year by Dashwood Books]

Have you ever been harassed while drawing people?
No, I find it’s the opposite! Drawing in the street is a form of communication that makes the big city feel friendly because most people are open to art, they readily accept drawing as a normal thing to be doing, along with everything else. The people whose actual portraits I have drawn were willing and often helped by standing still for a while. Sometimes people look out for me while I’m there, thinking the same, that I may be harassed.

There are a few artists who have drawn NYC and published what they’ve done (e,g, Joel Holland on storefronts, Jason Polan on people). Where do you see yourself as filling the gap?
Doing these drawings has been my own preoccupation, and I haven’t tried to fill a kind of gap, but I guess my drawings are more about the architecture, with wider-angle views of the streets than those two. The scope of the book is similar to that of street photography (I greatly admire many of those photographers, such as Robert Frank and Berenice Abbot), but I use the completely different medium of drawing, which has different results.

The post The Daily Heller: In NYC, Everywhere There Is Something to Draw appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Folded

My mind inextricably connects folds to paper. Still under the influence of Japan—I was thinking utmost simplicity. I made a couple of sketches then a folded model, cut the segments from PMS colored papers, and pasted in my sketchbook.

Craig Frazier

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 27/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

William Bentley, quoted in Snowflake Bentley

Into December

It is time for the next postcard prompt, and, strangely, I can’t get past the snow of it. Winter is coming, but I don’t live somewhere where I will see snow. It has been many years since I’ve seen snow. For people who have never lived in an area that gets no snow, it may seem hard to comprehend going years and years without either the beauty or the inconvenience. I miss snow. I miss the idea of snow.

When my oldest was born, there was snow in surrounding areas. Snow is so unlikely here that even the hint of snow on that day more than twenty years ago was enough to create family lore. For years, we crafted, cradled, and repeated a story about a little boy who lived on a hill, and on the day he was born, there was snow in the mountains around the city. It is the kind of story that, as soon as you begin saying the words, feels imbued with the magic of a fairy tale.

I can’t remember the last time I saw snow.

I have grown into my appreciation of November as a gratitude-themed month and a month of intentionally looking for and tracking light, but December has a magic all its own.

My enjoyment of December is often rooted in light, sometimes catching the early sunset as the days shorten, but also artificial light. Some of my favorite things are related to Christmas lights. There are lights on the tree and on the bookcases. We used to have lights around the windows and across the shelves in the office.

Ornaments are my other favorite thing in December. Ornaments are often shiny and whimsical containers of memory, quiet little portals to the past. Drawing ornaments has often been a way to center myself and anchor creative habit in December. There are some ornaments I draw again and again, returning to them each year, using them as touchstones to the past.

Last year, I took a nutcracker diversion.

I think devising our own nutcrackers would be a lot of fun for illustrated postcards. I considered it, but I didn’t want to do a prompt for this month that is locked into Christmas. So I went to that thing which we don’t have, snow.

A Focus on Snow – Postcard No. 3

How do you do a postcard about snow?

How do you think about connecting the dots between years and people and memory and personal history and the passage of time…with snow?

You get really close.

You think about snowflakes. You think about individual snowflakes in their frozen latticework, in their fragility and beauty and singularity. You think about crystallization and symmetry.

You think back to when you were a kid, or to some point when you interacted with a child, or to when you were an adult and, on a lark, you grabbed paper and scissors and tried, once again, to make a snowflake. It really shouldn’t be so hard. It’s just the folding of paper and then cutting along the folded edge.

Making snowflakes…I don’t remember doing that as a kid. I’m sure I must have. I don’t specifically remember doing it with my children. I’m sure we must have. But I do remember doing it somewhere along the way, especially as an adult. I remember the anticipation of delicate, lacy, paper creations and the reality that they often come out large and clunky.

I remember that they came out more square than they should. I remember that my hand cut snowflakes don’t offer a lot in the way of whimsy. I remember paper snowflakes as a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe it’s been my technique. I think there’s a very good chance that I’ve never folded the paper correctly, that from the beginning, I had the wrong shape. In looking at directions today, because how hard can it be?, I see over and over again the foundation of a cone-shaped structure. I am fairly sure I’ve never used that kind of triangular base. Did we just fold the paper into rectangles and make block-shaped snowflakes? Surely not. Maybe we stopped one step short of the cone, cutting shapes from a larger, less refined triangle? No wonder they were disappointing. No wonder my memories of paper snowflakes are of something fairly square.)

