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.

The Paper Tigers are an indie rock band comprised of multiple nationalities. I designed or art directed all of the band’s visual collateral, including its website and album packaging.

The color palette focuses on white and black (a nod to the stripes of a Tiger), with red as an accent color. Yellow, green, and blue are also included as references to the colors of Buddhism.

We spent a lot of time thinking about Chinese social media, crafting marketing materials geared toward WeChat, including stickers that capitalized on the personalities in the band.

Here’s a look at a few of the projects I designed for my friends at Mao Mao Chong, which is one of the best cocktail bars in Beijing.

The business cards feature an updated logo and imagery based on the artworks inside the bar. The typography is a carefully curated selection of English and Chinese typefaces that work together effectively.

The menus were designed a year later as MMC began to market more to Chinese. The artworks-based imagery in the business cards returns here on a smaller scale. I added a serif typeface to move the menus to a more upmarket position. I also created a navigational tool for the menu, which features a dizzying array of drinks that can be overwhelming to new customers.

For convenience, a WeChat QR code is included on the last page so patrons may pay their tab directly to Eric via smartphone.

Bill Gaspard and I collaborated with China Daily’s Shanghai bureau to craft this redesign of their then-defunct weekly entertainment tabloid, the Shanghai Star. The Star is sadly once again defunct, but its short run managed to win a redesign award from the Society for News Design.

The bulk of the design — except for the folios — is by me.

I chose to use Benton Wide and Big Miller because those typefaces are essentially more feature-oriented versions of the type families that define the core China Daily product.

My key concerns were instituting a grid and bringing rigor to the typography. The previous design had no set standards for either. 

I was also interested in iterating China Daily’s color palette, which at the time was a heavy blue, two shades of gray and a red. With the Star, we introduced orange and a lighter shade of CD blue. 

The typography and color would eventually influence the main China Daily product, which launched a visual refresh in early 2015.

The spreads in this gallery were designed by me. I'd be remiss to not mention my frequent collaborator, Guillermo Munro. His illustration work alone or in collaboration with me often gave the Star a distinctive visual identity that the other entertainment weeklies in Shanghai couldn’t match.

A collection of various illustrations designed by myself or in collaboration with Guillermo Munro.

These covers often return to the Shanghai skyline with the iconic Pearl Tower as a motif. It was our attempt to create a recurring visual element for the Star, akin to Eustace Knickerbocker, the New Yorker's cartoon dandy.

The subjects: World Cup soccer; the Shanghai Film Festival; a guide to summer; the Shanghai Book Festival; a feature on women being confronted by the possibility of having a second child following the easing of China’s One-child Policy; and Santa Claus in China, where there are no chimneys. 

This double-sided spread, which unfurls to the width of four broadsheets, was designed in two days. It won an award from the Society for News Design.

The content and photography was assembled as if the spread could be treated like eight regular news pages. I thought this approach was flawed. The spread is just too difficult to read like a newspaper. The only effective reading experience I could think of for such a size was for the spread to be treated like a poster.

With that in mind, I developed the lead visual concept: a faux-Beijing skyline with the past on one side and the present on the other. 

Guillermo Munro helped me with a few of the many cutouts for the illustration I composited together, and also contributed the sky effects. Anci Feng Xiuxia designed one of the graphics. 

I designed the rest.

The spread became the centerpiece and aesthetic inspiration for China Daily's extended APEC edition. That edition, published on November 10, would earn China Daily a gold medal for overall design from WAN-IFRA's Asian newspapers competition, beating out the venerable South China Morning Post.

This photo page won two awards: for photo page design and for feature page design. Both awards were given by the Society for News Design.

My approach to the design was to focus on photography that involved the river, and my selection from the pictures provided reflect that. 

An illustration for Chinese Valentine’s Day for the cover of the Shanghai Star.

The cover is based on Qixi Festival, which happens on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar.

The festival celebrates the myth of the weaver girl and the oxherder, in which the deity wife is reunited with her mortal husband for one day when magpies form a bridge across the Milky Way.

I used a more modern style (this is a myth that has been painted since antiquity) and tied the folktale to our editorial package, which was about the best places to propose in Shanghai.

“The 2014 government work report magnified” was designed at the tail end of that year’s Two Sessions, prompted by a request for a word cloud visualization of the Work Report from a member of China Daily's editorial board. The data crunching, design, text, and the visualization approach were by me in collaboration with Guillermo Munro, who focused on creating the visualizations. The blurbs at the bottom of the page were written by China Daily reporters He Na and Zhang Lei and then edited by me. We won a China Journalism Award — China's highest journalism prize — for this project. Wang Shanshan was the assigning editor for the project, and Chen Xiaofeng and Brian Liou were the Chinese and English copy editors respectively.

I think word clouds are a little cliche and quite ineffective in relating data.

While we ended up including an art directed version of a word cloud, I think the real substance of this page is in our analysis of the text itself. Based on word counts derived from grouped topics, we were able to quantify what were the most important issues covered by the work report.

Since designing this page, I’ve been introduced to more sophisticated tools and visualizations for lexicographical analysis, which I hope to someday use for future information graphics. 

