A. Minzhulina

This project reflects my approach to editorial storytelling as a strategic tool—shaping narrative systems that translate brand values into human, contemporary experiences.

Client | Bombardier / Spafax

Publication | Experience Magazine, Issue 43

Role | Art Direction & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Editor-in-Chief | Elio Iannacci

Photography | Carl Lessard

The Concept: At the heart of Legacy was a story about inheritance—not just of name or business, but of values. This issue explored how Bombardier’s evolution from a family enterprise into a global innovation leader remains rooted in generational continuity. The narrative bridged past, present, and future through the lens of familial connection—grandfather to grandson, history to innovation, tradition to transformation.

The editorial directive was clear: honor Bombardier’s heritage without slipping into nostalgia. The design needed to evoke a sense of timelessness while affirming the brand’s forward momentum.

The Approach: My approach was to frame legacy not as history, but as continuity in motion. Rather than relying on nostalgia, I constructed a narrative system that connected generations through visual restraint, pacing, and editorial structure—allowing the past to inform the future without overpowering it.

The issue was designed as a cohesive narrative system—where pacing, imagery, and typography articulated legacy as an active, evolving force.

The Execution: I directed the cover portrait series to establish a human entry point into the theme of legacy—intimate yet composed, grounded yet forward-looking. Inside, I structured the issue around a timeline system that marked key innovations without romanticizing the past. A featured photo essay of father and son offered a quiet counterpoint—subtle, dignified, modern.

The layout language was deliberately restrained—anchored in clarity, white space, and typographic confidence—allowing the theme to breathe without ornamental weight. The result was a visual framework that mirrored Bombardier’s brand ethos: engineered precision with emotional resonance.

The Impact: Legacy was one of the most cohesive and conceptually resonant issues of Experience magazine to date. It reinforced Bombardier’s position not only as an aviation innovator, but as a brand defined by long-view thinking and human connection. The issue reinforced Bombardier’s positioning as a brand defined not by heritage alone, but by its ability to carry that heritage forward through innovation.

This project reflects my approach to editorial and brand work: constructing visual systems that translate complex ideas into clear, compelling narratives.

Client | Bombardier / Spafax

Publication | Experience Magazine, Issue 42

Role | Art Direction, Cover Design & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Editor-in-Chief | Elio Iannacci

Contributors | Lippincott, Douglas Coupland, Guillaume Poisson

Awards | Gold—Best Art Direction of a Complete Issue, National Magazine Awards (B2B), 2025

The Concept: Issue 42 of Experience marked a pivotal moment for Bombardier: the public reveal of its complete brand transformation. More than a style update, this was a foundational shift in how the company wanted to communicate innovation, vision, and forward motion.

The design brief was both simple and monumental: make the brand evolution visible—powerfully, beautifully, and with precision. This issue would serve as the launchpad for Bombardier’s new identity. The creative team worked in close collaboration with Lippincott, the New York-based branding agency behind the redesign, to ensure consistency while reinterpreting the brand through an editorial lens.

The Approach: My approach was to translate Bombardier’s brand transformation into a coherent editorial system. Rather than applying branding elements directly, I constructed a visual language that could operate across covers, features, and layouts—balancing precision, clarity, and visual impact.

The Execution: I led the full creative execution, anchoring the issue around a custom-designed gatefold feature that unveiled Bombardier’s new logo, colour system, and typographic voice. The visual language of the issue extended and amplified the core brand toolkit—transforming it from corporate guidelines into editorial experience.

The cover design became an instant focal point: a bold, graphic interpretation of the new Bombardier logo, treated not as a corporate mark but as a symbol of innovation and movement. Its reductive elegance communicated clarity and confidence—two qualities at the heart of the brand’s repositioning.

Inside, the content was structured to reflect the evolution of the brand itself: from heritage to future, from functionality to aspiration. The collaboration with contributors like Douglas Coupland brought further conceptual depth, while layout choices reinforced the notion of design as forward momentum.

The Impact: Living Ahead of the Curve was more than a magazine issue—it was a brand launch disguised as editorial design. It bridged the gap between strategic identity and creative storytelling with uncommon finesse.

The project was recognized with Gold for Best Art Direction of a Complete Issue at the 2025 National Magazine Awards (B2B), underscoring my ability to lead high-stakes brand/editorial hybrids at the highest level.

