Wraparound cover illustration for Santa Clara Magazine. Art direction: D.J. Stout, Pentagram Design. The concept is a California brag map - playing off of the news of Santa Clara University being voted Best in the West.

Final sketch for cover. One of the challenges for this assignment was that it is a wraparound cover, so it has to work each as a front cover, back cover, as well as a whole / complete piece. The location of Santa Clara in California is at the southern end, so to have one map of California, we would have had to position the state horizontally so SCU would appear on the front. This really would not read too clearly. So I did a loose interpretation of an expanded / zoomed out detail on the front, with the complete California map on the back, using all the details to pull it all together.

This is the first final that I sent to D.J. - with an overall beige background. However, after playing with more color variations, I realized that a white background would work much better. D.J. and SCU agreed, and thankfully we were in time to get it to the printer and get it done!