I would say cutting a snowflake is worth a try again. I would say it’s probably worth using the scissors that shouldn’t be used to cut paper. I would say we should get past caring if we use our scissors to cut paper. I would say we should use smaller paper because we’re older and wiser, and we realize that the full sheet of printer paper is not going to yield a delicate snowflake. I would say we should be bold and use really sharp scissors that can make tiny cuts.

You may or may not be or aspire to be a delicate snowflake, and yet there is beauty in making a delicate snowflake. This is not Minecraft. We don’t need block-level snowflakes. We don’t need 8-bit images plotted out on graph paper. We can follow curves and dip in and out of spaces. We can play with the geometry of shape and form.

So what do you do on a postcard if a single snowflake is your objective? You think about symmetry. You think about branching and hexagonal designs. While it may be fun and intriguing to draw snowflakes with a large number of branches (or arms), the familiar snowflake has six branches that radiate from the center. It’s all about chemistry:

“The six-sided shape of a snowflake can be attributed to the molecular structure of water and the unique formation process of snow crystals. Snowflakes form when water vapour condenses on tiny ice nuclei in cold, supersaturated air. As the water vapour freezes, it arranges itself into a hexagonal lattice due to the hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” – IET

From each of the six arms, a unique symmetry evolves, each arm mirroring the others:

“…while different snow crystals follow different paths through the clouds, the six branches of a single crystal travel together. They all experience the same growth history, so they grow in synchrony. The end result is a snow crystal that is both complex and symmetrical… and often quite stunning.” – Kenneth Libbrecht, The Art of the Snowflake

It is often said that every snowflake is different, that no two are alike. The infinite scope of this singularity, the possibility of this lack of repetition in formation, is part of the magic of snowflakes. We may cling to this story of individuality, but there are actually a number of different types of snowflakes. The classification of snowflakes seems to be something on which scientists differ, but many use a system that includes 35 different types:

A Bit of Snowy History

Wilson A. Bentley, known as Snowflake Bentley, spent much of his life examining, documenting, and photographing snowflakes using a photomicrographic technique. (He succeeded in first photographing a single snow crystal in 1855.) Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes and, famously, never found two that were alike.

In 1931, Snow Crystals, a collection of his photographs, was published. (Bentley died shortly after the publication.)

Snowflake photos taken by Wilson Bentley. Source: Jericho Historical Society.

And here comes the snow,
A language in which no word is ever repeated.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow”

Send a Postcard

On your postcard this month do something related to snow. Draw a snowflake or two. Play with tessellation. Look up snowflake photography and draw something based on real snowflake structures, or play with the simplification of the snowflake as a symbol.

Drawing a snowflake is similar to the process of drawing a mandala. It can be symmetrical and mindful. It can be geometric. It can be precise and structured and measured and calculated, or it can be freeform.

I encourage you to cut a snowflake first. You can then use it as a model to draw, a visual aid as you think about the shape of snow. You might even use it as a stencil and play with negative space, adding a splash of color to a postcard and creating a mosaic from the spaces between.

I tried again before writing today’s prompt, and I still didn’t have much luck. After laughing at one of my attempts, my son suggested that solving part of the problem (the fact that it didn’t have distinct branches and was circular) required cutting off parts of the top at opposite angles. I did that, and as I opened it back up, I was enchanted to find I had unwittingly created rabbits. (I couldn’t not see rabbits.)

The additional cuts helped, giving the snowflake some semblance of branches rather than the appearance of a circular doily, but it still wasn’t satisfying. The rest of the snowflake is still disappointing.

(I had to laugh to see Martha Stewart talk about kids happily occupying themselves cutting dozens of snowflakes.)

The Challenge

This month, I am suggesting you cut one, or, really, draw one.

You don’t have time because December is busy? Really? That might be exactly why you need to slow down and cut or draw a snowflake. It can be a mindful practice.

This month, consider drawing your own snowflake or snowflakes, one or many, on a postcard. Snowflakes embody individuality and singularity, and something crisp and fragile, something icy and prismatic. Snowflakes are often said to represent hope.

Snowflakes are very quiet.
Be like a snowflake.

Related Resources

Here are some directions you can use to cut a snowflake. (These directions also include instructions for how to make a vertical mobile or “curtain” out of paper snowflakes.)

Video inspiration for drawing snowflakes:

• How to draw snowflakes (LethalChris Drawing)
• How to draw a snowflake (Crafty Nica)

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the third in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. The first two prompts involved Halloween memories and spirals of gratitude.

