These were for a book many artists and designers contributed to.

The book, hand-bound, was a memorial for Rick Sams, actually created for his son Timothy who was only six when his father passed away.

Rick (the father) was a remarkable, fascinating, and at times incredibly aggravating character. Many of us thought his son should have some record of the man

Many of Rick's friends were artists, designers, writers, and the like, and even if they weren't, they were asked to contribute stories, illustrated or not, for the book.

This particular story is about a trip we took to Mexico, where Rick insisted on buying these little (dead, posed, stuffed and varnished) frogs ... well, you'd just have to read the story.

Which is really easy, on a pdf (and it's only 5 pages) :

high resolution PDF ( 3.61 Mb ) | Low resolution PDF( 2.88 Mb)

illustration and copy * : Scott Agnew
photography : Jeffrey Bach

*I set the body copy in InDesign, not in Illustrator, and I did the photo silhouetting and edge effects on the frog photos in Photoshop... but obviously, this is mostly Illustrator stuff. It's one of the first times I actually used their reusable Graphic Styles (for the type) and pattern "brushes" (for the spiky serrated-edge medallion things) ... saved me a ton of time and sold me (and got me paermanently hooked) on some of Adobe's new techniques, which, although they can be a bit of pain to learn, really do pay off.