Client | Bombardier / Spafax

Publication | Experience Magazine, Issue 41

Role | Art Direction, Design & Cover Art

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Editor-in-Chief | Elio Iannacci

Contributors | Carl Lessard, Jaime Hayón, Kacy Meinecke

The Concept: Ace the Deal explored the dual identity of Bombardier as both a business powerhouse and an innovation leader. Editorially, the issue juxtaposed the glamour and deal-making culture of Las Vegas—with features on luxury brands like Judith Leiber—against forward-looking coverage of the first supersonic test flights.

The creative strategy was to visually “play off” these two themes—strategy and speed—while delivering a cover that felt elevated, symbolic, and instantly iconic. The solution: a visual motif inspired by a playing card, redesigned through a lens of elegance and precision.

The Execution: We designed graphic cover, balancing symmetry with restraint to create a bold yet refined visual metaphor. The card-inspired composition allowed for dual storytelling: one side suggested the high-stakes world of business aviation; the other, the velocity of technological advancement.

The interior design extended the motif subtly—through layout cues, spatial rhythm, and photographic pacing—while giving room for contributors like Jaime Hayón and Kacy Meinecke to shine. Typography remained modern and assertive, reinforcing the issue’s themes of power and performance without veering into cliché.

The Impact:Ace the Deal set a tonal shift for Experience, reinforcing Bombardier’s narrative of modern luxury and brand evolution. The issue stands out as one of the most visually conceptual in the series—an example of editorial storytelling where illustration, strategy, and brand identity align seamlessly.

This project reflects my approach to large-scale editorial systems—developing visual frameworks that can sustain complexity, maintain clarity, and operate consistently across high-volume content.

Client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC) for Maclean’s magazine

Publication | Maclean’s, April 2023, Volume 136, Number 3

Role | Art direction & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Cover Design | Anna Minzhulina in collaboration with Maclean’s Creative Director Christine Dewairy

Photography | Various Sources

The Concept:The Power List 2023 spotlighted 100 influential Canadians reshaping the country’s cultural and industrial landscape. The editorial tone was energetic, urgent, and generationally current. The challenge: create a cover bold enough to stop readers mid-scroll or at the newsstand, and flexible enough to visually accommodate a vast and diverse group of people—without sacrificing clarity or impact.

This cover required careful visual orchestration. While developed in collaboration with Maclean’s Creative Director Christine Dewairy, I led the full creative direction of the package, developing a system of portrait treatments that blended photography with digital painting to achieve both cohesion and individuality across more than 100 subjects.

The Approach: My approach was to treat the issue as a scalable visual system rather than a collection of individual stories. With over 100 subjects and limited production resources, the challenge was to maintain cohesion without sacrificing individuality. I constructed a flexible framework that balanced repetition and variation—allowing each subject to feel distinct while reinforcing a unified visual language across the entire package.

The system was designed to operate efficiently under real-world constraints, ensuring clarity, consistency, and impact across every page.

The Execution: The visual approach was based on custom illustration-style portrait treatments, integrating photographic realism with stylized outlines and enhanced saturation. This technique made it possible to feature over 60 individuals on the cover without visual overload.

My design balanced the chaos of the collage with structured hierarchy, using tonal balance and composition to create movement across the cover and ensure every subject was given space. The hand-rendered “Power List” emblem further reinforced the editorial character—graphic, contemporary, and culturally tuned-in.

Working within tight production constraints, the system was designed to be both efficient and visually distinctive—maximizing impact without relying on heavy resources.

The table of contents extended the same visual system, building cohesion between the cover and interior while reinforcing the concept of a fully immersive editorial package.

The Impact: The project reinforced Maclean’s ability to present complex national narratives in a visually cohesive and contemporary way—demonstrating how editorial design can scale without losing clarity or identity.

The Power List 2023 became one of Maclean’s most visually dense yet legible covers—an editorial collage that felt deliberate, celebratory, and unexpected. It served as a high-impact showcase of my ability to lead multi-subject design at scale without compromising narrative clarity or visual appeal.

The work also demonstrated my ability to collaborate effectively at the creative director level while maintaining a distinct visual and strategic voice.

