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Jumping forward for a moment, this is a promotional set of brochures for Worksight, designed and printed a FEW YEARS AGO with tiny metal tools attached. The beaded chain serves a nice function for allowing the pieces to be hung up on a wall. To me their mini JOURNALS documenting WORKS and even MANIFESTOES explaining where Worksight is coming from. And they get MAILED OUT to potential clients, COLLEAGUES and RELATIVES who probably all think I’m being silly.


This is the first brochure that I USUALLY SEND out with the plumbing part on the cover. And this is the text from that PIECE acknowledging that if I weren’t a graphic designer I would be doing PLUMBING work like my family has for generations before me....AND that the reason why lunch boxes, and wrenches, and pipes, keep reappearing in my promotions is because they CONVEY an HONEST, and RUGGED INTEGRITY of purpose. And then I try to BRING IT BACK to the POTENTIAL CLIENT that might be READING the text and say that when a company is proud of who it is and what it makes, then it can afford to be honest and direct too.


This is the center spread. The original sentence is from a novel I was reading called GEEK LOVE...“I’m just the plumbing that let’s it flow through.” I really like using it because it seems to be a GOOD WAY to take some of the conceit out of my white collar profession.





Another brochure talks about the value of AMBIGUITY and audience PARTICIPATION as giving a design SOME LIFE AND ENERGY. When you straighten everything out and make it all TOO clear you sometimes wind-up KILLING a design communication. The center spread uses a quote culled from a conversation between a client of mine named DAN, and his boss JACK. Dan was defending the cover of a brochure I had designed by explaining that it DID ITS JOB even though SOME elements of the design weren’t IMMEDIATELY understood. His quote was “Jack, how much do you have to GET to GET it?” To the ears of a designer, this is MARKETING poetry. Dan was later FIRED...just kidding.


Another piece that describes words, numbers and images as the RAW MATERIAL that a designer would assemble into a coherent whole by adding SOUND to the words, FORM to the figures, and especially a POINT-OF-VIEW to the images. The inside spread SUBVERTS a classic phrase by INVERTING IT into “a word is worth a thousand pictures, and then NEGATES THE INVERTED PHRASE by using a pointing-hand icon to notate the turning of the page.

And other pages include projects like a book interior and cover titled “The art of light and space.” Through the project I became really intrigued in these artists. They did most of their work in the 1970s and 80s and dealt with the subject of phenomenology, or the study HUMAN EXPERIENCE. There’s a book about one of the artists— ROBERT IRWIN called “Seeing is Forgetting” which is especially good. He wrote that he wanted “to allow people to perceive their perceptions, or MAKE THEM AWARE of their PERCEPTIONS... to make people conscious of their consciousness. I think he said he was more interested in the experience of someone SEEING the Mona Lisa for the first time than the Mona Lisa itself. I just wanted to throw that out there to explain what I also get excited about. The promotions get INDIVIDUALLY mailed out and people think they’re getting INTERACTIVE cd’s when they receive them, but no, SURPRISE, their just GOOD OLD printed things.

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