CULMINATION

The cover of the CULMINATION art book, designed from scratch in a 1970s idiom. I drew the wordmark in two custom variants — one solid, one striped — and set it against halftone gradients, topographic linework, and warm orange banding: the print language of MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED.

A print mockup of the finished book — a landscape hardcover shown from two angles, so the cover, spine, and color banding can be judged as one object rather than a flat layout.

Staffed by clerks from MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED's administration division, the Ordinance Office handles personnel reassignment and the civil registry — every posting, every relocation, every file on every citizen begins at one of these desks. The architecture is built on the rounded forms of the 1970s: flared columns, chamfered casework, a continuous arcade. Palette and lighting are held in a warm register and the skylight floods the hall, so the room reads as a reception lounge rather than the place where lives are reassigned.

Tally is MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED's official IP character, the company's public face on posters, packaging, and broadcast. He is drawn in classic American cartoon style — rubber-hose limbs, an exaggerated head-to-body ratio, a mouth line that never quite comes down — and dressed in the company's cream jacket and orange roundel. The sheet carries a full turnaround plus an expression range, because what a mascot is allowed to feel is itself a corporate decision.

An early promotional film released by MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED in 1965 to sell the public on the company itself. It imitates 1960s American cartoon advertising — limited animation, coarse print texture, and a narrator far too pleased about the future being handled for you. I designed the storyboard and every character in it; the animation was produced with Seedance 2.0 as an assist, and the final edit and grade were done in Premiere Pro.

Two key art posters for MERIDIAN PASSAGE — the company's interstellar expansion program, and the campaign the whole book is named after. Everything is presented in the corporate print language: halftone skies, orbital route diagrams, a single figure at the edge of somewhere newly assigned. A program that moves people off-world is sold with exactly the same warmth as a staff benefit.

Deep in a mine shaft in former Russian territory — now zoned for gas extraction — MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED keeps a facility. At the end of the shaft stands the sealed Old Mercy Monastery, a place name that appears in no registry. Dormant, the chamber is warm: candle flame, gilded stone, the winged form beneath the vault lit like an altarpiece. It still looks like a church.

The moment extraction begins, the whole monastery turns blue at once and the wailing starts — no record states where the sound comes from. The geometry does not change; its nature does. Chromatic fringing tears at the edges, blue-white glare presses down from the vault, and the winged form stops reading as an icon and starts reading as something developing into view. The company files this under routine operations.

An illustration still in progress — flats down, rendering not started. In a book about a company that assigns everyone a purpose, this one has not been given a place yet. It may end up inside; it may not.