I’m proud of this page. It was a rigorous examination of policy that nevertheless received an award from the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

This wasn’t a redesign per se. Rather, China Daily wanted to consolidate its Saturday and Sunday editions into a single weekend edition. As part of that plan, China Daily decided to make the B-section — which on those days was a combination of business, sports and features — all feature stories.

These are selected spreads from a single edition. The front of the book features all-cap headlines for a lead story on each page. This distinguishes China Daily content from the Telegraph wire content that comprises the back of the book exclusively.

The horror infographic, which I designed, is one of my personal favorites. It plots a film’s total box office versus its budget based on the size of the blood splatter and the white space within it.

Occasionally I design display ads!

One is an advertisement for a jointly sponsored forum in the European Union. The second is a promotional advertisement for the Weekend Life section that I redesigned.

The forum advertisement ran in China Daily’s European edition. The rigor and sophistication of European design are extraordinary, so I consciously designed something that would comfortably sit next to European design work, hence the strong use of grid and rules, a la Emil Ruder.

One of our goals for the playoffs special section in 2012 was a greater variety of storytelling techniques in the book.

To that end, I came up with a concept for an information graphic that broke down the offense, defense and special teams.

The Merc sports team really got behind the page and did additional reporting, pulling together data from the 49ers that put the overall rankings in historical context. 

The hard work we put in paid off: We won an award of excellence from the Society for News Design.

I was embroiled in some controversy regarding the judging of information graphics in 2013. You can read about that on Dr. Mario Garcia's blog. 

I love the challenge of imbuing simple vector figures with personality. When creating the ghosts, I was thinking about It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

The illustration accompanied a two-story package. The first was a general feature on Halloween's fortunes. The second was about Halloween etiquette, hence the, ahem, big-boned fella. 

Steve Jobs’ decision to leave his post as CEO of Apple was huge news, especially for the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of record for Silicon Valley.

We played the story big. I decided to have the archival images of Jobs toned in four-color black and white to give the lead photo — a moody image from Getty — more pop. I think it also poignantly illustrates the great physical changes wrought by the illness that eventually killed Jobs. 

Richard Scheinin and I both love music and prior to this page had collaborated on some epic summer jazz record roundups.

When he brought up the idea of doing a guide to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in advance of a run at the S.F. Opera, I jumped at the opportunity. 

I love Wagner’s music and own two versions of the full Ring cycle: one by Wilhelm Furtwangler and the other by James Levine. (I studied Wagner as a music student, and the mesmerizing Tristan Und Isolde theme still amazes me with how logical the voice leading is between some very chromatic chords.)

Richard and I kicked around a bunch of different ways of organizing the page before I hit on graphically depicting the cycle of the ring itself — how it passed from ring-bearer to ring-bearer until returning to the Rhine River.  

With the concept in place, I made the illustration and began assembling the other images — some specifically shot for this project by S.F. Opera during early rehearsals that were closed to the press.

For a story about the then-arcane rules dictating the use of cell phones while driving, I created this photo illustration and pseudo-information graphic that broke out the rules based on situation.

The illustration was a combination of stock images, antiquarian photography, manipulated textures and vector illustration. 

The piece ran on the front pages of the Bay Area News Group, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times.

The Giants’ deep run in the 2010 postseason and subsequent victory in the World Series was a surprise. I don't think anyone expected the team to catch fire the way it did.

With little preparation time, we managed to crank out a ton of extra features in the news and sports sections, including a series of poster pages dedicated to a single player — on deadline. 

This Buster Posey page won an award of excellence from the Society for News Design. 

Also included are other pages from our special Giants coverage that year.

In 2009, Bill and I were asked to redesign Greenspun Media Group's community weeklies and rebrand them as part of the flagship publication, the Las Vegas Sun.

For my prototype, I produced a tabloid that took pieces of the Sun's design but softened it to make it more inviting. I lightened the color palette, making the tones lighter and less saturated. I also used more informal typography, and brought in the old Sun logo for a touch of history and fun.

The Henderson Sun project was eventually nixed, but I still love the ideas we developed. 

Sen. John Ensign's admission of an extramarital affair was huge news that shook Nevada politically. 

The challenge for the Sun's coverage was figuring out an approach that went beyond breaking news, especially important since the Sun is a newspaper inserted as a section in its rival, the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

We knew the R-J would cover the breaking angle but do little beyond that.

Our strategy was to take the Ensign news and put that in the context of the woes of the Republican party in Nevada, which was already reeling from Gov. Jim Gibbons' extramarital affair. 

This page, for me, is an example of how first-day news can have second-day angles.  I wrote all of the display type except the hammer headline.

As a newspaper devoted to investigative reporting, most of the Las Vegas Sun's news pages were comprised of enterprise stories that were rarely tethered to breaking news events that could be documented by staff photographers. And if the stories were about state government, we'd have to hire a freelancer to do the shoot in Carson City — using funds from a limited budget.

In short, images were hard to come by.

What I learned to do was to make archive images seem fresh by carefully integrating additional storytelling elements, strong display type, powerful typography and formal design elements.  All of these in tandem take pressure off the visual while making the overall design more architectonic.