Healing U.S. Healthcare
A pair of striking illustrations for the cover story on Steven Brill's America's Bitter Pill.
In his new high-profile book America's Bitter Pill, the journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill explores the complex issues around American health care and healthcare reform, from the hard-won fight for the Affordable Care Act to the inner workings of Big Pharma, hospital pricing and the insurance industry. Pentagram's Michael Bierut and his team have created a pair of striking illustrations for the cover story on the book in this week's New York Times Book Review, using adhesive bandages to form images of the United States and the American flag.
To create the illustrations, Bierut and Pentagram designer Britt Cobb collected stock images of bandages and painstakingly placed them at various sizes to form a silhouette of the continental US (made with 272 bandages) for the cover and the Stars and Stripes (72 bandages) for an interior spread. The country's diversity of healthcare approaches is reflected in the sheer variety of bandages, from typical "Band-Aid"-style strips of different colors to unusual shapes like butterfly and spot bandages.
