This illustration was created for “Silicon Valley firms shelter assets overseas, slash U.S. tax bill” by reporter Matt Drange. It appeared in The Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

While brainstorming with my colleagues, we determined we wanted to portray tech companies and money, while avoiding the typical stock art approach of photos of Silicon Valley buildings or just piles of cash. I also wanted to keep it fairly subtle, yet vivid enough to pop as the large lead art on The Bay Citizen homepage.

I started from a circuit board vector illustration by watchara on Shutterstock, and created white logos for the companies we wanted to include from the story. I then sprinkled dollar signs among the circuits and added a white outer glow effect in Adobe Photoshop.

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