Experience magazine | “Driving Forces”, ISSUE 40

client | Spafax for Bombardier

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

cover illustration | Anna Minzhulina

contributors | Maxime Tetard, Qasim Iqbal, Jamilla Okubo

Project | Official pitch for “Justin Trudeau’s Last Stand” article and cross-platform campaign

Client | The Walrus

Role | Art Direction & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

The Concept: Commissioned as part of a creative director selection process, The Last Stand was a conceptual and visual response to a high-impact political story: an embattled Prime Minister facing the erosion of public trust and political capital.

The goal was to develop a complete editorial and brand campaign—one that could live across print, digital, and social, while aligning with The Walrus’s journalistic voice and national audience. The theme centered on a fractured Trudeau at a critical breaking point—not as a caricature, but as a man under pressure, caught between public perception and political legacy.

The Execution: Minzhulina designed a cover that visually distilled the mood of a country and a leader in crisis: isolated, vulnerable, exposed. From this single conceptual anchor, she built a cross-platform system that adapted seamlessly across touchpoints—Instagram carousels, digital banners, and print collateral—all unified by a restrained but emotionally charged visual tone.

Each format was adjusted to respect the brand’s editorial identity while tailoring engagement to platform behaviors. The visual system was built to signal gravity without sensationalism—modern, stark, and culturally aware.

The Impact:The Last Stand pitch positioned Minzhulina as a top finalist for the Creative Director role at The Walrus, demonstrating her ability to lead editorial systems and brand narratives simultaneously. The project remains a benchmark in her portfolio for conceptual clarity, cross-platform integration, and the ability to translate political journalism into compelling visual language.

Client | Bombardier / Spafax

Publication | Experience Magazine, Issue 39 (Special Edition)

Role | Art Direction, Design & Cover Art

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Editor-in-Chief | Elio Iannacci

Contributors | Kelly Beeman, Thukral and Tagra, Olivier Samson Arcand, Kate Copeland, Cara Romero

The Concept: Commissioned as a special edition, Women Who Fly was conceived to celebrate the extraordinary contributions of women to the world of aviation—from technological innovation to business leadership. The brief called for a visual narrative that was strong, modern, and unapologetically feminine, while maintaining the refined, global tone of Bombardier’s luxury brand.

The challenge was twofold: how to honor the historic and ongoing influence of women in aviation, and how to design a commemorative issue that felt elevated, not ornamental—powerful, yet quietly poetic.

The Execution: The creative solution emerged through multiple iterations of the cover before arriving at a visual language that felt iconic: a Matisse-inspired illustration, distilled to abstract, symbolic forms. Executed in black and gold emboss, the final design achieved a balance between graphic strength and feminine elegance—commanding attention while retaining quiet sophistication.

Inside, the issue featured a bold lineup of women artists and visionaries, including work by Kelly Beeman, Thukral and Tagra, and a portrait-driven fashion shoot co-directed with Olivier Samson Arcand. The layout preserved Minzhulina’s signature clarity—elevated typography, deliberate pacing, and a visual rhythm that let each contribution breathe with dignity.

The Impact:Women Who Fly stands as one of the most distinctive issues in the Experience catalogue—visually spare, yet conceptually rich. It was a testament to Bombardier’s commitment to innovation and inclusion, and to Minzhulina’s ability to lead brand storytelling with visual restraint, cultural sensitivity, and conceptual sharpness.

Experience magazine | “Upward Spiral”, ISSUE 36

client | Spafax for Bombardier

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

cover | paper art by Julia Ibbini and Stephane Noyer

contributors | Sâmia Pedraça, George Greaves, Julia Ibbini and Stephane Noyer

Experience magazine | “Defining Moments”, ISSUE 37

client | Spafax

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

cover | art of Albert Madaula

contributors | Albert Madaula, Lisa Corson, Guillaume Plisson, Davide Bertuccio

Client | Bombardier / Spafax

Publication | Experience Magazine, Issue 38

Role | Art Direction, Design & Cover Art

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Editor-in-Chief | Elio Iannacci

Cover Illustration | Lauren Tamaki

Contributors | Gabor Jurina, Tawny Chatmon, Domain Studio

Awards | Finalist, Best Illustration—National Magazine Awards

The Idea: With Alter Eco, Bombardier positioned itself as a sustainability-first aircraft innovator—an audacious shift for an industry long synonymous with environmental cost. The creative brief demanded a visual articulation of this pivot, one that could evoke the company’s new values without slipping into greenwashing or cliché.

