Todd Weinberger is the creative director of Inked, a luxury tattoo magazine that he redesigned and re-launched in 2007. Notes on Design caught up with Todd this month to find out more about his creative journey.

Notes on Design: Can you tell us a little about your career so far?

Todd: After graduating, I moved to Boulder Colorado and spent some time as a freelance designer working for different kinds of clients: bands, snowboard companies, celestial seasonings tea, etc. I moved back to Philadelphia and worked at The Bailey Group as a designer for a few years doing mainly corporate branding and packaging design. I decided to try my hand at advertising and moved on to Gyro Worldwide (now Quaker City Mercantile) and was a Senior Art Director there for about 3.5 years working on Camel, Salem, Winston, Puma, Glenfiddich, Hendricks Gin, and a bunch of other random clients. I used to get this magazine called Philadelphia Style, and would rip apart the horrible design and brag about how I would take the Creative Director job if they ever fired the CD at the time. So one day we got a press release that she was fired, and all the other art directors called me out on it, I interviewed and took the job. I redesigned the magazine and realized how much I loved magazine design. After 6 years doing Philadelphia Style and DC Style, I moved to NYC when I was offered to job to relaunch Inked magazine. The president of Nylon magazine met me in Philadelphia and brought me to NYC to utilize my fashion and advertising background to make a beautiful high-end fashion and entertainment magazine for people with tattoos. I absolutely love it.
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Zara Arshad is a British designer currently based in Beijing, China. Having also lived in the UK, Syria and Indonesia, she continually promotes internationalism as well as the potential of design to solve social, economic and political issues. Previous experience includes working with the British Council, and Don’t Panic and Icon magazines; she is also a persistent volunteer for Architecture for Humanity, which she represented at 100% Design, London. As well as practicing as a freelance, multi-disciplinary designer, Zara is now working as Greening and Environmental Support Officer for the British Embassy in Beijing. Zara is joining the Notes on Design team this month, to bring us design news from China, so we caught up with her journey to date to welcome her to the team!

Notes on Design: Where are you originally from?

Zara: Good question! My family are originally from Pakistan, but I was born and raised in London. Over the years though, I’ve also been fortunate enough to live in Jakarta, Damascus, and Beijing where I am currently living.

Notes on Design: How and why did you choose a career in Graphic Design?

Zara: This was actually an accident. I’ve always been creative; from a young age, I was constantly producing drawings. My family are fairly traditional and were not very keen for me to engage in a creative career, however, when it came to picking potential courses for university (I was schooling in Indonesia at the time), the only thing that I could think of that I really wanted to do was Design. This was set to be a basis for a career in Advertising – well, that was the plan then!
 I accepted a position on the BA (Hons) Design course at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Coming from a strong academic background, with a limited knowledge of design, the first year was quite a struggle. I had to do quite a lot of catch-up reading on things that everyone else already appeared to know from undertaking specialised design and/or foundation courses, and every project was a new learning experience.

This struggle, however, also helped me to find focus quickly. I soon realized that Advertising was not the right choice for me Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Pilloton

I’ve seen some designs come out of the poorest villages in Africa that trump anything coming out of any design firm in the US. — Emily Pilloton

Recent Colbert Report guest and Bay Area native and designer Emily Pilloton was underwhelmed with the home product decision-making that made up much of her working life when she started Project H, an organization of volunteer designers who work to connect design with communities most in need. Her work encouraging local Project H chapters to bring better products to schools, hospitals and shelters led to the book “Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower
People.”

In February she’ll kick off the Design Revolution Road Show, a traveling exhibition and lecture series that will visit 25 high schools and university design programs nationwide across the nation via an Airstream trailer that highlights 40 humanitarian design solutions highlighted in the book. You can follow the cross-country tour, which will take Pilloton and partner Matthew Miller to schools from Austin to Baltimore, on the site’s itinerary and @DesRevRoadShow. Emily Pilliton is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes On Design: What your initial motivation for starting Project H?

