During the middle of a year of pandemic, fires and protests, The San Francisco Chronicle ‘s leadership wanted to publish a series of special sections dedicated to exploring how the experience could lead to societal, economic, and political changes. Because of its conceptual and speculative nature, the editors wanted to the section to stand alone and look different than the rest of the newspaper.

Chronicle Creative Director Danielle Mollette-Parks asked me to take charge of the project and shepherd it from development to actual execution. I had less than a month before the first issue.

My goals were to:

1. Develop an overarching brand that could exist within the San Francisco Chronicle — but stand apart. This included addressing typography and color, and a look for social media assets.

2. Create an iconic cover concept.

3. Institute a structure that prioritizes larger, magazine-style visuals.

For the cover, I commissioned visual development artist Pong Lertsachanant to create an 8-panel panoramic illustration of a futuristic San Francisco. With input from Danielle and the section’s editors — Robert Morast and Sarah Feldberg — I art directed Pong to create standalone visual stories that reflected each section’s content.

I illustrated a majority of the interior visuals out of necessity (and went uncredited since I didn’t want it to look like an ego-trip): Due to an unusual amount of breaking news, the main graphic artists at The Chronicle were often quite busy with daily coverage. That said, we managed to produce a couple of highlights for the section, including a map that reimagines San Francisco as a pedestrian/biking paradise and a comic strip that tries to envision alternatives to the police for emergency response.

Of my personal work, I’m quite partial to the Micro-hood infographic, which I developed in collaboration with Kuth Ranieri Architects and reporter Gregory Thomas.

Because our developers were busy with other projects, we were primarily restricted to using existing frameworks for online storytelling. Nevertheless, I think we created a lot of different, compelling digital presentations. These include:

1. A scrolling version of the Micro-hood infographic. https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/welcome-to-the-micro-hood-graphic/

2. A static image-based presentation for Youth Protest Leaders. Andy Warhold’s videos that linger on the face of a person inspired me to use multiple frames of the same person because I think it reveals something about the personality of these young people. You see that they’re committed activists but also their humanity and their age. We combined this with excerpts from a Zoom conference call with them that was moderated by The Chronicle columnist Otis Taylor Jr, thereby repurposing and combining many different content threads together. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/visuals/youth-protest-leaders/

3. A listicle for Peter Hartlaub’s set of proposals for making San Francisco a pedestrian and biking paradise. https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/car-free-sf-maps/

4. A quiz about contact tracing, for which I created a lead visual and bespoke icons. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/throughline-quiz/

I also wrote two stories (“Conjuring San Francisco’s future” and “Anatomy of the covers”) and participated in the closing editors’ note, which took the form of a Slack chat.

The section received a lot of attention from the public and the industry, attracting new subscribers and art aficionados who wanted to buy a print of the cover illustration. We also presented the work to the Society for News Design annual conference in 2020. The slide deck is public and goes into more detail about the project.