Triple Five Soul 2004 – 2008

For eight seasons, between 2004 and 2008, I was responsible, with Ben Velez and the team in NYC, for the content development and design of the Triple Five Soul website. Initially the site simply presented campaign imagery and lookbooks but it quickly grew to include viewer submitted imagery (Global Soul Project), a Japanese sister site and social network presence on MySpace and YouTube.

East Dev Music Packaging & Websites

Art direction and design for the first 13 releases of a music imprint I cofounded. My partners and I wanted the packaging to obviously reflect the individual artist projects but also feel like an East Dev release. The lack of realistic budgets also helped dictate the look which often ended up being illustrated.

East Dev websites

Various iterations of websites for Eastern Developments. As we released music the sites because increasingly neutral to emphasize packaging and photography.

Archinect T Shirts

The first series of Archinect shirts were a male and female archibot overprinting the archinect text, produced and sold in 2005 until 2008. A second series was run on CMYK approximated color Ts with the text overprinting the robots. See full series of drawings.

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Cody Hudson asked for drawings of delivery trucks facing right for also known as’ premier issue. I am not sure if it a magazine or a book. Either way I screwed up the brief by not drawing delivery trucks and not making them face right so thank photoshop. I like the truck Cody put mine next to.

Coca–Cola M5

Armchair Media approached GHAVA Los Angeles to create the interface in which Coca-Cola could present 5 films created in tandem with the beverage giant’s new bottle packaging. The challenge was to create a compelling encounter that would not inhibit the viewer from getting to the actual films. Playing off the evolution ideas floating around Armchair as well as the global aspect of the project, we responded by representing drifting continents with flora and making it happen with a big bang. How is that for intelligent design? The rest was just getting the viewer to the video as fast and simple as possible with a bit of interfilm animations made from the bottle graphics. Special care was also taken to make the viewer central to the creation of beauty by presenting a stark, black/creme interface and introducing color only with viewer interaction.

I designed the M5 film interface including the continental homepage and band illustrations. Stefan Kjartansson at Armchair functioned as Chief Enabler, Head Catalyst and Creative Director. North Kingdom (special shoot to Mattias) did the flash programming and animations. Of course tDR, Tennant McKay/Rex, Lobo, MK12, Caviar supplied the films and and the bottle graphics. North Kingdom rocked the bottle site. Daedelus and Nate Butler did the audio. And a bunch of other people made it happen behind the scenes.

Prefuse 73, “Surrounded By Silence”

Art direction and design for G. S. Herren’s 2005 LP and series of singles on Warp Records. Guillermo and my initial thoughts were to shoot Super 16mm scenes between distraught lovers in a car on a dead end Brooklyn street. Motion picture film would be flexible enough for print and the nascent digital platforms, YouTube and MySpace,  although logistically and financially the choice was ultimately not feasible.

I did however choose to treat the imagery, shot and art directed by Grace Villamil, as if they were film stills, by not covering them with the typography. This decision allowed more flexibility in dealing with the imagery online, beyond just presenting the standard packshot, by thinking of the entire browser as the package.

Choc. Ind. Web

Art direction, design and info architecture for Chocolate Industries website while running GH’s Los Angeles office. Effort was made to minimize putting stuff in boxes, maximize photography (B+, etc.) & album art (Big Strug, GH, Nago, et al) and maximize the lateral navigation. Hecox did the hand written menu text, Nago at Nonconceptual did the artist family illustration, we did the individual artist illustrations. Note the 8 column grid the site sits on.