Time Out!

Greetings, blog browsers. Well, lots has been going down. Let's see...I've recently finished shooting my first music video with my band The XYZ Affair. It was one of the most incredible--and nerve racking--experiences of my life. We're releasing it in July along at a big spooty release show/party with around 300 of our closest friends. It'll be great.

The video includes some Nickelodeon stars from years past, including Marc Summers, Michael Marona (Pete & Pete), Jason Zimbler (Clarissa Explains it All), and Danny Cooksey (Salute Your Shorts, Terminator 2). We were surprised that any of them agreed to do it, especially since we shot it in our dirt-hole of an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Not that I'm knocking Bushwick, I'm just surprised that Marc Summers voluntarily delivered himself to our desolate building--which sits across from a sizable meat distribution plant, mind you--at 8 in the morning. Truly astounding.

So It's been quiet around here, and will most likely continue to be. In case you haven't been following, I'm currently on hiatus from starting/running The Visual Field, and getting some agency experience at RDA International. You know how it is, the whole responsible, health-insuranced, full-time thing. I'll be doing the occasional Visual Field project where the interest and inspiration strikes me, but mostly I'll be working with some great clients at RDA, even spearheading some of my own brand campaigns, and having fun with my band.

Sounds like a great way to spend to the summer.

Feeling Fresh?

Lord knows we are. Today, Sunday, January 14th, we have launched the new Visual Field website. We'll be tweaking over the coming weeks; adding, subtracting, salting to taste. We just thought you should know. Whoever you are.

Onward and Upward

I've been working for over a year and a half now at a little clothing company called Neighborhoodies. I started there as a graphic design intern, which paid $30 a day. It was the only job I managed to get out of college. I worked there for the summer and, by some miracle, they asked me to stay on as a salaried graphic designer in August. I was pretty ecstatic.

They immediately put me to work branding, designing and building their original e-commerce indie music retailer, Amp Camp (which at the time was called Neighborhoodies Music). It was a little like asking the water boy to rewrite the playbook and captain the team. It was massive learning experience to say the least.

Over the next year and 8 months I would give Neighborhoodies a make-over and design two more customized e-commerce websites: first a redesign of the Neighborhoodies site itself (launched this October) and a third new venture known only as "Print Wars." Print Wars was a brilliant piece of brainstorming set to rival co-op t-shirt Goliath Threadless. It has, unfortunately, yet to be realized.

As of today, I have given my notice of leave to what has been my "place of business" for the last year and a half. I want to thank Neighborhoodies for giving me more opportunities than any other company would have dared. I hope I earned them retroactively.

I will be devoting myself to The Visual Field full time come January and will be accepting and seeking all sorts of design opportunities. I'm doing this with the view to creating a full fledged design studio, capable of creating at the highest levels of innovation and ingenuity in all visual media. As par for the course, I'll attempt this one giant step at a time.

Vote Like There's No Tomorrow...Today!

I'm very excited to report that my very own AmpCamp.com has been nominated for a Plug Award for best online Indie Music Retailer. You can vote online at this address. You'll find us under the "Media Categories: OBSESSIVE." This is good. Go vote!

Visual News

So it's tonight. I'm home from work where today I asked for (and received) the title of Art and Brand Director. This is good. I only had to spend a year reinventing the brand to get it, but to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm being driven insane by Illustrator CS2. It keeps crashing when I try to use the pathfinder tool. I. want. to. die. It has completely impaired my ability to do my freelance project right now. Did I mention the freelance project I'm working on?

Got advice today on my resume. Two points worth considering: first, I should have an opening statement saying what I want out of a prospective company. That begs the question, what do I want? To be answered later. Second, I should have a closing statement which moves the reader to an action. The most obvious of these being..."Call me!" (said melodramatically under one's breath with a phone-hand to one's ear).

I've also had suggestions about treating the sheet of paper as I should treat a design problem: by taking it apart and turning it into something completely new. perhaps inviting reader participation. I like this idea. I will think upon't.

Putting My Hands in All the Right Places

This is a blog about design. I don't want to promise that this blog will be interesting, and I don't want to promise that this blog will be revelatory (at least to anyone but myself), and I certainly don't want to promise that this blog will change the way people approach design and media. But I can promise that I'm going to have a helluva good time with it, and hopefully, some of those things will happen along the way.

The goal, I suppose, is twofold: first, to talk about the work I'm doing with The Visual Field, my freelance studio. To record my thought process with ongoing projects, clients, workload/lack thereof . It's a wild world and hopefully soon I'll be able to do it it full time. The second goal is to slowly but surely, by collecting individual thoughts and ideas, be able to codify what I think good design is, what I think good design should be, and where I think design should move to remain a positive, effective, fun, edifying, truthful, inventive, and conscientious asset to our mediated world.

Media and Image have long been the riverbeds of society, forcing the cultural stream to to wind and brake and merge. I suppose it's only appropriate that The Visual Field should focus on making design that allows for diversity, but isn't divisive. Of course, theory is always easier invented that applied.

In all honesty, I've always loved intelligence. I love intelligent design (not the philosophy, but the practice of), and working with images and words to create new meaning. It's one of the things that drove me to art school, where I wasn't learning a trade or a set of facts so much, as learning how think in new ways. The very root of intelligence if you ask me ...but why would you? Who the hell am I?