A.Minzhulina

Maclean’s magazine | “Power List 2024” issue, contents page

client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC)

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

photo source | various

maclean’s.ca | landing page

editorial package | AI: The Future Is Now

client | St. Joseph Communications (SJC)

art direction & design | Anna Minzhulina

AI generated illustrations | Anna Minzhulina

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."