Feel free to jump in. Even if you don’t literally make a postcard and apply a stamp, you might at least think through your response to the prompt and do it in your illustrated journal or sketchbook.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author, except where otherwise noted.

The post Connecting Dots: Send a Snowflake appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Shatter

My wife and I were traveling in Japan when this word got assigned. I was seeing a lot of sake vessels and their silhouettes were always striking in simplicity—inspiration supplied. In order to know something is shattered, you have to know what it was whole.

Craig Frazier

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 26/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The post When Famous Artists Were Kids: Barbara Kruger appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wind

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 25/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When your boss tells you to track down an amusing Steve Brodner factoid to open the podcast with, and one of the first things you find is a, uh, a “dick army,” welp, that’s what you’re going to go with.

Lest you judge me, I can explain. Brodner’s drawing of this army was inspired by a guy who was actually named Dick Armey (A-R-M-E-Y)! He was Newt Gingrich’s wingman back in the nineties. I thought to myself, The people need to know this.

However, with the election now a few days behind us, maybe the time for talking about men and their junk is over?

What you really want to learn about is this Society of Illustrators Hall of Famer’s career. Brodner’s work, which has been called “unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass, and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion,” has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and many others.

In this episode, Brodner talks about how the death of print has led to the current misinformation crisis. As it gets harder and harder to tell what’s true, the future becomes increasingly uncertain. Even his most biting drawings are rooted in truth.

Satire doesn’t work if you are irresponsibly unreasonably inventive. If satire doesn’t have truth in it, it’s not funny.

A production note: This episode was recorded exactly one week before the election. As our conversation began, we took turns telling stories about memorable election night parties, and our plans for November 5th. Here’s Steve, talking about his plans…

Check out the episode page for the full transcript and illustrations by Brodner.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a podcast about magazines and the people who made (and make) them. Magazines that combined thought-provoking attitudes and values with a distinctive look and feel, and cast a long and powerful shadow on American culture and public discourse. Hear stories and learn lessons from legendary designers, editors, writers, publishers, photographers, illustrators, photo editors, and more—stories and lessons that capture a magical history of innovation and inspiration, and that point the way forward. We’ll go deep into the lives and careers of this astonishingly talented group of creators, and tease out what these giants—past and present—have to teach the next generation of creators.

If you’re in the magazine business—if you’re in any business focused on content creation—this podcast is for you.

This episode is made possible by PIDLLP sponsors Commercial Type, Mountain Gazette, and Freeport Press.

The team behind Print is Dead (Long Live Print!) also produces The Full Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines and the magazines of the future.

The post What Makes Steve Brodner Happy appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Design creativity blooms in spaces where curiosity meets intention, where ideas are nurtured into forms that resonate and inspire. It’s a process marked by exploration, experimentation, and the willingness to challenge conventions to uncover new perspectives. In this fertile ground, creativity is more than a spark—it’s a cultivated journey, drawing from diverse influences and blending intuition with technique.

Celebrating our 45th year, the 2025 PRINT Awards honors design in every shape and form. And, as our industry continues to evolve and our practitioners continue to explore new mediums and methods to advance their creativity, the PRINT Awards have found new ways to recognize outstanding work.

2024 PRINT Awards First Place Winner in Self-Promotions. The Office of Ordinary Things and D&K Printing. D&K Printing also printed the beautiful 2024 PRINT Awards certificates.

Categories for 2025

The 2025 PRINT Awards offer 28 categories for entries, ranging from Illustration to Motion Design & Video. In recent years, we added In-House, Design for Social Impact, and Packaging and expanded our branding categories. We also expanded the awards to offer students a chance to enter work in each category instead of only one student category. And, this year, our jury will also consider entries in Social Media + Content Design, Title Sequence Design, and Graphic Novels.

Learn more about the 2025 PRINT Awards categories.

2024 PRINT Awards Third Place Winner in Packaging, CF Napa Brand Design; Second Place Winner in Logo Design, Onfire. Design.

Citizen Design Award

Each year, the PRINT Awards highlight a free-to-enter Citizen Design Award to celebrate design work focused on one annually chosen social issue. With societies facing global challenges like climate change, economic instability, and technological shifts, our Citizen Design Award this year will honor work that speaks to social justice.

Social Justice ensures that all people are entitled to human rights and societal respect regardless of race, gender, religion, health, and economic status. Discrimination in the form of economic and educational inequities, combined with enduring legacies of oppression continue to impact many communities, creating toxic cycles of privilege and disadvantage.

