Reyman Studio

After years of careful consideration and planning I have decided to issue limited edition fine art prints of my paintings and drawings. All artworks were photographed by professionals who deal with museums and galleries. High resolutions scans were made and printed proofs pulled. I chose the proofs with the most accurate color fidelity to the originals and the best clarity. The prints are stunning.

I hope you’ll take a look. The new website is exclusively for selling prints. If you like one just click on the purchase button. Each print will be shipped in an archival print protector.

Many more prints will be added to the site.

The high resolution Giclee Prints are made with pigmented archival inks and printed on Hahnemühle 100% acid free etching paper. I will hand sign and number all prints. All prints will be editions of 125. Many thanks!

James Reyman Prints James ReymanGiclee PrintsThese limited edition prints are all made from paintings and drawings that I created in New York City. The high resolution Giclee Prints are made with pigmented archival inks and printed on Hahnemühle 100% acid free etching paper. I will hand sign and number all prints. All...

For my redesign of First Things Magazine I asked Brad Holland to consider a painting for the opening page of the book reviews section. He had done a piece years ago of books that looked like stonehenge. I mentioned it to him and he said he has been very interested to explore that idea more. He did some amazing sketches and we picked one. The magazine is heavy on intellectual texts so his beautiful painting brings gravitas to the page. The idea is that books, like stonehenge, contain secrets. The reviewers help to unlock the secrets in those books. Brad was very busy with 4 large painting assignments when I called him. I had to wait. I wasn't going to tell him to rush this! I told the editor, instead that we had to wait. He was fine with that. It was well worth the wait. The Reminga typeface I used on this redesign is a very versatile type family. Many weights and all with small caps. X-height is a little bit tall which makes reading at small type sizes easier. Lots of typographic hierarchy in this magazine. The editor loves it. https://www.reymanstudio.org

I was hired in January to redesign a magazine called, First Things. I had not worked on a magazine redesign in several years. After about 8 months of zero work due to Covid this was a pleasant surprise to say the least. The launch issue was just put to bed so I can speak about it now. I will be posting some of the pages and superb art by some of my favorite illustrators.

Illustration budgets for magazines have not been easy for me to come by. When I studied previous issues of this magazine, I decided that it needed art. They currently had none. When I read through several articles, images by the great, Brad Holland kept popping into my head. He fit so perfectly. I had no idea if he was still working or even taking on magazine projects any more. After all he has been very well known as a brilliant illustrator for over 50 years now!

I showed the editor his work and he loved it. I called Brad. I remembered a story about a very famous art director who called Brad to commission a painting then hung up when he answered because he was so intimidated. Brad answered the phone and was so engaging and smart and funny, that we spoke for about 45 minutes before we even came to the subject of illustration. We have a lot in common which kind of blew my mind.

He knew the magazine well and said, yes, he’d be happy to do work for me. We used 4 of his paintings for this project. 2 brand new ones and 2 that he had created but had not been published before. The magazine is designed as a literary journal with religious content. Heavy on the text. I asked Brad if he would consider creating a colophon which would act as a symbol for the magazine. We would use it in different places when space was available. This would be a spot illustration, which will mostly be used in a 2 inch by 2 inch space.

Spot art is a kind of illustration that an artist can sometimes knock out in a short time. It pays less than a full page or half page of art. It is not always the best example of an artist’s work. The pencil sketch was great. Brad then said, wait till you see the painting I have in mind (all 4 pieces he made are paintings). I knew it would be good, after all it was Brad Holland. I did not, however, expect it to look like it was painted by Velázquez, or another painter from the King’s court in 17th century Spain. When he sent it to me I just stared at it for about half an hour. Absolutely brilliant. He did not knock this out. I showed it to my students at Columbia as an example of professionalism and how to handle even the smallest project. Here it is.

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Dr Fauci has been a voice of reassuring expertise and reason during this difficult health crisis we are in. I made this drawing of him when he was on CNN the other night. g

Reyman Studio Home Reyman Studio provides graphic design services to businesses. We design magazines, books, newspapers and more.

