Hi There!
There is a lot of work that I am including in my portfolio. Much of it is stuff that takes some time to appreciate: it is contemplative, or lengthy. Time is always a limited resource, and I would rather have a small selection of my work be given more of it, then a lot of my work be given little.
For this reason, I just want to start off by highlighting a couple things that I think are most representative of the artist I am at this moment in time. If time constraints mean that some work has to be prioritized, this is the work I'd prefer.
Challenging Contemporary Art Music
I'm Harry Potter (and other maximalist pieces)
10 Must-Have Fonts Perfect for Any Design Student at KABK
The Incomplete Works of Dr. Earl
Realizations of Incomprehensible Music
Why is Everyone so Suicidal on Social Media?
A man named Scott Yarbrough talks to a man with a name tag reading “Scott” at a Jamba Juice
Thoughts on Elitist Language Within Progressive Communities
Aesthetic Responses to Repetition in Unfamiliar Music
Are men allowed to wear skirts?
Canon in F# Major for Yodel Instructors
In his 1969 Essay The Activity: A New Form of Art, Michael Kirby proposes a new art classification which he dubs the "Activity." Activities are a set of directions for the audience to follow, and the art exists in the performance of the directions.
I like this idea of Activity. Activities radically resist commodification, and redirect attention to the audience and away from the artist, both of which are important counterpoints to our expensive art world that celebrates individual artistic genius.
Activities Index is a collection of work that I think adheres to this idea of Activity. Michael Kirby was responding mainly to the Fluxus movement of the 60s, but this collection goes back as far as 1922 and includes work as recant as 2018. It includes work by composers, religious philosophers, painters, and friends of mine. Hopefully it encourages you to rethink art, and maybe even perform some Activities yourself!
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The Cowboy Collective is a space to celebrate and create cowboy themed art and media. The work can be fun, thoughtful, ironic, sentimental, irreverent, academic, sometimes all these things at once. The site includes essays about why Marry Poppins is a cowboy, or examining the changing image and memory of the cowboy. It includes an unaired television pilot, a caterpillar themed video game, a crude AI that generate cowboy literature, and the surreal, nightmarish podcast Cow Children. The site encourages you to make by providing resources like fonts, wanted poster templates, a pre-photoshopped cowboy hat pack, and most importantly, a $1000 (yes real money) reward for making a minute-long music video.
The collective is colorful, eclectic, weird, and engaging, and you would be forgiven for missing the underlying political aims of the site. But the Cowboy Collective has a goal: saving American masculinity.
I'm an American boy, and growing up in a country where almost two mass-shootings occur a day (even during a pandemic) is scary and alienating. I never felt connected to my country's culture, especially what it has to say about being a man, and while living there I started to detest my own identity. I wished to amputate the American man in me and throw it away.
When I moved to the Netherlands for school I had time and space to think about my upbringing. I did a lot of writing and reflecting, and I realized that my own sense of shame about the person I am is one of the lessons I learned from being an American boy. We teach our boys to feel ashamed of who they are, and this shame is part of a cultural fabric that can lead to the violence. I realized I needed to love myself and my identity, and I realized I wanted to create a space for others to do the same.
I started the Cowboy Collective with the hope of celebrating and loving American masculinity, and the many forms it takes. The projects are goofy and fun, but collectively they are working to promote something new, something I hope is radical.
I am by far the biggest contributor to the site, but it wouldn't be serving my mission if there weren't a diversity of contributes. I am working slowing to try and build this community. It's small, but the culture is important to me, and by growing it slowly we can be more careful about making sure we building something to be proud of.
View Site→
Back in the aughts, the internet was a much different place then it is today. It was before social media companies like Facebook and Twitter started terraforming the web into a set of clean, manufactured, and centralized sites, that all share a kind of professional blandness, lacking in personality or identity. It was a time when the web felt more colorful and chaotic, more arts-and-crafts, more like the wild-west.
