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Cosecha
Client
Cosecha magazine
Year
2024
Role
Illustration, cover art direction
Team
Paloma, editor Renata Soto and designer Marco Vidal
Cosecha prints six issues a year and has never put a photograph on its cover. For 2024 they asked me to draw all six, and the opening spread of every feature.
The ask
A cover has to work on a newsstand and as a thumbnail. Each issue had one ingredient, one colour and nine days between the edit and the printer.
What I made
One ingredient per cover, drawn bigger than the masthead: a pumpkin, a fan of chiles, an octopus. Gouache and cut paper, scanned at 600 dpi, set on marigold, the magazine’s colour. Inside, eighteen feature openers reuse the ingredient small, with a hand-lettered first line.
How it landed
Newsstand sales rose 22% over the year. The October octopus was shortlisted for a national editorial design prize, and the editor now has the six originals framed in the office.
“We stopped fighting for photo budgets. The drawing sells the issue, and readers send us pictures of it on their fridges.”
Renata Soto
Editor in chief, Cosecha