Cricket Hill
Medium publication by Jonas Ellison
I got to make a cool cover drawing for the even cooler Jonas Ellison and his freshly renamed Medium publication Cricket Hill (now Common Words).
Jonas and I have been businessy friends for a little while, getting on calls & exchanging brain juice. We both like simplicity, ease, joy, and freedom in our work. Basically, let’s not make things unnecessarily heavy.
What Jonas sent me as a creative brief was straight out of his Medium article on why he changed the name from 'Higher Thoughts' to 'Cricket Hill':
„Cricket Hill is the name of a grassy hill here in Chicago. But not just any grassy hill. It’s a sanctuary of sorts, on the edge of the city. From the top, you can see a little slice of the skyline and Lake Michigan. Many naps have been taken under its trees. Countless kids, both young and old, have laid on their backs and rolled down it. Armies of snow sleds have slid down it. Fleets of kites have flown in the sky above it. Existential crises have been processed during long walks over it.
It’s not particularly stunning. It’s not epic. It’s not Navy Pier or Millennium Park. You won’t see it on any Chicago postcards. But it’s special. Life happens here. Connection happens here. Contemplation happens here. Fun happens here. Laughter happens here. Sadness (sometimes) happens here. All of it, on this little hill at the edge of this beautiful city.
This is life, to me. Sometimes gloriously sunny and bright, but more often, fairly mundane. Cricket Hill is my place to proverbially lie on my back, stare at the clouds, and rant a little. Or a lot. Depending on the day.“
This illustration was easy for me to make, all I had to do was represent the weightlessness of simplicity: the sketchy style, the white sky, the openness to imagination. Colourful, fun, reminiscent of belly laughs and days spent in the grass, playing. I wanted to make it look like a comic, a Sunday afternoon, something fleeting, based in the present instead of the past or the future.
“Alice, you nailed it. Absolutely perfect 👌 🙏”
The font looks like the title of a book or a movie, and represents the storytelling aspect of Cricket Hill – and its aspirations to becoming a publishing company one day.