Design can profoundly influence social justice through graphic tools that amplify awareness and drive change. Design can make complex issues more accessible, spark debate, inform audiences, and motivate positive engagement. This year’s PRINT Citizen Design category recognizes and celebrates the most impactful work that fosters empathy and action. From social awareness campaigns to apps, community-centered design projects, infographics, posters, social media graphics, and interactive experiences, Citizen Design will honor work that strives to make our world more compassionate and just.

2024 PRINT Awards First Place Winner in Design for Social Impact, Clinton Carlson and Team.

Our 2025 Jury

With a global jury representing a wide range of disciplines, each entry will continue to be judged on four key criteria: Craft, Longevity, Innovation, and Originality. Top winners will be featured on PRINTmag.com and receive trophies, certificates, and social media promotion. We’ll be adding jury members in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we welcome a few here!

A few of the 2025 Jury Members: Marisa Sanchez-Dunning, Bennett Peji, Jennifer Rittner, Eleazar Ruiz, Lara McCormick, Mike Perry, and Miller McCormick. More jurors are to be announced soon!

The 2025 PRINT Awards Presenting Sponsor

The team at PepsiCo Design + Innovation believes that good design is a meaningful experience. A functional product. A rich story. A beautiful object. Design can be fun, convenient, precious, or fearless, but good design is always an act of respect, empathy, and love.

That’s why PepsiCo Design + Innovation has joined PRINT this year as our Presenting Sponsor—to recognize, honor and, above all, to celebrate the joy of design in all its forms. That’s why PepsiCo Design and Innovation has joined PRINT this year as our Presenting Sponsor—to recognize, honor, and, above all, celebrate the joy of design in all its forms!

Dates and Deadlines

As in years past, we’ve broken the deadline schedule for the awards into four simple tiers—Early Bird, Regular, Late, and Final Call. The earlier you enter, the more you save because it helps us plan judging schedules and other tasks in advance. Enter now for the best price! (And it’s worth noting that to enable students to enter, the pricing is consistent across the board no matter when they submit their work.)

Join us as we recognize the talent that colors our world and celebrate the beauty of fresh ideas, bold solutions, and impactful storytelling. From emerging talents to seasoned visionaries, each submission is a testament to the boundless growth of design.

Submit your work today, and let’s cultivate the next generation of creative vision!

The post Announcing The 2025 PRINT Awards Call For Entries appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I grew up with a New York Yankees super fan as a father, who listened to every inning of every game on a hand-held transistor radio pressed up against his ear. The soothing sound of legendary commentator Roger Sterling’s voice is central in the soundtrack of my childhood, crackling through our kitchen and living room airwaves, accompanied by my dad’s whoops and groans.

My dad normalized listening to sporting events on the radio, but I never thought much of it. Recently, however, I came upon the evocative work of the Spanish artist Cassandra Constant, who’s spent much of her art practice contemplating this very concept. In Constant’s hometown of Madrid, the sport they’re listening to on the radio isn’t baseball, but fútbol, which is a much faster-paced and frenetic sport. Constant began to consider how listeners to soccer games on the radio visualized what they were hearing, and took this questioning to her sketch pad.

Since this initial curiosity, Constant has illustrated over 250 soccer games she’s listened to in full. With just pencil and paper, she rapidly sketches the play-by-play relayed to her from the radio, creating a rich world of fútbol frenzy in her finished drawings. Enthralled by her work, I reached out to learn more about her action-packed process.

What’s your personal relationship to soccer? Have you always been a football fan? What team do you support?

I am, first and foremost, an artist who loves movement and color… and football! I was born and brought up in Spain, and here soccer is part of daily life— on the news, the teams, players, scores, watching games on television, or listening to them on the radio.

Growing up, we watched football as a family. My brother supported one team, Real Madrid CF, so of course I had to support the other main Madrid team. That was a long time ago. Following my first art show, a famous footballer (who plays on my brother’s team) bought a painting of mine through one of the chief curators of the Prado Museum. I instantly changed teams to support my new collector!

I would get into a taxi, and the driver would be listening to a match on the radio and I wondered: How does he know where the ball is? 

When and why did you first start drawing football games as you listened to them? What inspired that idea?

As an artist, you have to observe and ask questions and be curious. Often I would get into a taxi, and the driver would be listening to a match on the radio and I wondered: How does he know where the ball is? 