The concept: to juxtapose the natural and the engineered. The cover became a central metaphor—lush, hand-rendered greenery replacing the expected sleek surfaces of aviation. The image needed to signal more than beauty; it had to convey materiality, ecology, and transformation.

The Execution: Collaborating with celebrated Canadian illustrator Lauren Tamaki, Minzhulina directed the creation of a cover image that was both expressive and editorially assertive. The floral illustration—vibrant, loose, and full of movement—embodied the spirit of sustainability while standing apart in a space dominated by precision and polish. The artwork would go on to become a National Magazine Award finalist for Best Illustration.

This visual ethos extended throughout the issue. Photography by Gabor Jurina and styled sets by Domain Studio carried forward the theme of organic texture and mindful luxury. Minzhulina’s layouts amplified the eco-forward message using airy compositions, natural hues, and material-aware typography, delivering an issue that was editorially focused and visually regenerative.

The Impact: Alter Eco offered a new model for what sustainability can look like in luxury publishing—elegant without being didactic, modern without being sterile. The issue deepened Bombardier’s narrative of innovation with a human, ecological dimension, and further positioned Experience magazine as a vehicle for brand storytelling at its highest level.

Client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC) for Maclean’s magazine

Platforms | Instagram & Facebook

Format | Video Reels & Carousel Slides

Role | Art Direction & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Photography | Ebti Nabag, Kristina Dittmar, Paul Swanson, Riley Smith

The Idea: Commissioned as a digital extension of Maclean’s cover story on Gen Z, this campaign focused on transforming a static print narrative into a format that could thrive in a fast-scrolling, mobile-first environment. The brief called for a bold, on-brand, and high-engagement social rollout that would increase visibility and drive follower growth across Maclean’s Instagram and Facebook platforms.

The editorial theme explored how Gen Z is redefining success, work, and identity—less stability, more balance and purpose. The campaign needed to feel youthful, contemporary, and authentic, while still holding the visual authority of a national magazine.

The Execution: Minzhulina strategically selected Reels as the core format, maximizing visual dynamism and discoverability through motion. Using Canva as the animation platform, she translated the static portrait photography from the print issue into visually immersive micro-stories, each featuring a real quote from a Gen Z subject.

The visual system balanced neon gradients, bold typography, and editorial grid logic to maintain Maclean’s brand tonewhile embracing the speed and intimacy of digital. Each reel and slide was tailored to feel native to Instagram Stories and Reels—engaging without feeling like repurposed print.

The campaign was unified under a single theme—“The Gen Z Revolt”—with all assets designed to feel cohesive across formats while optimizing for swipe, scroll, and click-through behaviors.

The Impact: The campaign helped drive meaningful engagement for Maclean’s across social platforms, reinforcing the magazine’s relevance to younger audiences. It also demonstrated Minzhulina’s fluency in adapting editorial storytelling into platform-native digital experiences—an essential skill for creative direction in today’s media landscape.

Client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC) for Maclean’s magazine

Publication | Maclean’s, May 2024, Volume 137, Number 4

Publication | Art direction & Design

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

Photography | Various Sources

Format | Print Feature & Contents Page Design

The Idea: The Power List 2024 was built on the momentum of the previous year’s highly successful edition, with a core challenge: maintain continuity, but push forward with originality. The editorial package spotlighted 100 influential Canadians shaping the country in a time of cultural, political, and infrastructural strain. Visually, the issue needed to feel urgent, alive, and deeply human.

Working with a limited budget and minimal production support, the creative direction demanded ingenuity and adaptability. The strategy: create something striking, modern, and scalable—without sacrificing editorial polish.

The Execution: Minzhulina led the full design of the package, building a cohesive system around over 100 individual portrait treatments that blended photography with expressive digital painting. This hybrid aesthetic allowed for strong visual cohesion while giving each subject a moment of distinction—maintaining clarity while reflecting the diversity and vibrancy of the list.

The contents page became anchor element: colorful, assertive, and unmistakably Maclean’s. The palette—punchy yet editorial—created a strong counterpoint to the serious tone of the text. The result was a design that felt both celebratory and grounded, reinforcing the idea of power as civic responsibility.

