I just got my copy of Patrick McNeil’s excellent new book The Web Designer’s Idea Book. Patrick runs designmeltdown.com which if you haven’t checked it out is a deep, rich vein of design ideas from websites around the world. Patrick has categorized hundreds of sites based on theme, style and function on his site, which he has translated into print for his book.
I am lucky enough to have a screenshot of my humble, aging portfolio website jonkeegan.com featured on page 36 (itty-bitty, tucked away into the corner).
Thanks Patrick for including my site in your book, and for creating such an excellent design resource!

Another illo for the Publisher’s Weekly “Soapbox” column. This installment was a funny editorial was written by Mike Reiss, who has been a writer for The Simpsons for nineteen years. In an effort to reach kids with a different message than he does on TV, Mike has published eight children’s books, and enjoys the freedom of being the sole storyteller. But he doesn’t do it for the money:

“To earn what I make as a TV writer, I’d have to publish a children’s book every four hours.”

Money isn’t everything though…but Homer Simpson has weighed in on this:

“Bart, with $10,000, we’d be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like…love!”

Here’s a bunch of drawings that I had fun doing for a new client, Read Magazine (published by Reader’s Digest). The story, titled “Twist of Fate” by Steven Frank is about a teenage girl that ends up spending a weekend in the library’s rare books room reading a dusty old first edition of Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”, to avoid flunking a class. She snoozes off and finds herself magically transported into the story, and interacting with all of the characters. The only way home is to write herself out of the story, Dickens himself tells her. The sequence of the drawings is clockwise from the top left image.
Click on the image for a larger version.

The story for this month’s Soapbox in Publisher’s Weekly was a pretty fascinating one. Ben Cheever (son of John Cheever) writes about two seemingly unrelated topics: running and seeking the truth. Yet they come together in a most interesting way in his life.
Having just written a book about running (“Strides“), Cheever talks about how in his family of runners, running together lead to moments of surprising honesty because “the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen to support a falsehood”.
I was struck by the mention of his family’s deepest secret, his father’s bisexuality (thus the closet imagery) which lead to the idea for the illustration.
You can see more of my work for Publisher’s Weekly here.