The Stranger’s Comfort Food Issue

November 6, 2019

Roles: Art Direction, Editorial Design

Contributors: Rachelle Abellar, Nathan Watkins, Ashley Wong, Anthony Keo, Terra Dehart, Hayden Maynard, and Stevie Shao, Illustration

in 2019, The Stranger decided it was time to address the upcoming winter season with our first ever Comfort Food Issue! We all have our own ideas about what that entails, but it was up to the editorial department to write the seven features that ended up in the issue.

We wanted something very comforting on the cover, and I thought, what’s more comforting than apple pie? Rachelle Abellar, one of our staff illustrators, had been killing it on feature illustrations for months at this point, and I thought it was high time her art ended up on the cover. She ran with the concept and a new style of illustration she was working with: collage. What we get is an almost photo-realistic, textural, colorful feast for the eyes.

The guts of the issue included a collection of features about a wide variety of foods, so I wanted to get as many different stylistic approaches to the illustrations as possible, giving readers a visual smorgasbord to enjoy. I ended up hiring out 5 other illustrators including Nathan Watkins, Stevie Shao, and Terra DeHart of Seattle, Hayden Maynard and Ashley Wong of Toronto, and one more staff designer, Anthony Keo to fill out the package. With all the hard work everyone put in, and the final illustrations on the page, I believe it’s one of my favorite collections to date!

Please take a scroll through and check out all the food! I’m going to find some pie now….