I am very privileged to have worked with Miriam wearing the following hats: book designer, cover designer, and graphic designer of banners, t-shirts, magazines, and other forms of marketing collateral. And above all, I have worked with her as illustrator. (Check out our book The Wreck of the Good Ship Lollipop!) And I would and probably will hire her again, this time to design a record cover, and I wouldn't really consider hiring anybody else until Miriam becomes too popular and busy. Miriam is a double-barreled designer. Which is to say that not only does she get the visual design done with smoking aplomb, but, unlike other designers I have worked with, she has crossed the corpus callosum and united the aesthetic with the analytic, the right and left hemispheres. Consider that when doing an impeccable layout for an world-class Engineering department's alumni magazine—reading matter that is admittedly not to everybody's tastes— she read the articles, all of them, digested them, and created a layout that unified the suite of research stories but provided each with a complementary illustration (and all the researchers were delighted with their illos, which is a nearly impossible feat). I am embarrassed to admit that she even found typos in work that had been sent out for proofreading. I am embarrassed for the former proofreader. Miriam is a fixer, a problem solver, the bigger the better. I wouldn't ask her to draw a kitten, but rather an image to represent the plight of an adoptable kitten on death row in an under-funded Humane Society, while kitten mills crush their breeders to produce neurotic and genetically compromised purebreds. For example. She could represent all that in an illustration tight as a drum. In fact, if you asked her to draw a kitten, she might well do research and bring to bear the entire social context of kitten, in an illustration tight as a drum, so I recommend having a good conversation about the project first. Miriam's ideas feed on context, meaning, audience, purpose, and social issues, as much as they feed on her seemingly limitless ability to produce touching, beautiful, and whimsical illustrations and stories. There is in fact much about her to admire, envy, and love. But you don't need to know all of that, just hire her and see what happens.

William Gillespie
owner at Spineless Books
27 Jun 2021