Emily Pilloton: I started Project H mostly out of frustration, but the kind of frustration that is laced with optimism: where you wake up one day and realize that you don’t like the way things are, but you think you know how to fix it.

I’m trained as an architect and a product designer, and grew up always taking things apart and putting things together, and came to design believing that it would be a great skill set for solving problems in a physical, creative, and critical manner.

A few years out of graduate school, when I found myself working as the store architect for a retail clothing company, where design was synonymous with choosing doorknobs and other such minutiae, I had had enough. Design had, in my own career (mostly because I had huge student loan bills), become so far removed from why I originally became a designer: to solve problems. I quit the doorknob job the next day, started writing and making up my own rules, and eventually started Project H as an avenue to apply design to the things that mattered.

The Design Revolution Roadshow Airstream

NoD: How did the idea for such a non-traditional book tour come about?

Emily Pilloton: As a natural contrarian, I tend to find the expected and the usual very boring. This was particularly true when I wrote “Design Revolution” and the time came to think about what kind of book tour I would embark on. The usual book signings and library talks seemed valuable, but not in keeping with the tone of the book, which is so much about a grassroots, bottom-up, “just do it” approach to design that really belongs at the doorsteps of designers who care, not in Barnes & Nobles. Read the rest of this entry »

BNE Was Here sticker -- Photo taken in Sukhumvit, Bangkok by Nat Wein

Thanks to Mother I recently interviewed, via email, a graffiti artist known as BNE.

Mother is big ad agency with big clients (like Coca-Cola and Stella Artois), that does interesting and creative work. They are opening a huge New York office (36,250 sq. ft.) at 11th avenue and 44th street in Hell’s Kitchen and across the street from Ogilvy. I was there last Thursday to attend a party they threw in celebration of their new office that was also promoted / co-sponsored by New York culture magazine ANIMAL. The guest of honor was BNE, but he/she/they was not present…as far as I know.

BNE has a secret identity and is prolific in the sense that the stickers and painted stencils that say “BNE” are in major cities all over the world. Enough to get print, tv, and web media coverage by major and minor outlets including a recent New York Times article. Coverage garnered, I suspect, thanks to a little help from trend / cool hunters representing agencies that tell the media what is cool and news worthy. There is no other logical explanation, because prolific tagging is not new.

BNE at Mother -- Photo courtesy of Mother, New York

The party was also billed as BNE’s first art show. The art at the opening included the big BNE initials/acronym that have provided the attention to date, and then some pieces where the BNE acronym were placed on top of brand icons like Bart Simpson and Spiderman obscuring the iconic characters as though the brand of BNE is so large, and aggressive, that it is stealing the exposure, the real estate, the consumers’ attention from the long established brands that play by the old rules of branding.
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Celeste Prevost

After a stint in Colorado where she earned recognition for a clean, often humorous body of work now detailed on her newly redesigned site Designisfine, designer/illustrator Celeste Prevost has landed her creative talents in Minneapolis. In addition to working in-house at marketing firm Zeus Jones she takes on freelance projects that inspire her creatively. Here Celeste describes her career path, shows us the mood boards she creates for inspiration, and let’s us have a look at her design space at Zeus Jones where she and husband (Rob Angermuller of www.lifterbaron.com and designer for ARTCRANK) spend their weekends being creative at their adjacent desks. Celeste is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

NoD: You sometimes make your designs available for little or no payment. What are your thoughts around arguments for creative and media work being shared for free online?

Celeste Prevost: A typeface I created and posted for free download, Hand of God, is kind of gimmicky and I made it to be used publicly. I’m not a professional typographer, but I was happy when a small Boulder company called Humanoid Wake approached me obout using it on one of their wakeboards soon. It will stay free for them.

Hand of God Typeface by Celeste Prevost.

