What I Do (#1 of 3)

People are always asking me how I ended up doing what I do. They also want to know if what I do has a “name”. My intention was never to set out to be a “lettering artist”, but somehow I always gravitated towards solving communication problems with letterforms. I guess in some ways I’m a designer who works like an illustrator. I have done work of all kinds in all sizes—from billboards to postage stamps, from logo design to labels, from CD covers to signage—and then of course there’s font design.

I don’t feel it’s ever a good idea to try to fit one’s work into categories or niches: what I do overlaps several categories: illustration, graphic design, lettering, typography and font design. What I usually tell people is that I’m a “letterforms” artist—a definition vague enough not to be too confining, but at the same time giving a little more emphasis to the “lettering” part. How I ended up “inventing” this genre (I hope that doesn’t sound too immodest) is a whole other matter. I don’t want to give myself more credit than I actually deserve by focusing on this, but people are always asking how I got here . . . so, if you’re interested, stay tuned for my next post for more of the backstory.

Fame Has It’s Drawbacks…(sigh)

Something I hear quite frequently runs something like this:

“You’d have been perfect for our project, and I’d have hired you in a minute, but you know, we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford you.”

Well, many of the instances that clients believed this to be the case would actually have worked out just fine. If I had to depend only on the big-budget projects for my livelihood I’d probably go broke. The truth is I work for all kinds of clients, big, small and in-between. Many times the most interesting projects are the ones that don’t have the huge budgets. There sometimes seems to be a direct inverse correlation between budget size and creative freedom. Often we can find a way to work something out.

Just as an example, a recent project of mine was to do logos for a pair of Los Angeles restaurants—one in Beverly Hills, the other in the Los Feliz/Silverlake area—Dominick’s and Little Dom’s, two recent additions by restauranteur Warner Ebbink.

The budget wasn’t gargantuan, but we were also able to work out a situation where I was able to take advantage of his hospitality in exchange for my design expertise—it was win-win all around.

Label Treatment: “Eschatone Records”

An interesting job I did recently was for a new client in Brooklyn. I designed a record label for the independent record company “Eschatone Records” who’ve started producing old-style vinyl records. This was the type of project that I never thought I’d get to see—but the surprising new found popularity of vinyl has given this genre a new lease on life. One of the owners of the company, Jed Davis, is a big fan of record labels from vinyl’s heyday, so I had a lot of fun giving this job some of the style I remembered from the 45 RPM labels I collected as a kid. A local art space Zakka Corp. in Brooklyn is hosting an exhibition of Eschatone’s album art beginning May 23, 2008.