Dancing About Architecture is a website my dad made during this bygone era of the internet. It was ahead of its time, and is one of the most inspirational multimedia works of digital art. He tells the story of his life through his collection of music, and each page acts as one-part music review, one-part him telling personal anecdotes. It's non-linear, and doesn't demand you read it to completion, but the more you read the more a picture of a complete person emerges. The experience is similar to getting to know someone through casual conversations over time. I didn't myself realize that there was something deeper going on until I was around two-thirds the way through, when it hit me: this was an autobiography in disguise.
He is unashamed and fearless in his telling of his life. He talks about trauma, the time he broke into his teachers house to steal porno magazines, getting into fights with his parents, and the profound power of music.
It is a beautiful work of art, but like much of the web from that time, it went offline many years ago. I think this project deserves to be online, so I have taken it upon myself to recreate and restore it, using captures from the Internet Archive, and a draft version my dad still had a copy of.
I wanted to capture the experience someone would have had stumbling upon this site fifteen years ago, so it wasn't enough just to put it back online. I've taken the trouble of writing CSS to mimic the style of drop-down menus sites have used, and forced the site to use Times New Roman, etc. I have also painfully recreated graphics with twice the resolution and tracked down higher-resolution copies of all the album art used, so the site looks crisp on modern monitors.
View Site→
There are rules to how we interact with each other everyday. Consciously or not, they dictate almost every aspect of engagement with fellow people. Sometimes these rules benefit ourselves and the people we’re engaging with. Sometimes they are to our detriment. Regardless, the rules of social interactions are something we should be aware of, and something that we should remember are malleable.
This game, inspired by the fluxus movement, reminds us to be a little more conscious and playful with the rules of social interaction.
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I've had an interest in making fonts for a decade now; it's my second-longest running passion (first being music composition). I'm self taught, but over the course of the past decade I've manage to become good enough, and market myself well enough, that I've turned making fonts into my main source of income.
When I first decided I wanted to try and sell my fonts, I turned to established marketplaces like MyFonts, but I quickly realized how uncomfortable I was with doing business there. Most places take 50% of the money made on sales, and they have restrictive rules about where and how else your fonts can be sold. I wanted to do a pay-what-you-want model, which is also not possible on these marketplaces.
I realized that if I wanted to do things my way, I'd have to do them myself. And so, in January of 2016, I started my font foundry, indestructible type*. I tested out different business models, and found that making my fonts open-source and free, while reducing the amount of money I was making per download, helped to spread my reach, and was ultimately more profitable. It also fits in with my politics, as I want the tools of creation to be free and accessible to all.
Since then my fonts have been used by the likes of Condé Nast, the Latvian Youth Council, the airline KLM, and many others. I've done work for the state of Florids's official tourism corporation, Mozilla Firefox, and Google. Most importantly to me, I've helped hundreds of thousands of small creators, like myself, afford high quality fonts and enrich their design. Indie video game developers, soap makers, book writers, YouTube video essayists, there's a feeling of pride I get from knowing and seeing a little part of myself is out in the world, invisible to most but working to make it look better.
I've included a Typography section in my portfolio, where I'm listing fonts I've designed, but I'm including my indestructible type* website here because it's a project in-and-of itself.
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The experience of being in lock-down during the pandemic has been full of sorrow, but also incredible boredom. The lack of human interaction and regular schedule has lead me to start drifting off into this half dreaming place that at times felt crazy.
Lilac is a piece that comes from this state of mind. It is the lighthearted hallucinations of an isolated person, transformed into a mini concert that can be experienced anywhere with an internet connection. View Site→
I became really fascinated with the fact that people were uploading pictures of themselves performing sex acts to Wikipedia. It raises some interesting questions about porn and consent and digital spaces. I wanted to explore these questions in a way that facilitates thinking, as I liked the process of questioning more then I did the actual conclusions I arrived at. I decided creating something that resembles the atmosphere of a museum would be the best way of presenting these questions, and I liked the idea of elevating what are essentially Wikipedia dick-pics into a fine-art context. Thus, Meditations on Pornography was born.