The Impact:The Power List 2024 demonstrated Minzhulina’s ability to lead a high-volume, editorially dense issue from concept through to execution. The final result was visually arresting, politically relevant, and structurally sound, reaffirming Maclean’s identity as a national voice and visually contemporary brand.

This project also stands as a testament to her adaptability—delivering high-impact design under real-world creative constraints, with resourcefulness, editorial precision, and signature aesthetic clarity.

maclean’s.ca | landing page

editorial package | Best Places To Eat Now

client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC)

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | John Cullen

photo director | Rachel Wine

This project reflects my approach to integrating emerging technologies into editorial practice—using AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool to extend conceptual thinking and visual authorship.

Client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC) for Maclean’s magazine

Platforms | Print, Web, Social

Project | Special Issue Cover, Landing Page, Digital Editorial Experience

Role | Art Direction, Design, AI Illustration, Web Production

Creative Lead | Anna Minzhulina

AI-Generated Illustrations | Created by Anna Minzhulina using ImagineArt

The Concept: AI: The Future Is Now was conceived as a multidisciplinary editorial initiative investigating the influence of artificial intelligence on Canadian life—from creativity to policy. The challenge: translate a highly complex and evolving topic into a visually unified, forward-facing package across print, web, and social platforms.

Instead of commissioning traditional illustration, Minzhulina proposed that the medium become the message: the entire visual identity of the issue would be created by AI, through AI, using text-to-image generation tools. The ambition was not just aesthetic—it was editorial, conceptual, and cultural.

The Approach: My approach was to treat AI as part of the editorial thinking process rather than a standalone tool. Instead of generating images for their own sake, I used AI to explore and develop concepts—testing visual directions, refining narratives, and translating abstract ideas into imagery that could function within a cohesive editorial system.

The process combined research, prompt development, iteration, and critical selection—ensuring that each image carried both conceptual clarity and visual intent. AI became a medium within a broader creative framework, guided by editorial judgment rather than automation.

The Execution: I led the development of AI-generated illustrations across the package, integrating them into print, digital, and web environments to create a cohesive, multi-platform editorial experience. I generated all imagery using ImagineArt, after extensive research and prompt engineering experiments. The cover image—a humanoid robot holding a skull—was inspired by Hamlet’s existential dilemma (“To be or not to be”), reframed as a meditation on machine consciousness and human obsolescence. It became the first AI-generated cover in Canadian magazine publishing.

The interior and table of contents were also visually supported by custom AI art. For digital, Minzhulina designed and built a standalone web experience using the Elementor plugin—complete with a landing page, animated navigation elements (including a looping .GIF menu), and 14 modular story pages housing contributions from Canadian experts. Every element was designed for cohesion and cross-platform clarity.

The work required building a repeatable workflow—balancing experimentation with control—to ensure consistency across outputs while maintaining conceptual depth.

The project demonstrates how generative tools can support—rather than replace—editorial intelligence, extending the role of the art director into new creative territory.

The Impact: The project sparked wide internal discussion and external interest around AI's role in the future of creative direction. It positioned Maclean’s as a thought leader willing to take risks—not just editorially, but technologically.

For me, it marked a turning point in her practice—merging research, design, and speculative strategy into a singular, media-spanning execution. It stands as a landmark case of how generative tools can support—not replace—editorial intelligence and visual authorship.

This project marked a turning point in my practice—establishing a framework for integrating AI into editorial workflows while maintaining authorship, intention, and conceptual rigor.

Maclean’s magazine | “Year Ahead” issue

client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC)

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

photo source | various

Experience magazine | “Myths & Legends”, ISSUE 36

client | Spafax Communications for Bombardier

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

3-D sculpture | Sâmia Pedraça and Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

Experience magazine | “Defining Moments”, ISSUE 37

client | Spafax Communications

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

Maclean’s magazine | “Year Ahead” issue

client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC)

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

photo source | various

Experience magazine | “State of the Art”, ISSUE 31

client | Bookmark Content and Communications

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

awards | Best Graphic Art (Gold), Folio Awards, New York; Overall Design: Single Magazine Issue (HM), Folio Awards, New York; Best Art Direction: Single Magazine Article “Great Expectations” (HM), National Magazine Awards

