Illustration

An early take on an illustration for an infographic on the effects of obesity.

The request from the editors was to render my obesity illustration in a more painterly, less clinical visual style. This was my final version. I was just informed that the graphic using this illustration was awarded First Place in the Press Club of Cleveland's statewide Excellence in Journalism competition.

Op-Ed illustration. Modeled in Lightwave 9.

The reporter and I agreed that a down-to-earth, colloquial tone and a hint of humor would suit this piece on the pitfalls of holiday air travel. That — and the very tight deadline — convinced me to use a low-tech, cartoon style of illustration.

A freelance illustration, produced using a felt-tip pen, for a Philadelphia Inquirer story about unpleasant wedding experiences.

I heard it said that Philly mob figure Joey "Skinny Joey" Merlino really, really didn't like this page. No word on how Angelo Lutz took it.

"The Couch Politico" was a standing political-analysis feature that appeared for a brief time in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

GPS devices explained

This was supposed to be an explanatory graphic accompanying the story, but there really wasn't much graphic there — they mainly wanted art to anchor the page. So I went ahead and gave it a workout.

Just getting started on a piece about Browns uniforms down through their history. Modeled in Lightwave 9.

A desktop wallpaper illustration created for a presentation called "The Key to Producing First-Rate Graphics In the Second-Tier Newsroom," which I delivered with my colleague Stephen Beard at the Society for News Design's annual workshop in 2006. Why a newsroom chimp? Well, you had to be there.

Illustration for a takeout on the cancellation of "Star Trek: Enterprise," the first Trek series to be cancelled since the original. I never miss an opportunity to produce graphics about Star Trek. And anytime you can get phasers and beer cans into the paper, you're obviously doing something right.

A careful 3d study of a 17th-century Algonquian Indian and an English settler for a project piece on the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. The project got scaled back and I didn't end up using these guys, but I was still very pleased with my effort to bring vintage visual source material to 3-dimensional life.

My take on a scuffed-up Cleveland Browns football helmet. It's an experiment in bump and specularity mapping.

This was my proposed (and rejected) header art for the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Graphics blog. It represents a graphic's progression from initial sketch to finished, rendered art.

A quick 3d illustration for a piece — can't even remember when it ran — on political dialogue.

I was writing an op-ed piece on Sputnik's effect on the American psyche. Again, there really wasn't much graphic there — I mainly needed art to anchor the page. This is an accurate, if incomplete look inside the Sputnik casing, and a simple explainer of the R7 booster.

Something about the relationship between the Public Utilities Commission, the Consumers' Counsel office, utilities, consumers ... A shake-and-bake Business centerpiece.

A quick change-of-direction piece for the Features desk, rendered on deadline with a No. 2 pencil and good old Photoshop.

We've done quite a few of these button-style logos, as most papers have. I really enjoy designing them.

Illustration

GPS devices explained

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