Many years later, I bumped into an old friend in Rio de Janeiro who was a technician for a Spanish radio station and they were covering Real Madrid CF in one of the international competitions. We talked about transmission, how the match was relayed back home, the importance of narrators and commentators, communication and imagination, and how radio illustrates the scene.

Very much an experimentalist, I started putting down some ideas to “illustrate” the radio, beginning with football matches! Drawing soccer players on large pieces of paper, trying soft-ground etching on metal plates and collages, cutting out footballers from newspapers, and also drawing straight onto smooth canvases. But the narration and commentary and the match go very fast! Each game is two 45-minute halves, and there was a lot to capture. So eventually, I settled for A3 size (approx. 11×16 inches), smooth, white paper, using all kinds of writing materials, from black ballpoint pens, Bic blue biros, and now a variety of graphite pencils. I continue to experiment!

How often do you draw games? How many have you drawn so far?

I used to only draw football matches occasionally, and closer to the final stages of competitions: national leagues, European football, and World Cups. Now I find myself drawing all sorts of matches, from those between big rival teams to lesser-known ones.

I now draw, on average, a match a week. I have drawn over 250 matches.

Can you describe your game drawing process? What’s your set-up like as you listen to them on the radio? How have you developed the visual language you use to interpret the games?

Once I know which game I want to draw, set up starts about an hour before the match begins. I usually listen to the top Spanish radio station for sports, but also Talksport and BBC5 Live. I find out who’s in the initial starting teams, and write the names on paper so I know who’s going to be running in which direction!

Then I get an A3 size paper and quickly note down the competition, stadium, teams, name of referee, roughly draw club emblems, an outline of the pitch, goalposts, and the benches. I turn the paper upside down, the match starts, and we’re off! It’s fast, there are passes from left to right, back towards the goals, long balls, players whose names I cannot grasp, the kits, and what colors the goalkeepers are wearing, and I am grateful when I hear it’s a throw-in, a corner, offside, foul, yellow card; that’s when I start getting an idea of what’s happening! 

There are goals, injuries, red cards (occasionally), players come off the pitch, and new ones come on. Depending on the radio station, this can be interspersed with advertisements, calling of winning lottery numbers, the number of people in the stadium, football gossip, transfer news, VIPS in the stands, what players have just had a baby, endless statistics, and records broken— you get the picture. I love it! There’s a rhythm and it’s all very intense!

I think playing football is really difficult! It involves so many components, organization, and strategies, from players, coaches, medical practitioners, nutritionists, PRs, designers, and more to plenty of staff to manage it all. There are many more aspects I have yet to explore!

Why have you decided to keep your interpretation of the games to just pencil and paper, only using a red marker to indicate goals? What does that sketchy style bring to the way you portray the games?

The sketchy style is the result of “illustrating” a game, which takes place in less than two hours: fast, speedy, energetic, dynamic, and intense, trying to capture as much as possible. I assure you, I end up exhausted!

I’m not sure whether I should continue to outline the goals scored in red. Maybe that’s one of those questions I can ask on social media: Better in red or not? What do you think?

I feel I am contributing something to art and to football. Sharing the experience means a lot to me.

Are you surprised by the public reception of your game sketches? How has the success of your work felt?

I’m not really sure how many people have seen my drawings. What I can tell you is that when people first see them, they seem perplexed and not too sure what they are looking at. But when they realize, or when I explain it to them, they love the concept. This makes me happy, as I feel I am contributing something to art and to football. Sharing the experience means a lot to me.

I have had many enquiries about the drawings and had conversations with fans from different clubs, which I find very enriching. I am interested in the histories and values of these clubs. 

At the moment, I am in the process of setting up a website offering a selection of matches which I hope will be ready later in November.

Header image: 2022 World Cup Final; Argentina vs. France

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Wood

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But, his political satire only scratches the surface of his full oeuvre.

Rodriguez’s work spans from painting and sculpture to film posters, portraiture, children’s book illustrations, and on and on. Steven Heller recently wrote about his illustrated book covers for two Cuban sci-fi titles in a recent The Daily Heller. He also wrote and illustrated his American experience in Worm, a graphic memoir that spans his fleeing from Castro’s Cuba as a young child on the Mariel boatlift to watching the insurrection unfold on January 6, 2021. If you missed our PRINT Book Club with Rodriguez about Worm, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Rodriguez is the subject of a new documentary, Freedom is a Verb, now screening at DOC NYC from Nov 13 through Dec 1, and airing on PBS in the coming months. Directed by Adrienne Hall and Mecky Creus, the film explores the reckless pursuit of freedom inherent in all of Rodriguez’s work. Watch the trailer here.

