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Jeff:

Such a pleasure to with Angela on this puzzle. I had been thinking about vowel progressions, and noticed that RAID READ RIDE RODE RUDE worked pretty well. When RAID THE FRIDGE and RUDE AWAKENING came to mind, it seemed like we ought to give it a shot.

However, the fact that these first and last themers were both 13 letters long created a challenge, since 13's can't go in rows 3 and 13 due to black square constraints. That means all the theme answers had to get squished together. With five theme answers spaced just one row apart apiece, I wasn't sure it was going to be doable without including some ugly fill.

Luckily everything worked out out after a couple of attempts and Angela and I were off to the races! We really liked FLAME WAR and wanted to put in more sparkly long down stuff, so were pleased that NOLAN RYAN and HOLE IN ONE would fit without much compromise. And then FEED BAG and FRET OVER fell into place so nicely we held up our hands and said "I like!" in a Borat voice.

The only area we had to really work at was the center, which was constrained by the three middle theme answers. Having ICI, NDAK, and ATF all in close proximity wasn't ideal, but in the end we figured in the grand scheme of everything that was working in the puzzle, this was a good tradeoff.

Finally, I tried to sneak it in with Angela's name first but she out-sneaked me.

– puzzle by Jeff Chen and Angela Olson Halsted

My favorite puzzles to solve are those with punny themes like those by Merl Reagle. The phrase FEET OF KLEE came to me, and though it didn't make the grid, it started the wheels turning. First I identified reasonably familiar names of artists that would lend themselves to punning. Eventually I pared the list down to only painters. The phrases played on had to be solidly in the language, especially as I'd be offering puns that were not quite sound-alikes (groaners). For a while I wanted only musical phrases, but there weren't enough for a Sunday grid.

The original cluing scheme featured a reference to the artist's period or style while giving a nod to the original sense of the underlying phrase. These clues weren't consistently clever — some were good, some were strained — and they weren't unified as a set. Will reworked the clues, making them more coherent stylistically and more accessible to solvers unfamiliar with the periods/styles of the artists.

My mentor, Vic Fleming, found a discouraging number of weak entries in the first fill I came up with; I reconfigured the entries and moved blocks until I got better fill. Will tweaked the opening NW corner, which happily provided the letters needed for a pangram. This was my debut puzzle for the Times. I studied every editorial change like it was a koan. I aim to make increasingly refined puzzles that are reliably well-conceived and well-clued. Still learning.

– puzzle by Tracy Bennett