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The idea of a message in a bottle is so simple, poetic, and sad. To receive one reminds us that there's a whole world of strangers out there with lives as rich and complex as our own, and gives us for a fleeting moment a connection to one of them. The one-way nature is similar to looking at old photographs. Sending a message in a bottle gives us the opportunity to put some part of our spirit into the world and touch someone disconnected from who we are. The fact that it's a private space makes it safe to be honest about things we wouldn't be publicly. It's tantalizing. I would consider this work a digital poem, but I couldn't tell you why.
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Red Ribbon is one of my most formative experiences. It is a ballet that I wrote, directed, and produced while in High School. I decided to take this project on because of its tremendous scope. What I like about ballet is that music serves a very integral and present part of the medium, while still including many other elements. The story is a personal and universal one, of relationships and loss, and I sought out interesting things to do with the medium. I wanted to have a dance that was silent, which I hoped would be strange and eerie, and I wanted to include readings of poetry related to the story during the transitions. Not only was this an opportunity to do something big, but it was an opportunity to collaborate with others, and make art that was bigger than myself.
This was the first project I’ve ever taken on with this kind of multi-year timeline, and multi-person scale. The end result is something one would expect of a ballet put on by a group of highschoolers. Which is not to say that it is bad, but is to say that it doesn’t even come close to the perfect vision I had. The absolute best thing that came out of Red Ribbon for me was being in charge of a project of this scope. I honestly believe that the only way someone can get any good at this kind of large scale project is through experience and making mistakes. Red Ribbon isn’t something I expect to show off as my best work, but it will always occupy a special place in my heart for being the first.
Watch on YouTube→
Social media sucks. It's full of advertisements and propaganda and it's constantly observing everything you do in order to create a detailed profile of the kind of person you are so it can better exploit you for profit. It's bad for your mental health, it's bad for society. It sucks.
But it does serve an important need: connection. I've noticed my family and the people I love going around social media and creating a kind of hobbled together system of group texts, group emails, and word of mouth to avoid the toxic environments. I wanted to slightly formalize this and make the process a little easier by creating my own social media platform, one that's free of spying and advertising and can change with the needs of the community.
The name Tin Can Phone Club was suggested by my grandmother (who uses the site!) because it's amateur and local. Just like a system of cans and strings the site can go offline randomly, but when it works it's a great alternative to Facebook and the likes. It's full of fun details, like when you get a new notification it sounds like a can being struck with a stick
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This is a four-part podcast/radio-show chronicling my discovery of a forgotten art movement called Tricksim. It starts with my discovery of a 1950s record titled Ten Explorations in Trickism by a composer named Lynda Alden. As the name of the record implies, it's a series of pieces that follow the principles of this proposed art movement. Trickism works by creating an unconscious expectation in the audience, and then subverting the expectation in a manor that forces the audience to experience a moment of self-questioning.
The podcast is a mix of conversations with my friends at art school about this record, as well as my work researching the topic of Trickism, something that proves surprisingly difficult.
The section below has plot details that might ruin the listening experience so I blacked it out, but if you click it it will become visible.
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I wanted this podcast to not just be about telling a story but also about creating an environment for the listener. I like the feeling of old mystery dramas and radio shows, and I wanted to capture it in this newer medium. I scored original music inspired by the likes of Leonard Bernstein through out the podcast, which contributes to the darker tone.
It's quite lengthy, but I would really recommend if you have the time listening to the first episode. There's a charm to it that can only be understood through experince.
Listen to First Episode→
I studied music composition at Cornish College of the Arts for two years, and before that I spent time in other music institutions like the Colburn Music Academy and the Lamont School of Music's precollege summer program.
Because of the nature of institutionalized music education, certain aspects of music get emphasized over others. These places often have a strong focus on sheet music and ensemble performance, vertical harmony and advanced theoretical concepts like set theory. Aspects of music such as emotional resonance or listenability aren't objective or measurable and are difficult to meaningfully integrate into a institutionalized framework, and they get emphasized less.