With the election decided, Rodriguez’s work takes on layers of prophetic meaning. We look forward to Edel Rodriguez’s truth-telling in the near future, reminding us of the power of artists and creatives in times of chaos and despair.

Below, we’ve highlighted some of his stellar work over the last few years.

Left: Latino voter engagement illustration for The Washington Post; Latino vote 2024 poster

Covers for Stern (Germany, two at top left), La Croix (France, top middle), and Time (US, top right and bottom two).

Imagery courtesy of Edel Rodriguez.

The post Four More Years! (…of Edel Rodriguez) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

For more, read PRINT’s interview with Hische about her latest children’s book, out Oct 2024, My First Book of Fancy Letters.

Welcome to the DesignThinkers Podcast! Join host and RGD President Nicola Hamilton as she digs into the archives of the DesignThinkers conference, reconnecting with past speakers about their talks and ideas that have shaped Canada’s largest graphic design conference. Follow the RGD on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit them at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

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Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Backstage on the Two Craigs website is on hiatus for a few weeks, but if you’ve missed any of the last few prompts, it’s worth a look back.

Time …

after Time

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Our gratitude is individual. Like the lines and whorls on our fingers, our relationship with gratitude is unique.

Gratitude doesn’t have to be about big things. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Our gratitude can be most sustaining and most profound when things are falling apart. We can be grateful for things that are vast, things that are ineffable, but we can also be grateful for small things, for a favorite coffee cup, a soft pillow, the flash of a bird in the tree.

Finding gratitude in the quotidian can help center you, can help you find perspective, and can make a difference in how you experience the world around you.

Talking about gratitude is more commonplace now than it was a handful of years ago, or maybe it feels that way simply because I struggled with gratitude. I struggled to find my footing in gratitude as a mindset and a practice at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart.

I was a late-comer to the gratitude table, or, in my case, hilltop. I found my way there not as things got better but as things started to dissolve. When I first talked out loud about gratitude, I got emotional. I remember feeling like I was shedding my surface as I admitted that what I thought I needed was to focus on gratitude. It didn’t make sense to me, but my discomfort, and even my resistance, seemed important. I struggled with my sense that gratitude was a superficial practice, something that blurred or elided reality. I remember feeling silly. I might as well have been admitting I was going looking for unicorns in the park.

That was a beginning. I was struggling with fear and anxiety and worry over ongoing health issues in my house. I was feeling like there was no bottom to bottom, like I didn’t know where “bottom” was, but I recognized that something was increasingly hollow in me. Almost instinctively, I reached for something shiny, something I thought might be powerful. I reached for gratitude.

The next year, in November, I did 30 days of gratitude writing and recording. I found myself standing at the top of the hill, the literal hill on which I live, at sunset most days, and looking out, a point that lets me see the ocean and the bay, a point that puts the sky in motion overhead. I can turn in a circle and see the whole world. That’s how it feels, the moon over the bay, the sun dropping into the ocean, rose light warming the faces of the houses on the street. November has the best light.

That year, I gave myself over to the top of the hill, to my appreciation for all that was right then, for having that beauty within the distance of a short walk of our senior rescue. I noticed the colors of paint on houses after rain. I wrote about memory, about all that I don’t remember. I wrote about being present, being aware of things we take for granted, and appreciating things that are within reach.

I try to keep gratitude in mind all year long, but November is always a reset point, a month steeped in a gratitude mindset. I no longer cry when I talk about gratitude.3 Like most things, with practice, we get over our resistance, find our own patterns, move past the things that hurt, and find comfort in the routine.

I’ve done a number of November gratitude projects now, both written and drawn. I’ve tracked November light, the barest of diagrams showing the bands of the sky when I first walk into the kitchen and see the light over the bay in the distance. I’ve added gratitudes to daily planners and my Notion dashboard. There is really no wrong way to approach it. One year I did a series of portraits of people in one of my online communities. Two years in a row, I did large drawings to which I added a simple drawing each day of a concrete thing for which I was grateful. (Those projects are favorites.)

It may feel silly to focus on daily gratitude and on gratitude for small things, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite pencil, the familiar quilt, the cozy sweater from a loved one who has passed, but the practice is powerful. It is deceptively simple, but it can make a dramatic difference in how you feel. All that is wrong doesn’t go away. That remains the tension with gratitude. It isn’t an eraser. But something happens in the process of paying more attention, focusing, and looking around with intention and naming and recognizing our gratitude.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

John Greene, Turtles All The Way Down

Snail Mail – November Postcard Prompt

This month’s postcard prompt is gratitude-infused, but on the concrete level, the prompt is a spiral.