The 2 new brochures I designed for the Journalism School at Columbia University are completed and printed. They worked out very well. One is for the Publishing Course in NYC and one is for the course at Oxford University. What can we design for you in 2020?

9 projects from 2019. What can we design for you in 2020?
1. 4 newspaper props designed from scratch for the Broadway production of, Hillary and Clinton, starring Laurie Metcalfe and John Lithgow, for Ross MacDonald.

2. Paul Swank, Enduring Hero, Non-Fiction, Book design (Jacket and interior). 4 versions; 2 in French and 2 in English, for Significance Press

3. 2 Brochures for The Columbia Publishing Course, Columbia University; one for the NYC course and one for the Oxford course (I am a teacher for the NYC course).

4. 9 Report templates for the Compliancy Group Software company. Reports are delivered to clients of the company who have been audited for HIPAA compliancy.

5. Newspaper prop design for HBO mini series which will air in 2020. One in 11 newspapers I designed from scratch for Ross MacDonald.

6. The Case of Two in the Trunk. Detective novel, Cover and interior, paperback and kindle e-book, for Significance Press.

7. Newspaper Prop designed from scratch for Broadway production of King Lear, starring Glenda Jackson, for Ross MacDonald.

8. Certificate for Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

9. Tides Brochure. 46 page brochure on 2019 new carpet line for Tai Ping carpet company.

NEW WORK! I designed this brochure of hand knotted and hand tufted carpets for the manufacturer, Tai Ping (Edward Fields is a Tai Ping brand). They produce gorgeous bespoke carpets, hand made from silk and wool. This brochure features the new 2019 collection, TIDES. All carpet designs by Ariana and Juliana. Location photography by Andrew Bordwin.

I designed this brochure of hand knotted and hand tufted carpets for the manufacturer, Tai Ping (Edward Fields is a Tai Ping brand). They produce gorgeous bespoke carpets, hand made from silk and wool. This brochure features the new 2019 collection, TIDES. All carpet designs by Ariana and Juliana. Beautiful location photography by Andrew Bordwin.

New Work! I was invited to design the jacket and interior of a very moving, non-fiction book on the life and death of an American soldier in Occupied France during WWII. Jacket is almost done. Paperback edition is next as well as a French edition.

This assignment is one of the single most difficult projects I’ve done. Last Saturday afternoon I received a call from my friend, Ross MacDonald. We had, just a few days earlier, completed the props for the new, Broadway production of King Lear. I did the newspaper, he did everything else (wine bottle labels, rubels, etc), beautiful stuff.
He had a new project, another play! The play is, “Hillary and Clinton”, starring John Lithgow and Laurie Metcalf. This one, however, needed 4 newspapers, not one. These papers were to be dated, 2008, the start of primaries. He needed one New York Times, one Boston Globe, one USA today and one Washington Post. They all needed an interior spread and back page as well. I was given one headline for each newspaper from the director, that’s all. No templates, no logos, no typefaces, no photos, no secondary headlines and decks. I had to get all that material together myself and design those papers in 2 days. And I had to do them in full color! They need to be designed, produced, printed and delivered to the theater for previews beginning Friday!
As I sat in my studio on Sunday, getting started, I realized this was almost completely impossible to do. I was sweating. I did not even have any time to go to newspaper stores to look for issues. I went on the internet and found front pages for each newspaper from 2008. The images were tiny. Ross and I talked about it and decided that they would all be the same size. I still needed to figure out typefaces and make as close a guess as I could for those that I didn’t have. Logos for each newspaper were relatively easy to find on the internet. I have art directed at the New York Times and did some design consultation at the Washington Post so I had typefaces I could use. I had some Cheltenhams that would work with the New York Times and Bodoni and text faces for the Post. USA today was an entirely different matter. I spent 2 hours of valuable time trying to figure out the type family. I finally contacted Sam Berlow and he told me. In 2008 the paper used a typeface family created by the late, great Gerard Unger, called Gulliver. Gerard had kept tight control over this type family only granting something like 9 licenses. It’s a very unique look and it’s all over those USA Today pages from 2008. After searching and searching I came up with a Poynter Compressed Display bold face. It worked. I needed to find photographs of primary rallies with no identifiable faces. It was crazy!
I finished all 4 newspapers at about 2:15am on Monday. I sent them to Ross, he delivered the files to the printer on Tuesday. They printed on Wednesday but blew the deadline and got them done on Thursday. Ross’s son had to drive them into the city to the theater. The show previews tonight (Friday) with all 4 newspapers on stage! Here they are!