There is a certain recognizable aesthetic that emerges from this. Music tends to be more conceptual and aesthetically challenging. This is reflected in my own work that came from these spaces. Music I wrote to tickle the ears of my peers who were also studying music.
I think this music can be hard for people outside of academic spaces to listen to, and I think having a view of music that only recognizes the validity of academic music is harmful, but I don't think academic music is bad. It's contributed a lot to our musical culture, and my personal understanding of my musical process. Many of these pieces are fun and playful, like my Woodworks, or Simple Sabotage Field Manual, both of which were written to accompany bizarre instruction manuals (the score for Simple Sabotage Field Manual is also very much worth checking out).
Challenging Contemporary Art Music is my collection of music from and for academia.
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I had a choir director once say that the human voice is the only instrument that God ever created. I do think in many ways other instruments strive to replicate the human voice. Do With You? is EP featuring a collection of experimental music for human voice.
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Under capitalism there's this desire to make things that are going to have wide appeal, and often successful media from that past is drawn upon to try and ensure this. The people making the new media often don't understand why the previous thing they're drawing upon is popular, they just throw together a collection of popular images and characters and hope for the best. What's created is this bewildering collection of empty signifies and plot point. A series of representations without meaning or cohesion.
The experience of consuming this media can be dream-like. It appears as though the media has meaning, but the harder you try and grasp it the more it slips from you hands. (What do the animals in Zootopia represent? Is it a metaphor for racism, sexism?) The more you think about it the more confusing it becomes. It tries to be everything and ends up being nothing.
I like this dream-like aesthetic, and the music in I'm Harry Potter (and other maximalist pieces) reflects on this experience. They are overloaded with ideas and images that don't really add up to any specific meaning.
I'm Harry Potter features Harry going into the "enchanted forest," something which does not exist in the Harry Potter books. After its release the track immediately got a shout out from the Wizrocklopedia because the simple mention of Harry Potter was enough to constitute "Wiz Rock."
Fairy Tail also features an enchanted forest. Go figure.
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Making the Memories Happen is the collection of theme songs written for the Shadowcliff Staff that I had the pleasure of working with during the 2018 season. All songs were written and recorded at Shadowcliff, a retreat in the Colorado mountains. These people are all very near and dear to me, and this collections of songs is like a photo album of sorts.
Of course, the true and proper version of Making the Memories Happen exists only in a piano bench, waiting to be discovered.
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Ones We Love is my most recent musical project, coming out this last December. It is a true collaboration between myself and my partner Chloe Leczel. We made it as a Christmas gift for our friends and family. It is highly sentimental, featuring a mix of cover songs, and original music. Madeleine is written for and about Chloe's friend, and Cat Songs are a group of two duets I first learned from my grandparents (the third one Chloe and I wrote to match). It was made under a short time budget because we wanted it to be finished by Christmas, so it's less polished than some of my work.
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There's a saying at the Cowboy Collective which goes "anyone can be a cowboy!" One of our main missions is to facilitate and promote the creation of cowboy-themed art and media, and a great tool to do so is that of the remix. It's easier to make when you aren't starting from scratch. To better enable remixing, and foster a community-oriented approach to creation, all the art and media that exists within the collective must be licensed under the creative commons.
Cowboys are famous for "wanted" posters and cash bounties. Tapping into this cowboy spirit, the Cowboy Collective offers $1000 bounties for the creation of a music video. This gives aspiring film-makers more resources to make their visions a reality, and reminds us that artists deserve to get paid for their work, even if it's public domain.
Of course you can't make a music video without a song to go along with it, so I went ahead and wrote a collection of ten cowboy songs and released them as an album, Songs of the Cowboy (Vol. 01). Each song is exactly a minute long so the finished music video can go on social media platforms like TikTok or Twitter. There already exists completed music videos for all but one of this first round of ten cowboy songs, and as the "Vol. 01" in the title implies, I hope to do additional albums of ten songs with corresponding $1000 bounties.
