Welcome to Burning Man 2023, Animalia and the 12th year I have created the Burning Man Survival Guide!
This 20 page printed piece with about a dozen large illustrations is the highlight of my design challenges, year after year. The value of putting the extra time and creativity in to this project is that people pay attention to it when it arrives in their mailbox. There’s a lot of information in here, much of it is crucial, but not a lot of it is as exciting as the actual event. Getting folks to stop and read, keep and return to, share and reference is what makes this project a success.

A snippet of the theme description from Burning Man describes an “Endless menagerie of imagined animals we bring with us every time we come to Burning Man. The mythic beasts we carry with us in our minds—imagined or idealized, objects of fear or fancy, the animal spirits that populate our dreams and are so often brought to life on the playa: boars and horses and bears…” and in my case new mythical characters that are fantastic and mundanely human.