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 »

We interviewed Flash animator Chris Georgenes at his home studio in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Chris is self-taught as an animator and his clients include Pileated Pictures, Lucas Arts, Universal Records, Plot Developers, AOL and others. He is currently working for Acclain on their web game RockFree, is a Flash instructor at Sessions College for Professional Design, and is the author of How to Cheat in Flash by Focal Press. We talked with Chris about how his career path has gone from airbrushing streetscapes to the stage at FlashForward, and how his techniques for using Flash can best be expressed as…in Chris’ words:

“The devil’s in the details, and that’s where I love to be.”

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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Christine Nguyen

You’ve not seen work like that of Christine Nguyen. Much of her current body of work involves combining original photography, items from nature, and a salt crystalizing process that makes each piece organic and delivers unexpected and otherworldy results. She is a busy artist and solo exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Hammer Museum (Project), Michael Kohn Gallery, Andrewshire Gallery, and Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Laguna Beach Art Museum, Laguna Beach; 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, PH Gallery, New York; San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Sprueth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany; and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Christine currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She received her B.F.A from California State University, Long Beach and M.F.A from University of California, Irvine.

Here, professional photographer and curator Laina Karavani interviews Christine in a series of emails, Internet chats, and phone calls.

NoD: Hi Christine. Where are you from?

Christine Nguyen: California. I grew up in Northern California and currently reside in Los Angeles.

Work by Christine Nguyen

“My work draws upon the imagery of science, but it is not limited to technologies of the present. It imagines that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space, that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro- and macroscopic.” – Christine Nguyen

NoD: Oh. Where north?

Christine Nguyen: I was born in Mountain View and then grew up in San Jose. My dad was a commercial fisherman. He fished mostly in the bay area during my childhood and then in Southern California in my late teens. I realized about 3 years ago a lot of my work is partially inspired by the ocean due to the things my dad would bring home and spending a lot time on his boat as a kid. I’ve always been fascinated in nature, the sciences, geology, the macro/ micro, and outer space. Lately, I’ve been into growing salt crystals and collecting minerals and crystals.
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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 »

Indigo Painting with a Stencil

Shallom Johnson is an urban artist, dancer, and fashion/arts writer currently based in Vancouver who has been painting under the alias Indigo since 2008. She paints beautiful, layered, and emotional pieces using meticulously cut stencils, spray paint and house paint. She’s moving fast, literally and figuratively, making her mark in the art world in just 1.5 years of professional painting. Consider that she just left a live painting event in Brooklyn, is now painting with C215 in Paris, then is off to Brittany to paint with artist Liliwenn and then more events and collaborations in Berlin, Moscow, Dresden, London, New York City again (in late November), LA, and then home to Vancouver. And despite this frenetic schedule, when you speak with her you sense the patience and quiet that is required to create the works that you can view below. I met her in Brooklyn, and we have since had an interesting email exchange over the past three days:

NoD: Where are you from?

Indigo: I’m currently based in Vancouver (have been living there for 10 years now) but I grew up in a log house in the middle of a forest in Northern BC.

NoD:You just painted at Mark Batty Publishing’s Urban Arts Festival in Brooklyn. How did that come about? How did it go for you?

Indigo: My involvement with MBP came about via facebook. I was going to be in NYC anyways, because it is so much cheaper to fly to Europe from there than it is if you go straight from Vancouver. I saw the event listing online, noticed that they hadn’t announced all the artists yet, and messaged Adri (one of the festival’s directors) to ask if they had space for me to get involved.

Indigo painting after the rain stopped (Photo by Vincent Cornelli.)

It went really well, on all fronts – but during the days leading up to it, it seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong! First the paint shipment from MTN never showed up, then they got a little bit of paint but it was the wrong kind for me to use with stencils…finally got to the venue the day before to get my background done, and the space I was given was up on a narrow ledge with no available ladder to reach the top…then someone ran over two gallons of my housepaint with his car 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 »

Timoni Grone is the senior visual designer at Scribd where she creates websites that blend responsible web practices with classic design & typographical philosophies. She also co-founded the monthly design MeetUp and work session Chromatic where Bay area designers meet to network share ideas and design challenges. It’s part of her effort to expand the reach of user-centric design and make your web experience just a little bit better. Timoni is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes on Design: How did you get your start?

Timoni Grone: I was an English major in college but talked about art and design enough that a friend encouraged me to take an art class, and I’ve been making sites and designing for friends since 1999. I’m largely self-taught—I looked at course syllabi and taught myself design fundamentals.

My second job was as a web editor for the State Department creating mockups for sites to expand dialogue with the Arabic world. I didn’t expect that I’d ever work on security and public diplomacy, and it was eye-opening.

NoD: Wow! Not your typical design gig. Where did you go from there?

Timoni Grone: I ultimately left to work at a DC branding agency in the research sphere before moving to San Francisco, where I’d wanted to be since I was using early social media tools in Nebraska while still in college.

NoD: And in San Francisco you began working at Scribd where you are now the Senior Visual Designer and have been largely responsible for their redesign effort. What other sites that you frequent are you itching to redesign?

Timoni Grone: Twitter, no doubt about it, so that people wouldn’t have to use third party applications to have a good experience. I’d improve the leading on Facebook, but on Tumblr I wouldn’t change much beyond the implementation.

NoD: Can you expand on your comment regarding third party apps and how Twitter could improve if it did not require them? Isn’t Twitter improving because of third party apps..and is that built-in flexibility not what makes it, in part, so hugely popular? Read the rest of this entry »