I have, in fact, already started on the next group of songs, which you can listen to if you ask nicely. I've also made sheet music for the first round of cowboy songs.
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Voyage is an homage to the early greats of the electronic music genre, like Mort Garson, Larry Fast, or Wendy Carlos. Made using computer plugins and not analogue synths. Cheating, I'm sure.
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This album is very sincere in a way that I think departs from what's commonplace. The album is also incredibly sad. It is lonely, wistful, mournful. It was written during quarantine, while I was alone, and the feelings and experiences of that period in time are reflected in the album.
There's a kind of unmediated nature to the album. I am not really playing a character, I'm just singing as myself. The songs are not fantastical. Listening to the album feels a bit like you are sitting in my living room listening to me perform live for you. It was recorded in my living room, and I included background sounds from out the window to ground it in this context. I think this fits and aids thematically.
The song Laundry Day is about being alone in my apartment and feeling alienated and lonely which are all feelings set to the backdrop of me doing laundry.
The song First Day of School is about the moment right before I attend my first day of kindergarten. It is a moment where everything in your life changes permanently. My dad says this thing about how in life sometimes you walk through doors into new rooms and the door behind you closes and locks, and you can never go back. Starting kindergarten is perhaps the first time in many of our lives that that happens, but it's hardly the last.
Obviously these are all feelings and experiences associated with the pandemic, a changing world, and changing life, isolation. But, and I think this is to the album's benefit, the pandemic is never talked about directly. The pandemic is big and intangible, and art that attempts to address it directly often falls flat. I think this is because we don't experience it directly. It's so ubiquitous that it becomes the water we are swimming in, and the actual experience of the pandemic is reflecting back on our life (like our first day of school) and feeling lonely while doing laundry.
The sadness of the album is intentional. It is very sad and does not shy away from being sad, but it also expresses an uncomplicated kind of sadness. It is sad without being angry, without feelings of self-loathing, without doubt or fear. Just simple sadness. When I think of the media landscape I feel creators are often fearful of, or don't know how to, engage with feelings of sadness directly. They are often wrapped up in irony or anger, or they are intellectualized and problem solved. Those are all really good things to have, but if we don't also have sadness in a pure and uncomplicated form it gets unhealthy. We need to just feel simple sadness sometimes in order to process and give reverence to the sad things in life. Lord knows we have all been through some sad times, and I think having art that gives space for that in the media landscape could be needed.
There's also an optimism to it. It's called we're ok and I think that message is also at the album's core. As a culture we often look at sadness as a sign of brokenness, or an indication that things aren't right. I don't think this has to be the case. I think feeling sad when sad things happen is healthy. It's only a culture that doesn't permit this that's unhealthy. The album in it's own way becomes a celebration of sadness. It finds great beauty in sad things, and it's able to come to the optimistic conclusion that we're okay. We're okay, not despite our sadness, but because of it.
I think the album has strong craftsmanship. What I mean by this is that it features good technical song-writing. It can be musically complex at times, without veering into this territory of feeling jarring or difficult to listen to (with the exception of Endings that does that for artistic effect). The form and structure of the songs complement their lyrics which complement the music which complement the themes.
I want to highlight the song First Day of School because I think it serves as an example of this. As I mentioned, it's a song about this moment in life where everything changes in a permanent way. This idea is supported through the story being told in the lyrics, but also the poetic form of the lyrics. The first verse has an ABCB form with the ending words being "photograph," "control," "small," and "school." (I rhyme "control" with "school" which is not a perfect rhyme, but it's a necessary compromise.)
The second verse begins exactly the same way as the first, even ending with the same rhymes. It goes "path," "cool," and "all." Which mirrors "photograph," "control," and "small" respectively. However, instead of ending the same way as before it completely breaks form and has two more lines that rhyme with each other. So we get ABCB, ABCDD. This change in lyrical form mirrors the change in life happening in the story.
