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In February last year one of the art directors at Wired Magazine got in touch, offering me the opportunity to work on the cover feature for an upcoming issue. The feature would focus on the human brain, and they wanted me to provide a set of 5-8 illustrations (including the opening spread), visualizing mini essays in the article. Cool! I’ve always held Wired in high esteem, fondly remembering their groundbreaking magazine designs in the 90s, and wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to a) work with them, and b) as a result have my work seen by a lot of people (I think they have a circulation of 500K/month).

The only problem was that it was due at the end of March, which meant I needed to work during my wedding holiday in Malaysia! Never one to shy away from a challenge, I gladly accepted the project…


The images that landed me the Wired gig: The Oneironaut (L), and a Inphra for DV (R).

The reason they asked me was because they had seen some of my image work (I hesitate to call it illustration myself) and wanted “that style” to illustrate the various abstract concepts in the article.

— On a side note, based on the screen grabs they enclosed (“These are images of yours we like!”) I’m pretty certain they didn’t go further than the homepage of my site to check out my portfolio. Lesson learned: always put your best stuff face front.

Anyway, they had a very specific idea for the feature and the layout. The cover story was titled “Get Smarter” and had actor Steve Carell (in what was no doubt a PR tie-in with his Get Smart movie) with a weird brain helmet. What I needed to do, for starters, was to enhance the photo (taken by Brent Humphreys), creating the effect that electricity/energy was kind of crackling around his head. They had even included a handy mock up to show me what they meant:

Design mock up from Wired

With that knowledge in mind I set out creating the image. Even though the Wired team had made it clear they liked the blue/red colours from my older work, I tried to steer away just a bit from that (no sense in doing the same thing twice!) and went for a more purple/blue & green tone for the graphics. However since time was of the essence I couldn’t create every single asset from scratch… Luckily I rarely delete anything and I’ve built up a pretty large image/digital asset library over the years of unfinished/unused/might-use material that I can re-use and remix into new imagery (kind of like Lego) layer by layer:

Gif animation showing how the opening spread image is built up

The image is built up of approximately 45-50 layers on top of the photo of Carell — I didn’t have a hi-res photo to work with, so I had to make sure my image blended over the photo without interfering with it too much, and that I could easily swap in the final Carell picture later. For those of you interested in the more “technical aspects” of creating the image: I didn’t use any special settings, custom brushes or fancy effects (just your standard blur and transform tools) — unlike Tim at Assault, who went out of his way trying to recreate the effect step-by-step.

Detail of the opening image

With a visual style set for the article, and the opening spread image approved I could move on to the remaining 4 spreads. The Wired team sent me some more rough page layouts so I knew where the image would be most visible (page content would be layered on top of them). I thought it would be interesting to create a sort of theme running through the pages, and so I tried extracting the rest of the images from the opening spread…

Article spread mock up from Wired

The first topic I had to illustrate was “Black hole” and thus required some black hole-ish visual, some vortex kind of thing.
I took elements from my opening spread image and started reworking them to create the required effect, but it looked too obvious that it was basically the same image — and it felt more like a swirling mass of energy than a black hole; even though I do like the result!

First attempt at creating a black hole

I refined the swirls and desaturated most of the image, then adding blue hues to it to create a much more pleasing and more appropriate result.

The final image and how it appears in the article.

Throughout the project I was, of course, in constant contact with the Wired creative team in New York getting feedback and always slightly tweaking the images as they worked on finalizing the page layouts of the feature, with sometimes last minute changes to the images. This creates interesting situations (to me at least) where you have a “final” image that for all intents and purposes ticks all the boxes, and in the end just doesn’t fit with what the editorial and/or creative department have in mind. But that’s all part of the process of editorial design: creating and fine-tuning that one image that captures the gist of an article. On the upside I end up with a lot of new material to add to my image library!

“Don’t Panic” image from concept, to colour change and how it got published.

As the deadline was nearing my wife and I had already been in Malaysia for a week, and I spent whatever free time I had finishing up the images and FTP-ing them one by one to Wired — then getting feedback, tweaking the images, re-uploading etc. The usual.
As luck would have it of course, a major thunderstorm had knocked down some power lines and cut off internet access for the entire neighbourhood where we stayed. So I ended up the last two days at a Starbucks in the local mall abusing their painfully slow free wifi. Uploading a 25MB zip file has never taken so long (2 grande Latté’s, a slice of cake, and a stroll through Borders). And if that wasn’t enough, at the same time I was also doing preliminary logo designs for Comic Book Tattoo!

Another image that went through revisions before being published

Anyway, it all worked out in the end of course. I managed to send all the images to Wired before the deadline, and was pleased to see the final result when I received my comp copies of the issue 2 months later, which you can see here and on Flickr.