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A Valentine’s Day ode to The Heads of State

From the moment we spotted them across the coffee table on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, we knew our destiny lay with The Heads of State, the graphic-design duo of Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers. At the time—just over a year ago—Brokelyn was just a URL we’d purchased from a guy in Williamsburg and a rough idea for a web magazine.

The Heads of State had created a series of reinvented WPA-style posters for the Times’ inaugural piece on the Obama agenda. The illustrations were nostalgic yet modern, beautiful yet cerebral, elegant in their graphic simplicity. They also had a distinct visual sense of humor, something that we thought could only help a blog about living well in tough times.

Unbelievably to us, Jason agreed to 1) coffee and 2) design our logo, even though an as-yet-unpublished Brooklyn web mag was hardly in a league with the team’s usual clients: Starbucks, Wilco, The New York Yorker, financially and otherwise. While readers of Brokelyn now know The Heads of State’s brand-identity work from our logo and the recent Beer Book, there’s so much more worth checking out: from their experimental “legalized” pot packaging for Print Magazine (below) to their posters for seemingly every major musical act that blows through Philadelphia (where Jason and Dusty have since relocated): Interpol, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, etc. etc. etc.

We could go on for days about how talented and professional these guys are—and what a pleasure it is to work with artists who elevate your ideas in so many unimagined ways—but we’ll let their designs do the talking. They say it better anyway. Thanks, guys.

Faye :Faye Penn is the founder of Brokelyn and publisher of the Brooklyn and Queens Beer Books, the Brooklyn Cocktail Book and other stuff you ain't seen yet. She lives in Ditmas Park. Get at her at brokelyn@gmail.com