Hustler Magazine
Hustler Magazine
01 · The Seed
Hustler Magazine handed me an interview feature on Tommie Sunshine: house-music lifer, rave elder statesman, a man who wears white sunglasses indoors and has earned the right. The brief covered the whole stack: photography, art direction, photo selection and layout design. An editorial package about rave culture can't look like a quarterly report, so the real assignment was simple to say and harder to do: make the pages feel like the scene.
02 · The Groundwork
The feature lives in two visual worlds: the red-soaked club at two in the morning, and the bleached daylight of a backyard shoot. Instead of choosing one, I built a system that holds both: rave-flyer typography as the connective tissue, candy color pulled straight from the photographs, and the interview locked into disciplined columns so all that noise stays readable. Loud design fails the moment it forgets it's carrying a story, so the grid was non-negotiable.
03 · The Growth
The opener plants "EAT SLEEP RAVE REPEAT" across the bottom in stacked display caps of green, magenta, teal and orange, with the deck set in a pixelated dot-matrix face and key words popped in pink. Opposite, Tommie and his wife Daniela sprawl on lawn chairs in hard backyard sun, stars-and-stripes trunks and all, shot by Shameless. Spread two runs flash-lit frames down the left edge like a contact sheet and floats the text on a green-to-orange gradient, print's answer to stage gels, before giving a full page to mirrored sunglasses reflecting palm trees.
For the closer, I shot the live club coverage myself: Tommie drowned in red light behind the decks, with a filmstrip of sequential DJ frames running across the top. Photo selection was the quiet job underneath it all: pacing the feature from sunstroke to strobe.
“Loud, sun-burnt, a little feral, but built on a grid that holds.”
04 · The Bloom
Three spreads that read like the culture they document: loud, sun-burnt, a little feral, but built on a grid that holds. It's the range this studio grows best in: photographer, art director and layout designer on one job, and one of 90 projects I've delivered for Hustler Magazine.
