Fortunate Horse

A comedy experiment/opus.

Each of the three projects were created in 24 hours with a team of incredible designers and comedians (SNL, Funny Or Die, The Onion, The Tonight Show, etc). It was a chaotic blitz of great ideas, caffeine, and hard work. The surrealist fake magazines were planted in the real world for unsuspecting people to find and be delighted.

2014, 2015, 2016

Art Director

⬛️ In-house

⬛️ Agency

⬛️ Freelance

☑️ Self-Initiated

Print design

Web design

Photography

Art Direction

Concepting

Copy writing

Information architecture

A magazine for horses that are fortunate

I was a designer for the one day project, working quickly on building the architecture, a few features, fake advertisements, and the cover. The entire concept was an absurd thinly veiled metaphor for the generational wealth gap in our country.

Once printed it was distributed all over NYC, from street carts to doctor’s offices, for people to find serendipitously and flip through before suspecting something was off.

A hipster lifestyle magazine for dumb men who smoke cigarettes

For the second year I moved to art director. We were more prepared and went bigger: larger staff and more pages all about awful men. I worked on the cover, features, advertisements, and shot original photography. What is something you’d find inside? A gritty exposé from an undercover journalist taking you inside the dangerous underground of Russian tobacco substitutes.

After a successful kickstarter campaign we shipped to cities all across America and internationally to the Philippines, Indonesia, Germany, and Singapore.

A TV Guide for the internet. Yes, you can look up what every website will be publishing depending on the day and hour.

The finale in the Fortunate Horse trilogy. We had to jump the shark of absurdity... Bigger. Funnier. Quantifiably more big and funny. The front section was over 50 pages of features and fake ads and the back “grid” came in at 250 pages.

This project took lots of prep. We built a system using google sheets mimicing the grid layout of days/times for writers to collaborate in real time. Later, it would import automatically into InDesign with styles attached. We had writing captains and teams that tackled an entire day of jokes. The most impressive feat of the day was the writing captains working together to make running jokes happen across the entire week. It’s a modern marvel of comedy.