Identity and branding
A full branding study for Los Canelo's Birria, with a mark for Bone Pit Smoke House under it.
Editorial page design
Covers, feature spreads and pages in print for the Silicon Valley, Sacramento and San Francisco business journals. The same grid that carried the weekly data page, carrying the rest of the paper.
A cover is read at three distances
On a rack, a reader gets a second and sees one shape and one headline. In the hand, they read the deck and the chart. On a phone it is a thumbnail, and everything but the largest element disappears.
Which distance mattered was never mine to choose, so the page had to hold all three: one dominant element, a headline that survives being shrunk, and a palette tight enough to read beside eleven others in a feed.
Covers and feature spreads
The pages in between
Between the weekly data page and the cover story sat most of the paper: local news, one story at a time, usually one chart or one illustration and whatever space the section had left that week. Less room than a cover and the same deadline.
In print
The charts had to survive the cover
The part I would defend is that the data did not get demoted to make room for the art. A darkening market is a photograph and a falling red line on the same page. A funding gap is a campus photograph, one large number, and a bar chart of enrollment. The chart is not an illustration parked next to the story, it is the reason the headline is allowed to make its claim.
Keeping both legible is a constraint problem more than a taste problem. Two colors and one dominant image leave enough contrast for a chart to hold its own at thumbnail size; four colors and a busy photograph do not, and the chart is always what gets sacrificed.
Four years of this, on a weekly cycle, across three mastheads. The same rules carried a routine market wrap and a breaking cover story without being renegotiated each time, which is the only real test of whether a set of rules is a system or a preference.