20 years ago I designed a cookbook for Jacques Torres (Dessert Circus at Home) for William Morrow and Company. Jacques was thrilled with it. I was invited to a tasting of desserts by him and we were introduced. He made my wife and I an incredible Chocolate Mousse while we watched. He autographed my book with this thought, "Dessert and Design, something in common" https://www.reymanstudio.org

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
I have been a huge fan of Ross MacDonald for years but never had the pleasure to work with him ... until last week, October 14. The great illustrator and prop master called me with a fascinating project. Could I design a newspaper that will be used on stage in the new Broadway production of, To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Jeff Daniels? Of course I said yes, but asked, Doesn't that start up in previews like, next week? Yes, it does!! So I immediately began researching newspaper headlines from small town Alabama cities in 1935 and found a bunch of great stuff. The director gave us a newspaper title (The Mobile Press, which Atticus actually reads in the book) and I designed it; cover and interior pages, in 2 days. Ross had them printed at a newspaper up in Connecticut two days later, and Voila! I used the old, 8-column grid that was popular back then and rules between every column. The photos are from Alabama newspapers in 1935. Typefaces are a variety of newspaper faces from the time; Bookman, News Gothic, Frankin Gothic, Cheltenham, Scotch. A great, fun project. Working with Ross is a giant pleasure!! A great guy! The reason for the multiple issue run is that it will be used in all performances of the play. Ross and I talked about this. The actor has to handle the newspaper like a real newspaper not like an expensive prop so they printed up a lot of them. And it's a broadsheet!

International Buyer's Guide, published by Billboard magazine. A catalog I designed for Josh Klenert when he was at Billboard.

Paul Auster was giving a lecture on urbanism at CCNY and I was asked to design the poster for his talk. I like the books of his I've read. I introduced myself after the talk and he was very gracious. He told me he loved the poster. We exchanged a couple of interesting New York Stories. I designed many posters for the Spitzer School of Architecture at CCNY. This is one of my favorites. https://www.reymanstudio.org

For over 10 years we designed the exhibition and lecture posters for the Spitzer School of Architecture at CCNY. This poster was for the Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism given by Rebecca Solnit in 2015. This was the runner up to the chosen poster and my personal favorite.

The Devil's Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen. Published by Soho Press. A wonderful book on the history of coffee. Stewart traveled the world looking for the origins of this tasty bean and came up with this glorious story, in a sort of a gonzo style. The title art just came to me and got a little help from hours of photoshop work.

Dessert Circus at Home by Jacques Torres. Published by William Morrow and Company. Jacques, a famous chocolatier, was the Executive Pastry Chef at Le Cirque for 11 years. My simple design idea here was to use circus graphic elements (colors, patterns) and make the cover fun. Jacques loved the book jacket and made my wife and I an amazing Chocolate Mousse! https://www.reymanstudio.org

I designed a variety of books for Gibbs-Smith, a publisher in Oregon. Built by Hand is a fascinating architecture book. About 450 pages with over 700 photographs. The authors spent years traveling around the globe taking photos of homes created by indiginous people using local materials. The book is made up up chapters with titles like, Wood, Stone, Thatch, Earth. In those chapters you can see images and stories aobut homes built with those materials. A meticulous design process but all worked out well at the end. Josh Klenert was the designer who worked with me in this one. We used a couple of beautiful Dwiggins typefaces; Electra and Eldorado. https://www.reymanstudio.org

The Far Eastern Economic Review. Edited by Hugo Restall. Published by Dow Jones.

