There are design introductions worth reading, this will not be one of them: No clever language or buzzwords. A slick html-site will also be notably absent.

I have been hustling the graphic arts for awhile now, and will leave a trail of stops I've made, things I've done, and made, and opinions I've formed about the graphic arts throughout this site.

In college, I drew Univers type at about 13 points for my Intro to Typography class at San Jose State University in California. That was hard, especially since I tend to produce a lot of typso. I also used Letraset® press-on type, which was also tedious, but satisfying to see dark type on a page. That same year, my cohort of art students transitioned to typesetting via Photoshop. Gross. This corresponded with the emergence of the Grunge movement in typography. My International Style-oriented, instructors frowned at the reckless application of type, but to me— it was dynamic, new, and fresh.

The instructors were predictably right. The principles that International Style espouses are rock-solid and hard to fuck up: Clarity, organization, application of a grid, and legibility are always keen adjectives to a well-designed page, screen, product.

But the late 80s (beginning with work being produced in Califonia) and stretching to the 90s was just so wildly different. It allowed for a more expressive quality to emerge from the Swiss-style. Paraphrasing David Carson— Just because it’s clear, doesn’t mean it communicates.

I think there’s merit to a wide array of solutions and styles, and the solutions should be content-driven. The grunge aesthetic, while not always appropriate, brought with it a rich, dense, painterly-composition to page-layouts that when applied-well, is just really beautiful.

These days, grunge just communicates ‘90s’ and is hard to read. Conundrum.

Anyway, this site represents the areas of design I've spent time with: Print, publication, advertising, and other allied-areas of visual practice. Some are the final design as they went out into the world, some are alternate iterations, others are personal endeavours. They're all part of my practice and process.