So I decided to indulge myself on a trip backwards in time. Going back 25 years to 1995 when my career in graphic design began. While this is a somewhat selfish endeavor, I think the timing is of interest to a more general audience. It was only a year or two before this business we call “the internets” was born. So it should be fun to watch as my portfolio goes from print materials for Tor Books and Cooper Union (where I attended college for four years and worked for an additional three).

Above is the first freelance project I ever worked on and of course, my first Tor Books jacket. Also worth noting is that it was my first of only two handmade mechanicals I produced before going 100% digital.

I also designed the font used in the title. Now all these years later there are probably 20 fonts that look exactly like this one that you can download for free online.

This (and many of the future covers I produced) the art was a painting provided to me that would be incorporated with a title treatment. Most SciFi books were literally just that— paining meets title treatment. There was little to no graphic design employed in the industry. 

The second project for Tor Books is shown above. The provided art for this was so crazy— I wasn’t sure what to do with it. So I just created an odd mask around the focal point of the painting and zoomed in about 500x on a small detail of people walking in a lower section of the full piece to create a background. It is not one of my favorites, so I hid it in this introductory post. 

This was the second and final mechanical I produced for a project (as mentioned above). What is funny is I actually used Quark Express to produce the line art for the boards. Later, my contact at Tor (Irene Gallo) said in the future I could just send them the Quark file.