Yuko Shimizu

I normally don’t post about recent editorial projects here. But this one is a bit different. About a month and half ago, FastCompany Magazine (one of my favorite magazinesby the way) called me and asked for a double page spread illustration. The difference between this and the others were that this was more complicated than any other editorial illustrations I have ever worked on. (close second place is this piece I did for New York Magazine back in 2005)
This image was for a great article about Coursera, a free online education service that may change the way we will think about higher education from now on. (Read the full article here) I spent days and days drawing every single student, from a young hipster to an older businessman to a woman in burka differently.
I will post this on the work section along with the final layout photo and all soon.
for now, to see all the details of the students, and find the one that looks exactly like you, in a newsstand near you.

Thank you Alice Alves and Florian Bachleda of FastCompany as well as my neighbor  Jungyeon Roh who helped me as a color assistant during the madness of the deadline.

It feels like I had worked on a lot of book covers in last one year or so. What is cool is that packages with advance copies arrive in mail when I least expect them. Books are long term projects, usually takes up to around a year from when I make images till the books actually get published.
I got two nice surprises last week. One was  Shadow on the Mountain by Newbery Honor author Margi Preus (Abrams) and another was The Purple Cloud, a re-issue of 1901 sic-fi classic. This is the first time I have worked with acclaimed Penguin Classics series, and I am VERY excited.
There will still be a while till they both hit the bookstores, but at least I can share some photos here.

I ended up illustrating the cover of Cory Doctorow‘s 2008 best seller Little Brother for something of almost an accident. The publisher already had a finished cover, but right before that went into print, they decided it needed a line drawing look instead of original digitally rendered 3D. I knew the AD, she called me and asked me to redo the cover in like a day or two. It turned out to be a bestseller, and translated into multiple languages of which many had the original cover. Lucky accident.
This lucky accident caused another lucky incident. Little Brother is expecting a sequel Homeland, and they asked me to do a new cover that is reminiscent of the original cover.

Well, the book is not out just yet, but for now you can read the excerpt on the publisher TOR’s website.