Joe Dizney called me with a project. Joe was the Design Director of the Wall Street Journal. The Far Eastern Economic Review was a magazine that Dow Jones had owned since 1946. It needed a redesign. Was I interested in the project? Oh yes, I was! The Review's readership was, Presidents of Countries, Heads of State and Business owners in the Far East. It had to look literary. It had been a full color weekly magazine and we discussed turning it into a journal style, perfect bound, black and white, type driven publication. Joe asked the WSJ's great, page one Art Director to work with me. That was David Pybas. I had 7 weeks to complete the project which included, preparing 3 distinctly different design directions (layout, typefaces, etc), flesh out the chosen direction. Created bulletproof templates, since the publication would be put together by the editor in Hong Kong, and design the entire first issue. Oh, and one more thing, Joe said. "You have to use InDesign" We had all been working in Quark still, at the time. I said, Sure I can do that. I was worried. First thing Dave said was call Jonathan Hoefler to see what he has going on. It was great advice. I called and we had a meeting. Jonathan was just then putting the finishing touches on the Mercury type family, which was a brilliant, complete, versatile type family with many styles, display and text, small caps in all weights, a numbers face, tabular numbers, you get the picture. It could do anything and it looked fantastic in every circumstance. Jonathan told me I was the first person to order the entire Mercury family for a project. I asked Tobias Frere-Jones to make me custom drop caps in a black box. It was like Christmas the day he finished it. The best present a designer could wish for! I called Josh Klenert to help me out and we proceeded to crank out this redesign. Since we did not know the application that well yet we would yell questions to each other across the studio all day, like, "How do you import an image?!"; "How do you make a drop cap?" It was pretty funny. I hired the great illustrator, Steven Salerno to do all the illustrations in the entire magazine, which were like woodblock prints. They were brilliant, every single one.

We presented all layouts to Paul Gigot, the editor of the editorial page of the WSJ and Hugo Restall, the new editor of the publication. It could not have gone better. They loved it.

The studio was a madhouse but we completed the job on time and the first issue went off without a hitch. I was asked to do the second issue then. We started it up and my son was born on the second day of designing. The doctor had assured me he would most likely be born two weeks late. He was born one day early. Now there were two madhouses.

About a month later Joe called me up again. I have another project he said. A big one he said. Not a little one like that last one. (I thought the last one was a big one) I said yes, I'll do it.

The Hollywood Reporter redesign. Published by the Nielsen Company.

Reyman Studio was awarded a Gold Medal for Best Redesign in the B to B category at the FOLIO: 2008 OZZIE Awards competition for our redesign of The Hollywood Reporter.

Our assignment to redesign The Hollywood Reporter, a daily paper which reports on the business of Hollywood, was, essentially, to bring the publication into the 21st century. Publications need to be a product of their time. The new look begins with a new logo; authoritative, accessible and immediate.

Next we had to consider the pacing of the magazine. We introduced various new visual navigation aids to help the reader find that information quickly. There’s a new, “What’s Inside” box on the cover with summaries of articles inside. There are skyboxes above the logo for articles of interest inside and there are small boxes placed in various locations which lead the reader to reviews and other sections.

A major element of the redesign was in choosing new, versatile, contemporary typefaces with classic lines. These typefaces can handle all the various typographic needs of the magazine with clarity and dignity, making every page easy to read and navigate. We considered many typefaces and settled with beautiful, sturdy, eminently readable faces designed by Cyrus Highsmith of The Font Bureau.

On the last day of 2009 Bob Newman stopped by my studio for a visit. He had not been by here before. I had known Bob since his first day at Entertainment Weekly as design director. I was working on a special issue for them.

