I was asked by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics — the City of Boston’s civic innovation team — to help create their 2022 Year in Review: a series of eleven postcards, summarizing ten projects from the past year (plus one cover card).

The Mechanics already had the content — project summaries, calls to action, lists of collaborators, and photos picked out by team members who had worked on each project. My job was to design the cards and add illustration to make the set feel cohesive and look good.  

Sometimes folks make “postcards” as promotional materials — not really practical for mailing. The client clearly wanted these cards to be sendable, as a way for neighbors and friends to connect. 

To me, this meant keeping to some tradition: image on the front, horizontal, writeable space on the back (following USPS guidelines).  

The New Urban Mechanics do a lot of really cool, sometimes hard-to-explain work! I wanted to use illustration to “bridge the gap” between the photos shared and the stories the team told about their projects.

Following my instinct to “annotate” the pictures, I printed them out and drew directly onto them. From there, I traced, refined, and eventually scanned and edited the images digitally before creating the final pieces.

After a few short rounds of edits, the cards were sent off to Red Sun Press in Jamaica Plain to be printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks.  

Check out the New Urban Mechanics’ 2022 digital Year in Review on Medium! https://newurbanmechanics.medium.com/a-return-to-analog-be898bb70a27