I am posing for a photograph,
standing still takes self-control,
my bag is big and I am feeling rather small,
it's my first day of school
I am walking on a shaded path,
the sun is warm and breeze feels cool,
the world is big so much I have not learned at all,
years have passed and in that time I've grown,
I think I'd rather have stayed home
It is also at that exact moment in the song (when I say I'd rather have stayed home) that the key changes, meaning musically we are also departing the old space and moving into a new space, like in the story. The song does something unusual formally: normally with songs we have a structure that returns to the material we hear in the beginning (like verse chorus bridge verse chorus chorus). I end with the same material I started with in all the other songs on the album, but, with First Day of School I never return to the musical ideas I start with. At the same moment the key changes and the lyrical form changes the song enters a B section with instrumental music, but it never goes back to the material from the beginning.
I don't think this gets in the way of the immediacy or accessibility of the song. When you listen to it for the first time it does not sound contrived, or like all of this thought is going into it. It sounds simple and sad.
If you listen closely to the album you will notice this kind of technical consideration is happening with all the songs. Hopefully this rewards repeated and thoughtful listening.
In general the album is not flashy or catchy; it's slow and contemplative. I imagine it's best understood and appreciated in a slow and contemplative way, and I hope you will give it some time.
It's by no means flawless. I haven't attempted a project quite like this before, and there's much I would change about it in retrospect, but it's imperfections fit with the tone of accepting things as they are now, even when they're less then ideal.
This is the kind of art-making I feel is most important to me.
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A lot of my intention with indestructible type* is to make neutral and robust font families that don't draw attention to themselves, but do fulfill a typographic need. I want to take a classification of font, such as "geometric sans serif", or "monospaced", and make a family that hits those notes, is functional, and doesn't do anything too weird or idiosyncratic.
Besley* is my attempt at an antique slab serif. It's named after Robert Besley, who designed the classification-defining Clarendon, but it differs from the designs of Clarendon in some key ways.
First, I wanted it to be useful for body text, not just headlines, so the "book" weight of Besley* is lighter and has more typical spacing. Clarendon also doesn't have any italics, so I designed Besley* with the knowledge that I was making a matching italic. I also made the somewhat unusual decision to not have any hard edges. I felt it was hard to tell with Clarendon, something that was made using mechanical processes, when a corner was supposed to be rounded and when it was rounded due to technical limitations, so I circumvented the issue entirely by making everything slightly rounded. This gives the font a kind of warmth.
Besley* is the main font used by the Cowboy Collective.
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With Bodoni* I bit off more than I was sure I'd be able to chew. It’s a modern serif font inspired by Giambattista Bodoni, but it wasn't enough for me just to make six weights, matching italics, small-caps, and a variable font. I decided it needed eight different versions, each optimized to work at different sizes. The finished result is a whopping 96 font files with over 500 glyphs each (over 54 thousand individual glyphs total).
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Copperplate CC is the first of a series of revival fonts I made for the Cowboy Collective. These were a little more fun and easier then my other work at indestructible type*, so they're named with a "CC" instead of the asterisk at the end.
Copperplate Gothic is an American classic. For this project I went back to the source materials. Unfortunately, the original drawings were lost in a 1939 fire, but the American Type Founder catalogs from that era provide some insight into the Goudy's design. I wanted to stay true to the source material, so this digitization differs from other versions. Unlike some, there are no small caps by default, as this was not originally present. The serifs are also smaller then most reproductions, and I have elected to keep the somewhat bizarre naming convention that calls the non bold version "heavy".
In some ways this Copperplate is not the one we are all familiar with, but perhaps it is more true to the 1900s spirit.
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Monospaced fonts are often used during the production stage of projects. They are used by programmers while coding, and film crews while filming. They resemble the rhythm of typewriters, which are monospaced due to technical limitations, and permeate our predigital visual landscape.
Drafting* Mono aims to capture this "still-in-the-works" spirit, with something neutral and timeless that is also personal and anachronistic. A seemingly self-contradictory desire, it takes heavy inspiration from typewriters, aiming to capture the spirit and logic of typewritten alphabets, rather then mimic the appearance literally.
