Earlier this year I was approached by Dr. Judene Benoit with an interesting project. She had just written a book on natural cavity prevention and remineralization, and needed a cover designed for it. I had never designed something book related of a medical non-fiction nature and it presented some unique challenges.

The obvious design quandary was how to stay within the usual medical realm (which is traditionally dull and features a standard author pic), so as to not alienate industry professionals, while at the same time keeping it fresh. Another target demographic of the book slants towards the younger, total health philosophy crowd, which is more at home in the yoga studio or health food aisles rather than a lab. I drew visual influence from cookbooks and fitness books while steering clear of making it look too close to Dr. Phil’s latest release.



We looked at a handful of typefaces and colour palettes in the concepts and in the end decided that cool tones on crisp white with spacious type, worked really well with a warm, inviting author photo. It struck just the right amount of balance of not intimidating the average health-minded individual while still feeling at home on a doctor’s bookshelf. We continued on with the feel through Dr. Judene’s website, which offers podcasts, blogs and info on her book signing appearances.

You've only got a few seconds to catch someone's attention with a billboard. Too often people make the mistake of cramming them full of stuff that nobody has time to read. In this recent fitness club billboard campaign, I designed action packed one-word visuals. The giant action word paired with a dynamic image grabs focus as well as states what the ethos of the ad is about at the same time. They are also easily recognizable as a series.

On the production side, the challenge for a campaign is usually the image. With only a day or two to produce, photoshoots are rare, which means using stock photography and doing something unique with it. You may find one cool image, but it never works out that you find all four that will work together. To match images into a campaign some heavy photoshopping is required. Adding pieces of hands and limbs, styling hair...things like that. In this particular case, only two out of the four were high contrast b/w images, so the others had to be modified. I finished up the look by throwing some texture on the type, and a watercoloury background.