I’ve been working for a few years with LA Metro making illustrations that can be used in a variety of formats, a project that has grown from a series of three posters to over 100 images. These pieces are used in advertising, commuter information, and online as part of LA Metro’s expanding program to bring mass transit to Los Angeles.

It’s been a real pleasure working with Creative Director Michael Lejeune and Melissa Rosen, Art Director at Metro Design Studio. My job is easy on some pieces, “give us a cool look at an existing light rail line, or new bus,” and more difficult on others “we don’t know exactly what this should be but we need an image that ties light rail to Metrolink, but without showing a specific train.”

When we started, one of the things Michael and I talked about was the great original Disneyland attraction posters by Bjorn Aronson. We both liked that modernist poster style for showing complex images in a clean, clear way. There’s a lot of people involved on these, engineers looking for accuracy in the structures and graphic designers making sure I get the correct font on the sides of the trains.