A spiral is a winding path, one that either moves in on itself or radiates from the center out. In walking, tracing, or drawing a spiral, literally or figuratively, there is mindfulness, the coiling or unfurling of thought, the chance to see what sits or stands or dances at other points of the spiral as you pass again and again.

Mathematically speaking, there are a number of different types of spirals, including: the Archimedean spiral, the hyperbolic spiral, Fermat’s spiral, the logarithmic spiral, the lituus spiral, the Cornu spiral, the spiral of Theodorus, the Fibonacci spiral (also called the golden spiral), conical spirals, whorls, and the involute of a circle.

These quick line drawings (not mathematically precise) show some of the spirals listed above.

This elongated spiral doesn’t show up in the list, but we know this model from the world around us:

To multiply the fun, consider the triskelion (or triskele):

We can think about spirals in terms of galaxies (look up “barred spiral”), snails, pinecones, succulents, pineapples, and the horn of a goat. The list goes on.

As a metaphor, we can use the spiral as a path for mindfulness. We can walk the spiral in or out. We can wind our way around and back like a labyrinth.

For this month’s postcard, integrate a spiral and, if you are bold, let gratitude be your guide.

You may want to simply play with the spiral as an image. You might think about cinnamon rolls or the Fibonacci sequence or snails. Or you may want to use the spiral as the form of the writing, starting from the center and writing your message in a spiral. Maybe you choose a special quote or poem. Maybe you express your gratitude to the recipient. Maybe you simply write a letter as a spiral, something the reader will have to slowly spin to read.

There is mindfulness in the reading, too.

Primary or secondary, either way, gratitude is part of the November prompt. If the spiral isn’t of interest, you might use your postcard to document daily gratitudes (one a day). You might draw a series of icons of things for which you are grateful.

Gratitude Quotes

Here are a few gratitude quotes to get you started thinking and appreciating in November:

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi

“Gratitude bestows reverence…changing forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” — A.A. Milne

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is the true prosperity.” — Eckhart Tolle

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you made and sent an October card, we would love to see what you did with the costume-themed prompt. If you share in social media, please tag me and use #PostcardPrompts.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author.

The post Connecting Dots: Tracking Gratitude in Snail Mail appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see their thought process as they translate each prompt through photography and illustration.

Hot

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Now, however, I have another vision in my mind’s eye as I re-read the book. Igor Karash‘s illustrations for a forthcoming limited edition from Easton Press bring more nuanced darkness to Vonnegut’s shadows. Karash, known for his satiric depictions of Stalinist Soviet Union, brings into play dramatic shades of light and dark that illuminate Vonnegut’s personal feelings about the horror of war.

Below, Karash and I discuss the making of this emotionally tense, tactile rendition of a 20th-century classic, which is bound to become a 21st-century treasure.

I’ve read Slaughterhouse–Five at least five times over the past 20 years (and saw the film three times). I am very taken by your visual interpretation. How did this project begin?
In the fall of 2021 (about five months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) I was approached by the publishing company Easton Press in Connecticut. Honestly, I believe it was only the second or third time in my illustration career that a publisher contacted me directly with a commission. Easton Press is best known for deluxe editions of illustrated classics. When I heard they were interested in me illustrating Slaughterhouse–Five, a book I always admired, it only took me a few seconds to reply with a confirmation that I was fully on board.

My initial step was to formulate a few possible visual scenarios—concepts and mood boards consisting of sketches, previous work that could stylistically work for Kurt Vonnegut, and inspirational images, including war-time photography. One particular concept titled “SO IT GOES” was inspired by an event in the book when Billy Pilgrim watched a black-and-white newsreel backwards and how the Tralfamadorians viewed reality as a thousand images in one glance. The other two concepts involved integrating religious imagery from the early Renaissance, or, quite the opposite, visuals inspired by American sci-fi illustrations of the ’50s and early ’60s.

The “SO IT GOES” concept was chosen by the publisher and I began to develop the series.

