After El Paso and Dayton

Words When Pictures Fail

Cover Art via time.com

A constant struggle for editorial artists is the search for a way to capture the essence of a story in a single powerful image.  Unfortunately, picturing a semiautomatic assault weapon, as sinister as it looks, no longer shocks readers.  In fact, guns and even images of crying survivors of mass killings feel cynically banal.  That’s why this week’s Time Magazine cover stopped us in our tracks. San Francisco Bay Area artist John Mavroudis simply hand-lettered the 253 locations of mass shootings in America so far this year and added the word “ENOUGH.”  The crude lettering is crammed onto the page with city names shown vertically, sideways and at a slant in large letters and small, filling every nook and cranny. Mavroudis calls his drawing “a frightening portrait of a country drowning in gun violence.”  Indeed, the effect is chilling and memorable and gives perspective to our epidemic of domestic terrorism. 

Packaging

El Paso Chile’s Border Town Packaging

When El Paso Chile Co. commissioned Charles S. Anderson Design in Minneapolis to create a new packaging system for its retail salsa and marinade lines, it wanted to make sure that consumers grasped the fact that its products were authentic Tex-Mex, not wannabe imitations made in places like Cincinnati or Brooklyn. A border town in far west Texas, El Paso is so close to Juarez in Mexico that the two cities are sometimes considered one metro area. El Paso Chile Co. knows its salsas and wanted the packaging to capture that in look and feel.

Read More »