The Blame Game

I created this illustration for a Bay Area News Group online special report published on Sunday, April 8. The Bay Area housing crisis! The influx of people from far and wide coming for jobs in the high-tech industry! Real estate developers and City Hall at odds as to how to create more homes! Greedy landlords and tree-hugging environmentalists gumming up the works! Bay Area residents looking on helplessly and in horror as traffic gets worse and worse... and worse!

All those topics (and more!) have been herded into one story by ace business and real estate reporter Marisa Kendall, and you can read her excellent work right here! She's done a heckuva job and really touched a nerve with this effort.

Created in Illustrator. No Photoshop, no MangaStudio! Pure vector, which is so unlike me that friends may worry.

The webpage was arranged and designed by graphics chief, the great Pai Wei. I have another little explainer graphic set up like a slide-show about halfway down the page. It's a series of spot illustrations and all of the heavy lifting (meaning the writing) was also done by Marisa Kendall.


Hindsight afterword:

Ugh! There are a few of annoying tangents that I missed but otherwise, I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. There were so many iterations of this concept and design that I probably was a bit snowblind when the deadline arrived. "Huh? What? Yeah, I'm done. Here!Take it! Take it! I'm going home."

And I could have done better than just that gray-green color scheme for the board. I didn't want to make it too crazy colorful – and it was crazy colorful along the way – but, again, I was a bit burnt out and just waved it through.

Had a good time working on it, and as I said, I'm happy with it!