Experience magazine | “Masterworks”, ISSUE 32

client | Bookmark Content and Communications

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

contributors | Miss Cloudy, Melika Dez, Peter Guenzel, Mahmoud Sanousi Mostafa, Matjaž Tancic, Xavier Tera

awards | Cover Design (Gold), Folio Awards, New York; Best Cover (Gold), National Magazine Awards; Best Art Direction: Single Article, “Timeless Tokyo” (HM), National Magazine Awards; Best Issue, National Magazine Awards; Feature Design (HM), Folio Awards, New York

Experience magazine | “High Notes”, ISSUE 33

client | Bookmark Content and Communications

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

contributors | Jonathan Tichler, Selman Hosgör, Simone Hutsch

Experience magazine | “Golden States”, ISSUE 34

client | Bookmark Content and Communications

editor-in-chief | Elio Iannacci

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

contributors | Jamie Lafferty, John Parot, Darrin Noble

Puzzled Japan | poster

client | Design School Field Trip, Concordia University

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

synopsis | “Puzzled Japan” is a collage of printed materials, collected throughout our field trip to Japan. Postcards, subway maps, toy instructions, street posters, miscellaneous tickets, and dye-cut calendar-event cards showcase the unique quality of Japanese graphic design. Intensely colorful and playful, “Puzzled Japan” draws inspiration from multiple sources, including classical painting, typography, animation, and comics.

Water Drop | poster

client | Design School Field Trip, Concordia University

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

synopsis | “Water Drop” takes inspiration from “Matrix” by Rei Naito, an art installation at the Teshima Art Museum on Naoshima Island. Here, droplets of water of different sizes move together, to become a larger stream that can sustain life and prosperity. To me, these droplets are representative of the islands of Japan itself.

Maisonneuve Magazine retrospect [2005–2016].

awards | Best Canadian Magazine 2012 and 2016, National Magazine Awards

Maisonneuve 10th Anniversary | In the world of Canadian small-magazine publishing, ten years is a long time—and hitting your first decade is a story in itself. That’s why, for the cover of our special tenth anniversary issue, Maisonneuve decided to push not one individual feature but the whole package. Here, art director Anna Minzhulina has crafted an elegant visual celebration of our tenth birthday. Front and centre is our iconic little logo, known around the office as simply “the Maisy guy,” though he actually represents Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the complicated, imperfect founder of Montreal. Like our hometown, this magazine is an energetic, frustrating work in progress, the product of little triumphs and hard struggles. We’re glad to have made it this far. The question now is: what will we put on the cover of our twentieth anniversary issue?

See more in "Covers" and "Spreads" sections.

"Homefront" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Ian Patterson

awards | Best Magazine Covers (Honourable Mention), National Magazine Awards

cover synopsis | Veterans suffering from PTSD who have been mistreated by Veterans Affairs Canada make national headlines. But the spouses who sacrifice their lives to support them receive little attention. Angelina Chapin profiles a woman, married to a vet, who refuses to be ignored.

Photographer Ian Patterson and art director Anna Minzhulina capture the strain placed on a partnership when active duty follows a soldier home. Special thanks to models Sarah Basso and Adam Zegouras, and to Scott Slack for providing the location for the shoot. 

"Walt" | fiction story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

typeface design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Daniel Ehrenworth

story synopsis | Many people live with roommates at one time or another. Some experiences turn into anecdotes we tell throughout our lives. Monica Heisey writes about a character who discovers that her roommate has placed a dead ferret in their shared freezer.

(No ferrets were harmed during the photoshoot or typeface design!)

"Porn", "In Too Deep" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

cover photography | Kourosh Keshiri

story photography | Lisan Jutras

awards | Best in Graphic Design | Creative Quarterly, The Journal of Art & Design, NY

cover synopsis | Tantalizing or tantamount to abuse? That’s the question Lisan Jutras asked herself when, after years of second-wave-feminist-informed abstention, she became a consumer of pornography. Many in the adult-film industry argue that having sex onscreen is becoming a mainstream way to make ends meet, but the perception of porn as exploitive and misogynist remains a popular position, bolstered by years of male-centric production. The arguments of anti-porn advocates gave pause to Jutras’ pleasure, so, in “In Too Deep”, she travels to a film shoot in Las Vegas, Nevada to discover the real people behind the fake orgasms. Jutras examines the repression and expression of female sexuality, and the complexity and authority of desire.

