American Illustration Profiles: Frank Viva

My latest illustrator interview for the American Illustration Profiles series is with Frank Viva. Frank is an image-maker, brand developer, and highly-talented illustrator whose artwork appears regularly in The New York Times and on the cover of The New Yorker. His Toronto-based Viva & Co. studio does branding, product design, corporate identities, digital and website design, as well as traditional print design work, but it’s Frank’s bold, stylish, retro-modern illustrations, most notably on 10 covers of The New Yorker in the past five years, that have garnered him so much recent attention.

Frank’s first cover for The New Yorker appeared in 2010. Since then he’s created cover illustrations and designs that have touched on themes as diverse as Earth Day, the Olympics, and scenes from the urban landscape, and several have incorporated his love of hand-drawn typography. With simple, graphic drawings and often monochromatic color schemes, Frank’s cover illustrations create a fun, surreal almost cartoonish look, like a 21st Century fusion of the jazz LP covers of Jim Flora and Gerald McBoing-Boing cartoons.

Read the whole Profiles interview here.