You mentioned that you started working on it at the outset of the Ukraine-Russia war. How did it impact your work?
Not in the greatest way. When I started developing the visuals, I was predominantly moved by the idea of examining the “horrors of war,” bouncing on the borderline between the darkest side of human nature and the paradoxical presence of good (this is the main message of the book for me). And then, the first war on the European continent since WWII turned everything upside down. Ukraine for me isn’t just another country—this is where I went to art school, where I met my wife, and where both of my children were born. From day one of the Russian invasion I was closely watching and following all news from Ukraine, contacting my friends there, etc., and almost immediately my drawings of the “horrors of war” on the surface of my drawing tablet started to feel bleak, unimportant and fake compared to the tragic reality unfolding before me, and I more deeply sunk into the hole of “PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN FROM THEIR PAST. SO IT GOES.” It took me a while to find enough inner peace to continue the project.

When were you introduced to Vonnegut’s writing, and what was your initial impression?
I was first introduced to Kurt Vonnegut’s prose during my “previous life” in the Soviet Union. There were few translations of his novels published in the USSR—most notably Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Not a lot of American authors were lucky to be published in my country (I say this with sarcasm in my voice). I think the Soviets liked Kurt Vonnegut’s rebellious criticism of the West, satirical commentary of the system, and anti-war sentiment. For us, the then-young generation (in contrast to the official government’s stance), his books were a small window to the West and we mainly enjoyed Vonnegut for his dark humor, surreal settings, fantastic worlds, elements of eroticism, and the oftentimes unusual structures and timelines in his books.

I only read Slaughterhouse–Five in English when I started working on this project. I have read it in its entirety about 10 times during the illustration process, and would periodically revisit specific chapters and sections.

What I like most is that none of the images you’ve made conform to my vision of the book, which I think is dictated by the movie. What is your thinking behind the pictures?
Somehow, perhaps subconsciously, my experiences in the Soviet military (1979–1981) shaped my vision for this project. Let me explain: There was a very strict draft system, so everyone had to serve in some capacity. I was drafted into the army while I was a student taking evening classes at an architecture college in Baku, Azerbaijan. I was a young 19-year-old dreamy/artistic type, so even though they found a military uniform and a pair of boots for me, I was very unprepared and quite unfit, a Soviet-style Billy Pilgrim.

I think what came through in my drawings based on my personal experiences is the feeling of being a misfit and a deep loneliness. The places I was stationed shaped my vision—I found myself in the midst of former German lands in the Kaliningrad Region (the city of Kaliningrad was built on the remains of the German city of Königsberg). When the city was taken over by the Soviets at the end of WWII it was somehow rebuilt as a typical Soviet city, but the region as a whole looked like a “frozen in time” war zone. One of these places, a small village called Kornevo with a dying collective farm, was at some point a fairly prosperous German town called Zinten. Not a lot remained of Zinten except for a few ruins. Scars of war were everywhere—holes from artillery shells on the buildings, wild apple trees where blossoming apple orchards once were, and ruins of homes with swimming pools in their backyards. Our regiment was stationed in former German barracks—a really well-built former German Tank School. These buildings were the only well-kept structures in Kornevo. When I started working on Slaughterhouse-Five, all my memories of this place came back, and now looking at my drawings I see some resemblance and reflection of these experiences.

On a general note, I always think my primary goal (when illustrating classic literature or modern classics) is to formulate a fairly independent and novel visual experience for the reader. But it is also important to me to find some balance between audience expectations regarding the theme, characters, time period, etc., and my artistic freedom. In the end, I hope the work has contemporary relevance and presents a balance of three worlds: “the world of the book,” “the world of the author” and “the world of the artist.”

You’ve also focused more on the return to Dresden than the character’s life in the suburbs. Did you prefer to stick to the surreal aspect of the plot?
This book, despite its small size, has a very complex structure (like the time travel) and an exceptional number of characters, so I had to make a decision very early in the process to limit my choices and focus on a few primary themes, like the Dresden bombing/scars of the war and the time/space travel that is part of Billy’s mental state … or is it?

This is a full-throttle deluxe visual experience. Do you feel it enhances or complements the reading?
A well-produced illustrated edition of an important influential book is something that, in my mind, corresponds to seeing a great theater performance or watching a great film based on a well-known classic. Yes, the story is familiar, but a new production or fresh creative direction adds new relevance and surfaces overlooked nuances. I think the modern reader is less interested in seeing visually what is already well-described in the text and appreciates illustrations that are more atmospheric, conceptually sophisticated and enigmatic.

This special edition also reflects the full creative freedom endowed to me by Easton Press—not a single concept or image I proposed was dismissed—including the most bizarre and strange imagery. I hope Kurt Vonnegut would like that!

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