Ear Infection

My recent ongoing ear infection has at least provided me with some inspiration to make a poster; and swipe some hair from Milton Glaser.

Harvard Square 1977-1991


From the time I was 4 until I entered college, the sights and sounds of Harvard Square were an intoxicating influence that was never more than a 20 minute drive away.

Before the Square got overly mall-i-fied, there was always an interesting mix of street performers, pseudo punks in the pit, demonstrators and preachers.

To me, the most interesting part was looking at the vast array of magazines from around the world at the 2 competing newstands--the stacks held firmly in place by large metal weights, their yellow paint chipping. It was also an era of subversive buttons sold in subterranean "incense" shops. Independent bookstores seemed to be on every block. Nightime walks in the summer, clutching an ice cream cone from Steve's while gazing at the array of hardcover jackets behind the illuminated plate glass, as live jazz played in the background the syncopated beats of champion chess players hitting their tournament clocks.

As my friends and I got older and were allowed to go into stores by ourselves, we would spend hours searching through used record shops, or rifling through stacks of promotional 8x10s or bootleg concert videos. Hobbies pretty much made obsolete by the Internet.

But the thing that stuck with me from that era is the mix of high and low-brow, the shouts and murmurs, the convergence of voices. You never knew what sights were in store when that dusty grey escalator step emerged from the bowels of the T and delivered you into the epicenter of the Square.

Drop the Shadows


Ahh Photoshop. The most universal and mis-used of design programs. How can one program produce the most garish of hack effects but also produce the most subtle sublime work around.

I was first introduced to Photoshop via a display copy at CompUSA in Framingham circa 91 or 92. An earnest English major - I was working long hours at my school newspaper: x-acto blading line tape and ruining my clothes with melted wax as I tried to paste up newspaper columns from our bw letter size printer.

Having been an early adopter of MacPaint I was eager to learn Photosshop - which, at the time, did not even support layers. At my first internship at The Boston Phoenix making 2"x2" phone sex ads where I tried to emulate Paula Scher's typography of her Shakespeare Festival posters - to the chargrin of the harried classified ad manager, I would try to sneak little Photoshop produced backgrounds into ads.  Cracked was the grunge font of choce amongst the 20-somethings that worked there. 1 in 3 ads used it someplace that summer it seemed,

Through the years as I have grown to appreciate the precision and speed of Illustrator - my firrst geek love will always be with Photoshop, the little program that spawned a communications revolution.

Blurring the line between commercial/fine art


As a middle schooler, I loved Andy Warhol. I was captivated paging through dusty coffee-table books about him at the library. I liked that he dabbled in so many different mediums. Along with his influential cover designs, I appreciate that Kidd has had some fun with his "brand" and ventured out to try other artistic pursuits: a band, a novel, YouTube comedic promos, etc.