The Occasional
A digital magazine almost revolution.
The year is 2012 and iPad arrives and we all collectively we’re like whoa are digital magazines a thing now?! We sure thought so. (The name is a take on News Corp’s The Daily, the largest publication in the space.)
For 3 years I art directed the high-end Funny Or Die spin-off, The Occasional. It read like a magazine on iPad/iPhone with gorgeous art and photography, interactive games and quizzes, and exclusive video series. It was the future— until it wasn’t. We produced 15 wonderful issues before closing up shop and hastily converting the content into a website for posterity. I have an Occasional sized hole in my heart to this day.
2012-2015
Funny Or Die
Art Director
☑️ In-house
⬛️ Agency
⬛️ Freelance
⬛️ Self-Initiated
Branding
Design
UI+UX Design
Coding
Photography
Video production
Motion graphics
Marketing
Digital publishing
iOS Development
A little explainer from Funny Or Die
Brand
A minimal frame for maximum seriousness.
In contrast to the bright & wild Funny Or Die branding, The Occasional needed to stand out as distinctively different with a quality you would pay for. The logo leaned on ‘the frame’ we used as an editorial design throughout the magazine. The palette was a majority black and white with the occasional light pastel flourish.
Issue covers
Exclusive videos
The One Man Affected By Y2K with Matt Walsh
A Charles Barkley Christmas
Between Two Ferns with Ed Helms
Bestie X Bestie with Gabe Liedman & Jenny Slate
A sprinkling of miscellaneous content
Selected work from iOS issues (1-10) and web issues (11-15).
Interactive Fuck Marry Kill
Each issue had an interactive game with a different joke for whatever you choose. These illustrations were my favorite to commission. You can see the layout follow iOS’ skeuomorphic design and flow into a cleaner editorial design.
Animated Morphs
A crowd favorite and reoccurring interactive feature. Sometimes you’d drag the slider to reveal a timeline and sometimes you could see “a celebrity turn young,” but without fail we'd morph them to someone else.
SELECT PRESS from the PROJECT
Gizmodo: The very model of a modern humor magazine.
FastCompany: It’s online magazine are not exactly hurting for tropes to make fun of in the magazine world.
LaughSpin: It gives you reason to fall in love with Funny Or Die again.
Moontower: Yet it is not with nostalgia but a sense of adjustment that The Occasional has already placed itself in the hallowed tradition of Mad, National Lampoon, Spy, and The Onion.
SXSW: Ran the 2014 Adobe Digital Publishing workshop
Webby: 2014 Best Entertainment nomination
The FINAL FACT
The Occasional was the #2 most downloaded Apple Newsstand product right behind this little stinker of a publication named The New York Times.
