Magic Post-It Notes that keep you from going insane

As a production artist, I was in front of a computer for hours doing work on Illustrator and InDesign. Which wouldn't be so bad if you were doing something more than boring, mechanical production work. One of the few things that kept me from falling asleep at work was drawing on post it notes. Usually what I would do is just take whatever was lying around on my desk and deconstruct it. After seeing slick logotypes and strict grid structures on the computer all day, the best remedy for me was not only doing hand drawing, but also the deconstruction. These post-its experiments were crucial for me because they led me to starting the work on my sketchbooks. These two are my favorite in particular: cigarette boxes.

Parliament:












Marlboro:

Alphabet I - Script/Sans

I was just playing around with hand lettering an alphabet and I came up with this: A script intertwining with a really badly drawn sans serif.

HOT (prosthetic) LEGS!!

This is one of my favorite impromptu assignments. In my spring '07 experimental type class we were having a discussion at the start of class. One of my classmates mentioned reading Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, which had mislabeled as Hot Invalids. Our teacher thought that would make a great assignment and told us to come up with something for the following week. So here was what I came up with. Sorry for the crumpled quality of the scan. For some reason I left that piece of paper in my bag for so long and just pasted it recently into my sketchbook.

Making the best out of boring signage

I had the unfortunate luck of having to sit in an outlet parking lot for four hours during Black Friday. Being too far in the middle of the parking to actually do any people watching, all I had to look at were some really banal store fronts all around me. Fortunately, they do make some pretty interesting shadows. I like the "food court" and "movado" ones best.

The Art Poster

I was reading about the Art Nouveau chapter in Richard Hollis's Graphic Design: A Concise History; so I decided to have a bit of fun with all the letterforms I found in the books posters.

Oh that Massimo...

This was a response to a Massimo Vignelli lecture at FIT in November of 2006. Vignelli is a staunch modernist, who called the post modernist movement a "disease." So in response, I took apart his mission statement, which says "I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, and pragmatically understandable. I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless."

7 train fun

Here's another one I did on a train ride; this time a particularly long 7 train commute.