Look Inside

My partner, Molly, and I are liminal empty nesters; both of our kids are in college. During this time of … transition, we’ve been going through our storage space, consolidating, and thinking about shaping the years to come. Part of this has been reconsidering our collection of books. While going through mine, I happened across this one by Juan and Samuel Velasco, published in 2017, that includes some of my work:

Flipping through the pages and looking at work from 15 years before, I began thinking about how I first met Juan Velasco, a co-author of the book.

It was 2006, back when Juan was the graphics director of National Geographic. He reached out to ask if I would be interested in working on an illustrated graphic on atherosclerosis. This was in the before times, when video calls weren’t really a thing. So I actually got on a train and headed down to D.C. from Penn Station to meet with him in person. Juan is a giant in the field. National Geographic is, well, National Geographic. I was a nervous wreck.

I met him at the Nat Geo offices, which if I remember correctly was housed in a Brutalist bizarro world nestled within the older architecture of D.C. I walked into his office, and he led me to his drafting table. I gasped when I laid eyes on this gorgeous pencil sketch:

After a moment of taking it in, my first words were, “Um, why don’t you just publish this?” Juan laughed. I’m not sure he realized I wasn’t kidding.

He said with concern, “We’re on a tight deadline. Can you do this in five weeks?” Now, this time I thought he was kidding. To give some context, I had started my career at weeklies, like TIME and Newsweek, and was used to adrenaline-fueled all-nighters on one- or two-day deadlines as the news cycle constantly changed and evolved. But I looked at his concerned expression and realized he was not, in fact, joking. Hoping I wasn’t missing something, I assured him five weeks was fine.

Here’s a sequence of the sketch process:

I made the deadline. Here’s the final art:

Revisiting this project makes me think of the collaborative nature of my work. Sometimes the “direction” that I’m given is merely a conversation about what story or information needs to be conveyed, and sometimes the direction is visually quite clear, as in Juan’s pencil sketch. Whatever form it takes, it’s taken me years to realize that the collaboration is what I love most about my job.