Lights Magazine — Bran Ferren Cover Art Direction

Project Details

Bran Ferren was the feature story for the second issue of Lights Magazine, and from the beginning I wanted the cover to feel as inventive as the subject. Ferren’s work has moved between technology, engineering, design and entertainment for decades, which made a conventional portrait feel completely wrong for a publication coming out of Corporate Magic and an industry built around turning ambitious ideas into something real.

The concept grew from Ferren’s childhood visit to the Pantheon, an experience he has spoken about as having a lasting influence on the way he thought about design and engineering. Working through Richard Solomon Artists Representative, I commissioned Ricardo Martinez Ortega to create the portrait, using the architecture of the Pantheon as a helmet surrounding Ferren’s face and then opening the image to reveal the machinery and ideas working beneath it.

I was also thinking about the original illustrated poster for Westworld and the image of Yul Brynner’s Gunslinger separating to expose the mechanics underneath. Our first direction pushed that idea much further through rendering, programming and scroll-based interaction, but as the work developed we pulled some of that technology back and allowed Ricardo’s illustration to carry more of the idea.

That decision made the cover stronger and kept the concept from becoming about the effect itself. The finished piece still had the digital interaction we wanted for Lights, but the illustration remained the center of the experience and gave the feature something that could hold up beyond the device it was originally designed for.

The work was created inside the Corporate Magic creative environment, where experimentation was already part of how we approached live productions, presentations and visual storytelling. Bringing that same thinking into editorial design gave us room to test ideas that would have been difficult to justify in a traditional publication, and the Bran Ferren cover became one of the clearest examples of what Lights Magazine was created to do.

The cover, illustration and feature received recognition from the Society of Publication Designers and the American Advertising Federation, including SPD Gold and Silver medals as well as ADDY honors at the Dallas, District 10 and national levels.