My Five-Point Plan for Doing Projects
Seven minutes of the only advice on creativity you'll ever need.
Combining elegant form with strong ideas. Creating structural clarity through diagrams. Writing jokes. As a designer I’m a bit like that Chinese encyclopedia that Borges describes — no simple delineated set of categories describes the range of my experience or quite the nature of my expertise.
For the great majority of my working life I’ve been self-employed, which has trained me to adapt quickly to the needs of any given problem without imposing ego or prejudice. I strive to cut to the heart of the project and uncover first principles to guide design decisions. I almost always send too many options in the first round.
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”
1.
Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
Original branding, signs, jokes, posters, and packaging for the area’s only crimefighting equipment source. Once-in-a-lifetime project.
N.L.H.A.
Possibly my best single design piece, for a favorite client.
Op-Art for The New York Times
Self-authored pieces commissioned by the hometown paper.
Writer’s Block
Branding, signage, and packaging for Las Vegas’s best bookstore and only artificial bird adoption agency.
2.
Work from Sam Potts Inc., independent graphic design provider, active since the early aughts. If you want to see the general scope of my work, it's here. Plus notes on hospitality.
For clients: Sesame Workshop • IFC Center • They Might Be Giants • Amy Baumann • Knopf • Redbird • Mom • Harvard University Press
BONUS: Lots of book covers
3.
A sampling of primary documentation from a range of projects I’ve collaborated on. By no means comprehensive or detailed, I show these projects rather to initiate questions and conversation. For any given project, there’s much to say about problems raised and solved (or learned from), conceptual and logistical approaches, and contributions made.
For clients: New York Times • Sesame Workshop • RISD • Sephora • TOMS
4.
JS Worldwide
A website for Jon Scieszka, beloved children’s book author and beloved client.
Infinite Jest Character Diagram
A poster connecting all the characters in the David Foster Wallace novel, personal project.
The Jericho List
Book design for the pro wrestler, listing every match in his entire career. Madness. Also very entertaining.
Terrible Two
A website for the YA series about two pranksters, to which young pranksters could submit their own pranks.
Three Books by John Hodgman
Three volumes of fake trivia by the brilliant humorist and repository of swordcane lore.
5.
By way of further biography, “Talking About the Past in the Present Tense” is a talk I gave at the SVA Products of Design program.