ARCHIVE
client connection, January 2010
client connection is a publication for staff of The Co-operators that I art direct and design (and sometimes squeeze some illustrations into). The editorial direction is to take the sometimes dry stories about insurance and the insurance industry and be creative and have fun. That being said, the book tends to have more humourous, off-beat creative.
The most amazing thing is we have next to no budget for photography and illustration and this really let me go off in tons of different directions. Any of the photography is done in-house (mainly by a guy named Brad Scott), we use staff for models and then any of the photo editing, Photoshop work and/or effects is done by me afterwards.
All of this is edited my editor Jill Hastie (Jennifer Burdick edited the publication up until the end of 2009) with help from our writer Barbara Allen and the creative director is Don Twerdun.
To start the new year's set of issues, I really wanted to do something completely different from the last issue's fashion themed cover and feature. The feature this time dealt with similar issues to a couple of the other articles so we decided to package the issue with one overall theme about recruiting, retaining and training staff. Inspiration came from all over the place but started with early 20th century propoganda posters (I figured that if we were going to put out some company propaganda, why not embrace it) and that's where the cover image came from — we recreated a Rosie the Riveter image. Much to my surprise, over Christmas I noticed the The Economist had a cover out for their new issue that had the exact image we were using as inspiration on the cover... must have been something in the ether.
Other inspiration for the design was definitely Swiss design, Lemon magazine, Norman Rockwell and Wired. Below are the designs of various spreads.
The back cover which features an illustration by me.