Lunar Holiday Poster

Yesterday I finished this holiday poster for Lunar, a product design company based out of San Francisco. They approached me with the general idea of wanting to collaborate on their company holiday card, with the hope that it could become a fold-out poster incorporating lots of different types of imagery. They sent out a questionnaire to their employees in San Francisco, as well as to their offices in Munich and Hong Kong, asking them to name some of their favorite things. The point of this was to gain a bit of a cross-section of the "Lunar culture" as experienced by their employees around the globe. Here's a few sample questions they sent out:

- All time favorite holiday food?
- Favorite corner in the city?
- Favorite LUNAR project of the year?
- Favorite gift to give?
- Favorite festival of the year in SF/Munich/HK?
- What’s your favorite SF/Munich/HK institution?
- Favorite after work/weekend past time?

So I had to take all of the different answers and figure out some way to represent them into a holiday poster context. Here are my first 3 sketches:




They liked the 2nd sketch, but wanted way more stuff going on and more imagery from the answers incorporated into it. They found an image of a vintage Candyland boardgame, which they loved as an idea for more of a path or a map. They felt that referencing this could communicate something like, “LUNAR is a unique place during the holidays". And they loved the way the illustrations tend to combine things in strange ways, much like mine tend to do. So I did some revisions and we came to a final approved sketch..





The final poster will be printed at about 12" x 18". Here are a few close-up sections:

Lurzer's Archive ads

I worked on these two promotional ads for Lurzer's Archive. The top one was made just a couple weeks ago, to be published in the near future.. and the bottom was in the vol. 4, 2008 issue.

The top ad was designed by Coco Connolly using some of the new branding for my agent, Friend & Johnson. The photo on the left was taken by Charles Shotwell, and I decided to make my page into a play off of his photo. I had free reign to do whatever I wanted, but thought it would be sort of funny to somehow use the missing chair from his photo. For some reason the first thing that popped into my head was a guy balancing a chair on his nose. So I went with that idea, and also pushed it to the more ridiculous side with the juggling of live grenades and the unicycle riding (which i've always wanted to try).

I designed the bottom ad myself, since I had the entire spread. And since I was extremely busy at the time, I used existing images: the left side being from a sketchbook, and the right side from a series of spots for Skiing Magazine.

IBM ad - "Connections"

Here's the first of 3 ads I did for IBM. I was asked to keep the people pretty graphic, so they're a bit different than the usual type of people I draw.. which ended up being sort of a fun challenge. I also needed to keep the color pretty graphic and limited, so I employed the same blotchy, loose look that I've been getting into lately (see the elephant down below)

The ads showed up mostly in magazines and newspapers in Europe. You can see some of the work done by other artists as part of the same campaign here. Click to the left or right to scroll through the gallery. I'm not sure what everything says, since it's in French.. but it's probably only interesting if you're an IT guy anyways. I'll post the other two ads I've been working on in the near future.