We had a couple of diet Cokes and had a terrific chat. He looked around and liked the studio. At the end of his visit he told me he had a project and wondered if I was interested in working with him on it. I said yes. It was the redesign of TV Guide magazine. They were in trouble. They had been purchased for a dollar (!) and the website had separated from the print mag. We had our work cut out for us. We set out with the most difficult aspect first, the listings. We spoke about the readership. Bob said, readers leave their magazine open on the TV stand and they read in dim light. He had nailed it. It was a bold, fresh look we set out to do and it looked great, even in low lit rooms! We talked to Sam Berlow at Font Bureau and got us some beautiful Cyrus Highsmith typefaces; the Boomer family and Quiosco. We also used the beautiful and practical Retina face by Tobias Frere-Jones. He made us a custom name block- typeface that we used for genres of TV shows on the listings pages.

The night before our first presentation we were at my studio at 11:00 pm with much left to accomplish. I said, Bob what are we going to do? He said, Do you have any Led Zeppelin? I had ALL of Led Zeppelin. I put it on loud and we sailed through until 3:00 am. The meeting was a huge success. It was a fun project and we had a blast. The launch issue featured the TV show, Glee. The great, Art Striber did the cover and interior shoot.

Here's a review of our redesign:

Review from The NY Post,
on the TV Guide redesign,
November 14, 2010

TV Guide is living its second life fully, with great style. Layouts and graphics rival those of any title in the born-again entertainment sector, and it's now a perfect fit for anyone's TV nest. Unlike the clunky little midget of a magazine of yesteryear, TV Guide offers a fast and smooth visit to loads of eye candy and news nuggets on stars and shows. An added plus: friendly and handsome listings that are easy to read in dim TV viewing environments.

My most recent book design project was, The Pinkerton Story, published by the Pinkerton Foundation. Roger Black called me and asked if I'd like to work with him on it. I said yes, so we designed it together. The Pinkerton Foundation awards grants to organizations who create after school programs for kids and young adults in NYC. The goal is to help reduce juvenile delinquency. A wonderful group of people. Photo editor was Karen Mullarkey. Photographs were by Michael Santiago. Designers who worked with me were Vera Naughton and Kerstin Michaelsen. The photo essays highlight certain very successful programs the foundation has worked with. A fun project with nice typographic details and wonderful images.

How Evan Broke His Head and other Secrets, by Garth Stein, Published by Soho Press. The novel is about a rock guitarist who unknowingly fathered a child 14 years earlier. The boy's mother dies and the father is reunitied with his son. His son is not happy. A very good book by Stein but a very difficult cover to do. The title was long and we tried some rock 'n' roll imagery but it was not working. We experimented with a lot of directions. I decided to try a father/son photo and did some imaging to bring the characters to life. I like this one a lot. Despite the hard work I enjoyed working together with Juris Jurjevics, the publisher, as well as the young editor at Soho Press named Bryan Devendorf who went on to find fame as the drummer for the great rock band, The National. https://www.reymanstudio.org

The Long Firm, a novel by Jake Arnott. Published by Soho Press. This was the first jacket of three that I designed for Jake's books. All three capture the seedy gangster lifestyle of London in the 1960s, including their interest in show business society. Harry Starks is the protagonist, a ruthless contemporary of the infamous Kray brothers. Evil, menacing yet a romantic. I always pictured Harry in shadow. Dark and imposing, and always with his boys close by. An excellent novel told in multiple voices. The book was so popular the BBC made a TV movie of it. A 4-part series I haven't seen but would love to.

He Kills Coppers, a novel by Jake Arnott. Published by Soho Press. This was the second of three books by Jake that I designed the jacket for. It's a look into the sordid gangland life of London in the 1960s. One character is a tabloid journalist that I pictured behind his old Olivetti typewriter banging out story after story, hence my use of the Trixie typeface. There is another character in the book who carries around an old, small newspaper photograph of someone he's been looking for for years. The photo is faded from being folded. The person he's looking for is described as someone who is easy to describe but difficult to identify. I think this was one of the photos I researched of men at that time period. The image is soft focus and the eyes are covered, making identification difficult. The background of the flaps, spine and back cover was crumpled paper, like the kind you see on TV, that old-time journalists would rip out of the typewriter and throw in a small waste basket. I started the text of the novel on the cover to give the impression that you were watching the journalist as he typed the story.