thomas quinn

My friends call me Tommy. I'm an artist/designer living in Chicago. This is where I post some process images, some finished designs, some music, opinions, and other stuff.

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The Chicago ambigram shirt I made, shown upside down to really prove that it reads the same both ways. Nashville and Texas shirts also available, but you’ll have to tilt your head weird if you want to see those upside down.

All available at https://bitnb.store/

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Last year I designed a number of ambigrams (lettering that reads the same right side up and upside down) and decided to make some enamel pins, stickers, and shirts of the designs.

They are all available at https://bitnb.store/

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I’ve got a shirt for sale for the next 14 days at Cotton Bureau. If you like Kurt Vonnegut, or you just like the look of this shirt, maybe go buy one?! Click here!

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An anamorphic installation I recently completed at the Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky. It surrounded a “distracted driving simulator” in which you could drive a car using an Oculus Rift and a real steering wheel and pedals, which was designed to teach the importance of staying focused while driving.

The big challenge of this installation was the part of the lettering that was on the floor, which we had to execute in big sheets of high-durability vinyl.

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A poster I designed for the 826CHI “Who Wants Love” event, showcasing posters by 20 designers all inspired by the same poem by a Chicago student.

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I just launched Pocketknife—a font I’ve been designing in my spare time for a while. Click here to buy it on MyFonts.

It’s got a ton of ligatures to create a fun interlocking letter look, and a bunch of alternate characters to pick-and-choose your favorite look for the particular words you are typesetting.

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A pair of anamorphic installations I recently completed for VF Corporation (Vans parent company) in their corporate offices in Greensboro, NC. 

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My font Volterra, now available in regular and italic, is now for sale at MyFonts.com and HypeForType.com.

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After nearly a year of work, the Holly Hunt HHV3 book finally printed and is available at Holly Hunt showrooms. It's the third book I've designed of it's kind—a hard bound book that functions both as a beauty book and as a catalog for interior design clients. The aim was to make a book that highlights the newest and most noteworthy pieces with large beautiful photography, but also to provide a comprehensive overview of the Holly Hunt's product lines. This time, I did this by splitting the book in two and having a front section where you can browse through the latest and greatest products, and a back section split into product types and listed alphabetically so that you can quickly find that chair you saw in the showroom last week.

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I’m finally able to share the logo I designed for the Gatorade 50th Anniversary campaign that launched yesterday, made up of different athletes, bottles, slogans, and logos from throughout their history. It was a real pleasure to work on this project, not only because it is the most high profile project I’ve ever worked on, but also because I’m a big sports fan and have been a Gatorade drinker since forever. The logo execution might not be breaking amazing new ground in design, but I believe it accomplishes the goals of the campaign: to communicate the history and impact of Gatorade in a single simple mark. Click through the images and read the captions to find out a little bit more about the process.

The logo made it’s debut in a video posted on Christmas that can be seen on a nifty custom YouTube page.

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Logos for a restaurant that ended up being renamed and reconcepted before opening. The client wanted a logo that referenced the age of the building (late 1800s) and felt rustic, but still reflective of the fact that it is a relatively nice restaurant. I completed these nearly a year ago, but I've been waiting for the restaurant to finally open before posting these...just in case they ended up deciding to use this name after all. This is the first (and so far, only) project I've ever been paid for in full that never ended up being used.

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An close-to-final draft of a book cover I'm working on for 826CHI.

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A preview of Volterra Italic, coming sometime in 2014.

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When I was given the opportunity to design the cover (and interior) of the new 826CHI book "The Windows Reflect Anything", a collection of stories by Chicago high school students, I knew I wanted to incorporate two things: a literal reference to the title of the book, and hand-drawn typography. Originally I was hoping to combine the two by putting some piece of hand-drawn lettering in a window and staging a carefully taken photography, but time and logistics just made that too difficult. Instead, I decided to do the two things separately and combine them later.

The photo was a result of an afternoon walking around Wicker Park, to have the photo be someone relatively close to 826CHI. After taking dozens of ugly photos along Milwaukee Ave, I ended up taking the photo of the reflection of a CTA train window with myself and the 6 corners artist lofts in the reflection.

The lettering was a little more complicated. The final product wasn't too far from my initial sketches, but it was discovered after I had finished my first comps of the cover that I had been given the wrong title for the book, and I had to change my lettering from saying "The Windows Reflect Anything" to "The Windows Reflect Everything". Unfortunately, that meant I had to lose the interlocking W and A from my earlier version, which was a bit disappointing, but it allowed me to add some different type styling. As a result I had to adjust the W in Windows and draw a new lower half of the cover. I kept all of my previous lettering that wasn't affected and drew the final word within the same space as the original drawing, then combined the two drawings on the computer. Adding some coloring and laying it over the photography was the final step.

Stop by The Boring Store at 1331 N Milwaukee Ave to see the book, and lots of other not-boring things.

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On a video shoot for Holly Hunt, recording the glass casting process for side table top. Hashtag: badass.

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I recently completed this new anamorphic typography installation for the Chicago Design Museum, a pop-up museum set up in downtown Chicago through the month of June 2013. Anamorphic typography is a spatial experience in which an arrangement of letters look perfectly set from a single point within a space, while looking wildly distorted from any other perspective.

My installation was in amazing company, as this year's ChiDM exhibition featured the work of Wolfgang Weingart, Marian Bantjes, John Massey, and Michael C. Place, as well as a number of amazing local designers. It is truly worth the effort to get there if you are in the Chicagoland area.

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My Etsy store is now launched to sell the posters pictured above. The "Best Things" poster is available in both black and white for $25 and is gold foil stamped. The Helvetica Logos poster is offset printed in silver ink and is $20.

The "Best Things" poster is something I had the idea for years ago. It is an expression of the uneasy relationship I have with branding, and the fine line between communicating the values of a brand and selling a dishonest image. The logos used are:

T Mobile, H&M, Internet Explorer / Beats by Dre, Electronic Arts, Sony, Twitter / Texaco, Hasbro, IBM, Nintendo 64, Gucci, Sega / iPhone (iPod, iMac, etc.), New York Times / Louis Vuitton, Zippo, Ford, Dell / Acura, Toys R Us, ESPN, Netflix, Chili's, Starck / Toyota, Hewlett-Packard, Tropicana, NY Yankees, General Electric, Subway

The Helvetica poster is a demonstration of the lack of creativity in using helvetica in branding and the ubiquity of helvetica in general. If the variety of brands shown in the poster all use the same general identity, how could it possibly express much about any one of them?