Photographer Kourosh Keshiri and Art Director Anna Minzhulina slyly encapsulate Jutras’ up-close and triple-X-rated glimpse into the world of professional pornography.

Get Lit! | logo

client | Quebec Writers’ Federation

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

"Nunavut Nurses" | cover

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

illustration | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

cover synopsis | Nunavut has higher rates of cancer, suicide, respiratory illness and food insecurity than the rest of Canada; life expectancy is a decade shorter than the national average. In a territory where many communities are only accessible by air, nurses provide much of the frontline health-care that the local population so urgently needs. But health centres are largely staffed by southern contract workers. Ann Silversides investigates how the territory is working to overcome the challenges to providing consistent, culturally sensitive care. On our cover, art director Anna Minzhulina shows that institutional health care problems put populations at risk of falling through the cracks.

"(e)Motionless Stillness" | books of poems

client | personal project

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Anna Minzhulina

description | The heart in love sings as a little bird flaunts the wings in delight of sun beams upon its feathers; in the meantime, the head is lost. When broken, the bird within becomes emotionless, still.

"Life Sentence" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

cover illustration | Anna Minzhulina

story photography | Finn O'Hara

awards | Art Direction for a Single Issue (Silver) | Art Direction for a Single Article (Honourable Mention), National Magazine Awards

cover synopsis | We have many customs to honour a death. But as Nicholas Cameron finds, rituals fall short when it comes to helping those who have survived. Speaking with HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, Cameron investigates how people are finding strength on the shadow side of survival. 

Art director Anna Minzhulina riffs on a famous headline from the Bay Area Reporter, run after new drugs began to offer reprieve from the horrifying death rates from HIV. Written on a day that the paper didn’t print a single obituary, it read: Death takes a holiday.

"Face the Music" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Kourosh Keshiri

adapted for | "Bad Singer" | book cover

story synopsis | How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? In search of an answer, Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness.

"Bicycle" | display typeface

client | personal project

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

description | Conceptualized and sketched a couple of years ago, this typeface was entirely redrawn and redesigned early in 2016 for a typography competition. My “Mikado”-brand bicycle, which has sadly since been recycled, provided the inspiration for the typeface, which stands as an homage to its intricacy of parts, details and beauty.

"Gays for God" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Kourosh Keshiri

awards | Best Magazine Covers (Silver), National Magazine Awards

cover synopsis | Was Jesus gay? That’s the implicit question posed by our cover, which depicts the Son of God wrapped in a rainbow shroud. The image, designed by Anna Minzhulina and photographed by Kourosh Keshiri, is arresting and provocative. But that raises another key question: why should it be controversial to portray Jesus as a gay man? Christ is love, after all—and, as Clancy Martin reports in “Gays for God”, a growing movement of queer evangelicals seeks to permanently banish homophobia from the American religious right. Although many liberal churches promote gay rights, this movement is uniquely ambitious: it challenges conservative evangelism from within the faith, putting itself on a collision course with the country’s most right-wing religious leaders. As the US presidential election approaches, cultural issues like same-sex marriage have galvanized voters on both sides, but gay evangelists offer a third way: it’s possible, they say, to be both queer and Christian. After all, God made us who we are.

"Fahrenheit 451" | book proposal

client | personal project

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

awards | Best in Graphic Design | Creative Quarterly, The Journal of Art & Design, NY

description | A box of matches plays a pivotal role in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451; in this project, the book cover itself became the box of matches, which you could slide open to reveal the book itself.

"A piece of mind." | Maisonneuve subscription ad 

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Anna Minzhulina

description | This folded Maisonneuve page, transformed into an origami dove, provides a play on the infamous phrase "peace of mind." The concept unsettles the familiar phrase; the idea behind the ad was to represent the Maisonneuve brand as classy, intelligent and mature—but also possessing a sense of humour. 

"On the Trail of Ignored Beasts" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina & Sylvain Dumais

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Sylvain Dumais

awards | Art Direction for a Single Magazine Article (Honourable Mention), National Magazine Awards

cover synopsis | We can turn a cynical eye to the hunters who head into the woods searching for monsters, but as Suzannah Showler reveals in her cover story, these explorers may be looking for something more than a giant homonid. The search for Sasquatch (and the television specials and park re-brands that capitalize on it) gets at an innate human desire: when we peer into the unknown, we want to see something bigger than ourselves. 

