Michael Salu, the Art Director for Granta Publications in the UK hired me to do this cover for Chris Adrian's A Better Angel. (Showing front cover and spine.) It's a companion piece for Adrian's The Great Night.

 This cover for Creative Review has my name on it because they wanted it, even over my slight objection. Well, there is a profile of me in the mag, so ...

The theme of the issue is "Dream Studios" so I imagined my dream studio, which is similar in location to what I have, but in a sleek modernist building with lots of windows. 

It's printed on an uncoated textured paper with silver foil, so it's pretty bitchin'.

(btw, on the CR site you can also see a page spread which shows a photo of me by my friend Mark Mushet.)

 It was a tragedy when this cover for a Canadian magazine (name changed to protect the innocent) was rejected.

Given carte blanche to design a special edition cover in red, black and silver, this was my intended design. The job was killed part way through, but I liked it so much I decided to finish it.

My good friend Brian Morgan called in a favour to get me to do this cover for The Walrus. I then worked with Kelsey Blackwell toward the final.

They wanted me to illustrate the words “We’re Sorry” relating to a story about the Canadian propensity to apologize, and the troubles that ensue from public apologies for past national crimes. I had hoped to trick them into letting me draw snakes, but just as I was relishing the prospect of a triumphant coup in getting snakes on the cover of a magazine, they nixed that idea. Disappointed but not surprised, I switched to string … or the entanglement of yarn. I don’t think Brian thought I was serious when I suggested a fluffy kitten to go with it, but I was! Alas, no snakes, no kittens.

However, I quite like the way, from a distance this looks like some gruesome viscera … but on closer inspection it reveals itself to be only harmless, friendly yarn.

I’ve been doing some work with the fabulous, and famous fabric company Maharam lately … work which is not ready to be shown yet (yet!), but they did use a piece of mine for the cover of their 2010 calendar.

I think you have to be a client of theirs to get this. Sorry.

I am tardy at getting this piece up, because the issue is now almost off the stands. My good pals Mark Mushet and Gudrun Will asked me to design the cover for their 20th issue.

Don’t ask me why I envisioned a rubbery, bubble-gummy “20” in pink and blue … maybe because the magazine is anything but?

Anyway, Happy 20th, VR!

This is a groovy isometric patterned cover I did for the “Signs, Symbols, Ornaments” issue of the German mag Slanted.

Oddly, something happened when the file was processed. The red (now pink) overprinted instead of knocking out … or is it the black? Anyway, my original design is below, but I’m not sure which i prefer.

And here’s the front and back cover together (before it was printed):

I actually did this back in September 07, but only recently found that the project is live. It’s all quite complex. Darren Wall from Faber books in the UK contacted me about this new project that they were doing creating one-off, on-demand books (see below). For this they were going to have a computer program generate unique covers based on border patterns that I would make.

The borders needed to go with a custom font designed by Michael C. Place, and although each would be different, they needed to have fairly distinct personalities for 4 categories: arts, fiction, children’s and non-fiction.

So this is what I provided, attempting to create something that I thought a computer program might be able to differentiate, somehow, while randomly interpreting. I think.

There’s a great write-up about the process by Karsten Schmidt, who was involved in the programming.
The results are as follows … the next 4 pics show the variety …

The following 4 pics show the variety generated from just the curly borders …

And then some from the angular borders …

More information on the books, and many more borders and books are viewable at http://faberfinds.co.uk/.

Richard Turley is maybe my favourite Art Director. Another great—if I do say so myself—cover for The Guardian’s G2. This ran on December 24, 2007.

This project was for Bruce Mau Design. I worked with Carolina Soderholm to create this emboss pattern for the cover of a book of lectures given at the Alberta College of Art + Design, in Calgary.

I’ve always been fascinated by the beautiful abstractions of earth when flying over the prairies: particularly the area around Lethbridge where the land seems to be divided into circular shapes. With the help of Google Earth, I combined these shapes with tose of city streets: bloack, roads, sections and crops. This speaks to the intersection of the arts and the community; the urban and the rural; landscape as metaphor for connection.

This is the limited edition cover I did for Wallpaper* Magazine.

It’s printed in silver and gold (and other colours), and the theme is “The Future,” so of course it has to have space ships! It also has 18 wishes for you for the future. I won’t tell you what they say, as it would spoil the fun of reading them. Perhaps in the future, I will reveal all.

I was excited as shit to be asked to do this, and a big thanks to Wallpaper’s Art Director, Tony Chambers, for doing so, and for working with me on it. He’s a sweetheart.

The Dec. 2 2006 issue of the New York Times Books. Here’s my cover:

Knitting in vector art is way harder than you’d expect, by the way, and takes a surprising amount of computer fire-power.
Here’s some titling inside (tho the scarf got changed to b&w):

And here’s the cover version that never made it, with a deer, a pug and a moth:

With thanks to Nicholas Blechman and special thanks to Steve Heller.

I was thrilled to death to be asked to do the cover for Print, as well as given [almost] free reign over eight interior pages. Actually, both came from the content I was given to work with for the interior: predictions of the future of graphic design as made by designers 40 and 50 years ago.

The predictions ranged from the wacky to the remarkably prescient, and as one can imagine they focussed quite a bit on technology. When thinking about technology then and technology now, I decided that one of the few things we’re still using are little wires. Those fine, coloured wires that make a nice, colourful line.

But I wanted to add an element of humanity for the fallibility of predictions, and so came the little hands, which then started doing things related to the text.

For the text itself I chose a typeface I felt evoked the 50s & 60s in Poster Bodoni Bold; and broke yet another of my own typographic rules never to use a display face for text, by choosing StormType’s Rondka: a quirkly little number evocative of all the mistakes humans make.

The display text is custom.

With thanks to Joyce Rutter Kaye, and Kristina DiMatteo.

And special thanks to Debbie Millman for hosting the fabulous New York party in honour of the issue, with 80 people turning out. I wish I had more pictures but I was too busy having fun. (Pictured, Kristina & Joyce, about to eat their words.)