The Making of Dwell with Chris Gardner

Tags:: Design; Designer; Illustrator

To open our September 2009 apartment-themed issued, we dreamed up Dwell’s ideal apartment. Not content to play mere decorator, we tried on the role of developer and enlisted architect Craig Steely to design our multiunit abode and illustrator Chris Gardner to put the proposal on paper and give the concept some color.

— Miyoko Ohtake

“For this project, [design director] Kyle [Blue] already had the architectural references for me, so to start, I asked an array of questions: What type of feel do you want? What’s the most important message to convey? What do we need to tell readers with the picture?” Gardner says. “He explained that the illustration needed to bring the structure into the environment and we kicked around ideas about putting a courtyard underneath and having people milling around. We went through two or three different variations.”

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