Photographer Sylvain Dumais and art director Anna Minzhulina capture the idea that what we're looking for could always be just behind us. Like Dumais' hairy monster, the idea of Sasquatch lurks in the periphery of our consciousness. Seeing may be believing, but how can we ever know we've seen it all?  
With the help of assistants Julien Grimard and Nik Mirus, and with clothes provided by Montreal's Frank and Oak, our modern-day hunter evinces a cultural fascination that goes beyond the Bigfoot and exposes our desire to believe. 

"TV We Hate" | cover story 

client | Maisonneuve Magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Ian Patterson

awards | Best Magazine Covers (Silver), National Magazine Awards

cover synopsis | The court of public opinion cuts TV shows apart on a daily basis. Our relationship to serial entertainment is impossible to parse from the discourse it inspires. In an era when our taste in television often comes up more than our taste in music, film or novels, we inarguably love TV, but we love to hate it, too.

Photographer Ian Patterson and Art Director Anna Minzhulina put TV at the mercy of the butcher, playing off both the dissection inherent to TV criticism and the looming obsolescence of the hardware. 

"Back To The Drawing Board" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina & Sylvain Dumais

design | Anna Minzhulina

illustration | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Sylvain Dumais

story synopsis | Richard Williams spent more than twenty-five years creating what has been called the greatest film never released. Peter Henderson illustrates the story of the Canadian animation icon whose masterpiece ended his Hollywood career.

"Kings, Queens and Everything in-Between" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Andrew Querner

story synopsis | Men and women are only part of the equation. Sara Harowitz on the non-binary drag performers who are re-defining gender. 

"Reduce, Reuse, R.I.P." | article

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

illustration | Mike Ellis

awards | Best Illustration (Honourable Mention), National Magazine Awards

story synopsis | With Canada entering the Golden Age of Death, Michelle Kaeser finds that green burial options are going mainstream.

"Cheddargate" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Kourosh Keshiri

story synopsis | Canadian Dairy is one of the most formidable forces in Ottawa. Justin Ling explains how our lactose overlords got so powerful.

Maisonneuve Facebook cards | promotional quote cards

client | Maisonneuve magazine online

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

description | The series of quote cards was used for web promotion. The carefully picked and formatted quotes hinted at the wonderful stories awaiting the next subscriber.

"Knights Of The Griffintown" | fiction story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

cardboard armour | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Marc Rimmer

story synopsis | A group of friends imagines themselves as Griffintown knights armed in cardboard armour patrolling streets in Sean Michaels’ story for Maisonneuve. Michaels himself became the cardboard-armoured knight galloping playfully around the streets for this spread.

"This Little Piggy Went To Market" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Kourosh Keshiri

awards | Best Still Life Photography (Gold), National Magazine Awards

story synopsis | Cheap pork comes at a high cost, and diseases like H1N1 may just be the beginning. As more consumers demand ethically-produced meat, Marit Mitchell wonders, can boutique butchers really feed a population?

"Worth the Risk?" | cover story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Ian Patterson

cover synopsis | Women around the world have been put at risk due to a common—and non-essential—surgical procedure known as morcellation. Alison Motluk tells the story of a husband and wife, both Harvard doctors, who were forced to campaign against their own institutions to try to ban the procedure as one of them fought for their life. 

Photographer Ian Patterson and Art Director Anna Minzhulina highlight how a medical approach that was heralded for its ease and simplicity hid a deadly risk.

"The Third Solitude" | feature story

client | Maisonneuve magazine

concept | Anna Minzhulina

art direction | Anna Minzhulina

design | Anna Minzhulina

photography | Finn O'Hara

story synopsis | Joseph Rosen searches through fact and fiction to confront anti-Semitism in Quebec.

"National Magazine Awards" | 35th gala program and ticket

client | National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMA)

design | Anna Minzhulina

illustration | Leif Parsons

description | This program was commissioned by the NMA foundation to accompany the 35th annual National Magazine Awards. I came on-board with the project after Leif Parsons had created its cornerstone illustration; my challenge was to develop a concept for the program using Parsons' illustration as a guide. "XXXV" emerged as a main and consistent element throughout the design.

The 35th award ceremony also marked the second time that Maisonneuve won the top honour, "Magazine of the Year."