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Foreward by Hank Richardson

“He has a way of stretching ideas, breaking them, and then reassembling them into inexplicably new ideas.”

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San Francisco design.

We were collectively creating a design aesthetic that was undeniably colorful, simple, graphic—often whimsical. I was very aware that “sameness” was ultimately the enemy, and if I was to survive, I had to keep working at being different.

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Laws of attraction.

Amongst the various requirements of assignment work lies the most difficult—to make the drawing interesting. In fact, quite often we are asked to make uninteresting topics interesting to those who aren’t typically interested. It’s a mind-bending exercise at the core of almost every assignment that lands on my drawing board.

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The wit’s end.

Ironically, wit becomes a more viable approach the more serious the context. It’s very rare that I get an assignment that strikes me as humorous upon initial reading. In fact, many are painfully solemn. Often even boring. Those are the very jobs that require the illustration to lift the reader to a place words can’t do alone. Thank god for wit.

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Buried treasures.

Because we are less informed about the subject, most of us start with fewer preconceptions, so the possibility for abstract concepts are more available. For me, this kind of assignment leads to visual metaphors and surreal scenarios—cobbling together familiar symbols to tell a new story. It becomes the perfect place to use irony, wit, and juxtaposition to create a new porthole into a subject.

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From here to there.

I wanted to employ understatement, leaving breadcrumbs so the reader could arrive at their own conclusions—a sort of programmed ambiguity. I wanted to contribute to my clients’ designed pages and, more than anything, make work that was memorable. I wanted it to be beautiful. I wanted it to matter.

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My back pages.

When I draw in a sketchbook, I feel like I’m making room in my head, like moving stuff from the dining room table to the garage.

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