The bikini tan lines in Dave's piece, which he called "Clinton in the Flesh," were the icing on the cake.On Tuesday morning, Peter Barbey, owner of the Village Voice, assembled the staff of the storied but turbulent New York City alt-weekly for a meeting. A few days later, Dave turned in a masterpiece made out of clay. I asked him to sketch out his ideas, but insisted that somehow or other, Clinton's portrait would have to include a quantity of flesh. But when Dave declined my commission-he and his wife were big fans of Clinton-we came up with a compromise. My concept was this: I wanted him to create a portrait of Clinton made entire of an assemblage of women's breasts and buttocks. Instead of taking the obvious path, I took the high road and called David O'Keefe, one of the best 3-D caricaturists around, and asked him to illustrate our cover. I pondered that assignment and came up with an idea. My editor told us he wanted "fellatio art." Hmmm. The Voice decided to devote a whole feature package to the story. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was big news and when the Starr Report came out, it, revealed the salacious details of the affair. One of my most memorable experiences was during the Bill Clinton era. We had a tag team style of cover design, with Jennifer, Florian, Kate and I working on different potential cover stories simultaneously, and trading pages back and forth. Our production values were funky, to say the least, and we stuck to simple type and a very limited palette of colors, basically black, red, and the blue of The Voice logo.
At the time The Voice was still sold on newsstands, and we wanted the covers to scream, to feel like the left-wing equivalent of a NYC tabloid. Heavily influenced by street graphics, gigposters, and especially the graphic design of Art Chantry (yet another Rocket art director), we developed a cover look that was big, bold, direct and graphic. (They were later joined by Kate Thompson, another ex- Rocket art director.) The Voice editor, Jonathan Larsen, was an art director's dream: smart, visual, a cover provocateur who gave plenty of space to rise (and also to fail, which I did with depressing regularity).
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Then being car-pooled to said NJ location, all of us delirious from lack of sleep, at the crack of dawn the next morning.Īs design director at The Voice I was blessed to work beside Jennifer Gilman and Florian Bachleda, two visual muses who were infused with talent, creativity, and grace. Then building the mechanical, adding instructions for the stripper at the NJ production plant (super-imposing type over a photograph was a MAJOR deal). Then maybe having to re-spec (or-gasp-reword) something for fit. Then walking from 842 B'way down to Cooper Square to see if the type had emerged okay. Then mocking up the colors with prima color pencils. Then coding and sending the (unseen) type on an Atex terminal. Then scaling the pictures with a reduction wheel, and carefully drawing it to scale in pencil with specs on a blue-lined layout sheet.
The result was a box-fest, with no single story or image getting more than half the cover. Thrashing out the design in a meeting while sketching variations on a note pad, trying to make every stakeholder think the story for which they were advocating wasn't getting short-changed.
It's amazing to look at an old VV cover now, and recall the convoluted process of creating them.
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