Iâve always been on the move. It started before I was even four years old, going from Vicenza, Italy to Vancouver, Washington. My dad, a retired Chief Warrant Officer 3, served in the Army for 20 years and we were stationed in three states. Through twelve grades I changed school nine times.
Twice I moved mid-year. The first time was during kindergarten, Vancouver to Indianapolis. There, my parents tried to enroll me but a full year of kindergarten wasnât required, so I stayed home. I cried, my mom says, but I later found it funny: joking that I only learned the first half of the alphabet, a through m.
For college I moved to Boston. Four years later I was in New York City. Three more and I was back in the Northwest. Now Iâve been here six years, the longest Iâve ever stayed in one place.
My professional career has been focused â magazines, primarily â but as unstable as my moves. Until two years ago when I became the design director of Seattle Met. In that time, I have been firmly planted, producing a local magazine every month, and settling into the city. Moving to another place is no longer a temptation â I love it here. Today my 27th issue hits the press. This closing week was the smoothest itâs ever been.
But itâs the last issue that Iâll ship.
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It was my pursuit of a writing degree that drove me to typography. It began as an attempt to add legitimacy to both my peersâ and my own work. During workshops I wondered if our short stories, in all their inkjet glory, could be fairly judged. Was any story, in fact, the same if presented as both double-spaced Times New Roman from Word and neatly justified columns of Mercury in Esquire?
The design-driven campus magazine I co-founded and the many chapbooks I made all stemmed from that thought. It drives me still: the possibility that proper typography â beautiful and original typefaces, employed with care â reveals credibility.
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When I quit my last job, web font services had emerged and I found myself consumed by browser typography. As in college, I wanted to figure out how I could make words look as true as possible. Now two years later, fonts from services like Webtype are a must-have for any legit website or app. But as has been the case since forever, when the awareness of type grows, so does the amount of work produced by those with no real know-how.
Bad typography is rampant and it drives me nuts. Recently, when I found myself digging into source code and taking screenshots of responsive designs to capture their line-heights, I realized it was time for me to move on.
This is such an exciting period of innovation, a rapturous phase for consuming everything editorial and typographic. An iOS Newsstand notification, when done well, is a thrilling little thing. I want to be more involved. Iâm going to help.
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âI never learned the second half of the alphabet.â
An entirely nonsensical notion. But Iâve always liked that from the beginning I might have been cut off and forced to get from n to z on my own. Iâve worked really hard with this alphabet of ours â sometimes I know it by heart, sometimes it looks all mixed up.
areudirty
vaporwave
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
annaxmalina
stormborns