I love to share my work and give back — sharing in our community is very important as long as it’s not abused. It’s empowering Read the rest of this entry »

Agnieszka Gasparska at her KMIP storefront HQ
(Photo: Andrea Brizzi – www.andreabrizzi.com)

Agnieszka Gasparska is the Creative Director and founder of design firm Kiss Me I’m Polish. Her clients include GOOD, Thrillist, Refinery29, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame and many others that you have heard of. She is speaking at AIGA’s MAKE / THINK conference in Memphis this October on the topic of Art Direction on the web.

I approached Agnieszka after seeing that she designed the Deitch site, a gallery of which I’m a fan. A few email exchanges and chats later and I’ve met a sincere, smart and accomplished designer with good ideas and the creativity and savvy to sell them. Out of her East Village storefront studio in New York she has built an impressive client list, but she is really just getting started as a firm so it is exciting to imagine what is still to come. Our exchanges follow:

NoD: What gig was a turning point for you as a professional designer?

Agnieszka Gasparska: Coming out of school [ at Cooper Union ] and starting out at a place like Funny Garbage (where I stayed for 5 years) taught me invaluable things about working as a designer in the real world. I could have never started my own business without that sort of professional experience. But at the same time, I feel that my career would never have taken the trajectory it has if it wasn’t for the freelance opportunities I had during that time, which were ultimately the reason I decided to strike out on my own. My collaborations with Fischerspooner for example, allowed me to experiment Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Hamada is a self-described small Japanese artist working out of Vancouver, BC. He was recently selected as one of 100 artists to collaborate with Converse and Product(RED) to celebrate Converse’s 100th year anniversary.

He currently freelances as a graphic designer, and runs the hugely popular art / design site Booooooom.com. I asked Jeff a few questions about his design work, both personal and professional. How does one guy manage a hugely populate design site yet also complete very high-profile and beautiful design projects. Maybe this answers the question —

“Even if I don’t know how to do something I’ll tell people that I’m the person to get the job done because I’m just willing to spend all night learning how to do it.” — Jeff Hamada Read the rest of this entry »

I have trouble keeping a secret.

But I delight in finding them. An author’s inside joke, a superfluous self portrait, well-designed error pages, virtual Easter eggs, are all fun secrets to uncover in design.

One of my design heroes, Ootje Oxenaar, added bonus elements in his designs for Dutch money. He says: “On the 1000 guilder note, it became a ’sport’ for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there!” His beloved rabbit, fingerprints, notes from his travels, are all hidden like secrets within the bank notes.

Detail from “error page” on mica’s website: www.mica.edu/404, design by Emily Bennett

As a student, we shared an unpublished Read the rest of this entry »

Camilla at work on one of her hand drawn patterns

Born in Sweden, Camilla Meijer is a London-based pattern designer specializing in wallpaper and textiles. Camilla’s technical training in Graphic Design has taken her on an unexpected, botanical path of pattern design. She elegantly draws upon her journeys through London’s greenery to relate stories of her past and present into her Camilla Meijer Design brand. Staying true to her mission to spread the beauty of nature to others, Camilla’s use of texture and color has gained her appearances in Design Week, Fashion Extras magazine, Home Décor & Furnishings, and the Essential Kitchen Bathroom Bedroom. In 2007, Camilla won the “New Designers One Year On Award” at New Designers Show in Islington, London. She is represented by textile agencies in New York, Paris, and Tokyo.

In this interview, Kerri Besse talks with Camilla about her creative print design process. From a stroll in the park to note-worthy design, she shows us that a career path less traveled can be surprisingly rewarding.
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Extracting detailed objects from a background can be a tricky thing in Photoshop, particularly when dealing with fuzzy edges like hair, fur, and leaves of trees. The Quick Selection tool and the Refine Edge feature introduced in Photoshop CS3 go a long way, but there are more powerful solutions…

Personally, I’ve been a fan of the Extract filter for a while. With it, you use a “highlighter” to roughly define the edge of the object you wish to extract, and Photoshop comes pretty close to what you’re looking for. The results can be a little rough or jaggy, but usable or easily fixable in many cases.

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