This week, the food journal is a comedy routine in disguise

Every week, someone narrates seven days of meals for The Grub Street Diet, and what comes back is never really about the food. It is a journal surfacing career, family, heritage and anxiety through what someone reaches for at lunch. This week’s subject is comedian and Late Show writer Michael Cruz Kayne, and Adam Mazur’s portrait is in on the bit. Kayne holds a microphone at center, his week of eating swirling around him. The food tells the story. Mazur illustrates the person it reveals.

A story about connection as self-care, illustrated with an image that rewards a second look

For an interview with psychiatrist Joanna Cheek, author of It’s Not You, It’s the World, Maggie Chiang painted what first reads as a sunny afternoon scene with two people talking in a park. Moments later, the foliage itself resolves into a woman’s profile. The whole picture reorganizes. The conversation isn’t happening in a park, it’s happening inside someone.

Lorena Spurio’s opening illustration for Vox’s parental leave story demonstrates how three fundamental composition techniques can carry a concept

The frame your eye landed on first wasn’t an accident. Lorena Spurio’s opening illustration for Vox’s recent piece on parental leave uses three basic compositional tools, contrast, scale and cropping, to guide your attention to a single point. The way she layers them follows the same sequence that vision science says your brain does.

A look at how one illustrator turned a full section of literary criticism into a cohesive visual experience

Readers of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung opened the newspaper’s celebrated Literatur supplement and found themselves surrounded by color. Across a full special section timed to the Leipzig Book Fair, twenty illustrations by Julia Kluge accompanied reviews of the season’s most anticipated titles. One artist threading an entire literary season together through her visual language.