Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to Kelli for being today’s interviewee.
Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
I hail from New Orleans but returned to Brooklyn, the birthplace of my maternal grandparents, for grad school 9 years ago. Strangers can no longer get away with cutting me in line (or equivalent breaches of the social contract) so I *officially* call myself a New Yorker.
I do work as a tinkerer and designer and artist and illustrator and printmaker—guided by my interests and the demands of whatever interesting projects float my way. (My sincere hope is that I’ve been doing each of those things long enough to dodge dilettantism.) My favorite projects are the ones that succeed in finding a loophole in things that at first seem limiting, creating an unexpected portal of “disruptive wonder” in the everyday-boring. I’ve worked on a fake New York Times and a paper record player, which is how a lot of people know about my work. I left my job at the Natural History Museum earlier this year (I volunteer-work now) and have just last week survived my first TEDx talk.
What are you working on?
A website for an awesome artist friend named Steve Lambert, a (for now) secret project involving attribution in online journalism, a book cover, the design for the library at Amer. Mus. of Natural History’s new image archive, merchandise-galore for the film Girl Walk//All Day, an iPhone app’s design, holiday stuff for Airbnb, an infographic thingy, some holiday letterpressed gift cards for 20x200, branding for the “#OWS Bookmobile”, and a physical cut-and-paste art project with someone I’ve long admired.
Oh… and a floaty pen design. (incidentally, it does not feature a naked lady.)
Choose a favorite shot of yours. Why is it a favorite?
My favorite is always the latest thing I’ve posted, really—I must have a limited memory. In recent history, I’m super-excited about this:
I designed this insanely fast (within a period of about 12 hours) for n+1 / Verso Book’s new collection of essays on Occupy Wall street featuring a diverse group of writers, including Angela Davis and Slavoj Žižek:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1122-occupy
It is my favorite because:
- They are printing it with spot-gloss on the lettering on the cover (!).
- I can’t wait to read the essays this book.
- 3-dimensional type makes me stupidly, irrationally happy- it defies reasonable explanation.
Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)? (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch, etc.)
Nothing but a 13” macbook pro while traveling with limited fonts (yikes!) But normally I work from home with an iMac, wacom, letterpress, scanner, piles of art supplies, two cats, etc. I like the have the best, most efficient tool within arm’s reach for any project. Along with actually making the work, that is my other life-goal.
Letterpress photo from Design*Sponge.
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
Can I have two, please?
ed.: Why yes. Yes you can.
I really like this whole series of type-as-physical machines by Jeff Hamada:
He has the belt type, the lightbulb-blinky type, and the piles-on-my-desk type and they are all wondrous (and should totally exist in real-world-life).
This type-illustration by John Passafiume obeys the laws of physics but also has a flat, graphical power that just floors me:
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