Popular Mechanics
Ash worked for Popular Mechanics as a digital designer within Hearst’s Enthusiast Group brands, including Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, Runner’s World and Best Products.
Below are some highlights from my time with Popular Mechanics including a weekly publication of POP Projects, an illustration project called on mixology, Gear of the Year articles, e-commerce product roundups & other digital illustration pieces.
POP Projects was a series of articles published weekly on Popular Mechanics website for those who held a POPMech digital subscription. These articles were pulled from the Popular Mechanics archives & were updated and revised, including modernized plans and blueprints, materials lists & occasionally were featured on the POP Projects Youtube channel.
My first project with Popular Mechanics was to work on a series of illustrations of cocktails, drawn in a mathematical, blueprint style for a few digital articles to be run on Popular Mechanics website. The drinks were broken out into six families, as seen in the article linked below.
Photography from Mixology Article by Cole Wilson
Annually Popular Mechanics would write, review & publish Gear of the Year Awards. This article would first run in print with an accompanying digital article to follow. The digital article would have one main landing page with links out to individual landing pages for each section’s product roundups. These landing pages would include in-depth product reviews and links for e-commerce. Here you can view some of the assets adapted from print to digital & view the article itself below.
E-commerce & product reviews were a large part of Popular Mechanic’s daily publication schedule. Below are some of the digital illustrations made for these round-ups, which later included creating photoshop templates for editors to use.