Drafting* Mono is my most recent font project. It has nine weights, matching italics, small-caps, and variable font versions. It's my first robust font to not be based (and named) after a font-maker of the past. My entire portfolio (the thing you're reading now) is set in Drafting* Mono.
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This is a digital font based off of the Engravers typeface offered by the American Type Founders. These letters first appeared in Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry which was later bought by ATF, where they were refined by prolific designer Morris Fuller Benton. This was a very popular typeface and many type foundries offered similar letters. Today we see many fonts of different names with essentially the same characteristics.
Unfortunately, and questionably, Monotype owns the trademark to naming things "engraver's" so I named this typeface Engraving.
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After starting my type foundry I was turned on to the existence of variable font technology by a colleague. Variable fonts allow the user to create new, interpolated versions of your font by controlling variables. The user can specify boldness, slant angle, condensedness of the letters. The technology was still new at the time, and harder to develop for, but I wanted to make variable font technology a core part of my business model.
My first foray into this unfamiliar technology was Gnomon*. There are plenty of existing variables you can design for, but I was excited by the possibility of new, not yet thought of things the user can control. I made a font where the location of the shadow is effected by the time of day of the user. In a way, it's controlled by the actual position of the sun. There's something fourth-wall breaking about a design decision being controlled by something as real time and specific.
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If I were to design a curriculum around type design, I would have every student make a geometric sans serif. It's a classification of typeface that feels easy to design because the shapes are simple and geometric, but the truth is simple designs leave you with nothing to hide behind. When all you have is a circle, it better be perfect.
Jost* is the oldest and most popular typeface I offer on my website. It's changed and improved with me so much over the years that it hardly resembles its earliest drafts. Over time it's gained new weights, variable font versions, support for Cyrillic, and it's core character set has been worked and reworked many times.
There are some naïve design decisions I made that I wouldn't have if I were making the font today, but I think some of those decisions are what gives it charm. It's part of what people connect to. I feel as though it is a collaboration between the design sensibilities of an amateur version of myself and the technical expertise of the person I am today. This resembles the collaboration between Paul Renner and Heinrich Jost who together designed Futura, the typeface Jost* takes most inspiration from.
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Railroad Gothic is a big, bold, and often ugly condensed sans serif font offered by American Type Founders as early as 1900. The font in its initial release included many amateurish decisions and inconsistencies, which I hoped to reproduce in my revival. I took a page out of my own book with Besley* and rounded all the edges to make the letters look like they were printed on cheap paper with ink that bleeds. The rough look is a perfect fit for the Cowboy Collective
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The process of making a revival of the American Type Founder's Tiffany Gothic was the most intriguing from a research standpoint. I wrote a lengthy post on the Cowboy Collective website about it which I link to below, but in short, a digital revival of this font has never been done before, and my research put me in touch with someone named David M. MacMillan, who had access to documents that helped with this reproduction.
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A cookbook from a distant dream.
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This is a satirical listicle poking fun at typographic trends within the graphic design department at KABK.
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The is the oldest project I'm including in the portfolio, having been made all the way back in 2014. It should be viewed in that light. It's a collection of sheet music and an accompanying story about how I "discovered" this music composed by a relative of mine named Dr. Earl.
It's rough around the edges, but you can already see some of the ideas and artistic impulses I'll go on to explore in bigger ways later. There's a multimedia component, incorporating music, design, and writing. There's my fascination with typography, my interest in story-telling, and a desire to collaborate with others.
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At Shadowcliff there are pianos in public spaces, and the album Making the Memories Happen emerged out of goofing around the piano. When people would enter a room you would play their theme-song.
It's nice that a recorded version of the album exists, so more people can enjoy the music, but it was never truly in the spirit of this collection of songs. The true spirit is in live performance, specifically at Shadowcliff.
At the end of the my season working there, I took the time to create this publication. It's sheet music for all the theme songs. The staff signed it and we placed it in the piano bench, for future Shadowcliff generations to find and play.
There is only one true copy of Making the Memories Happen and it's in a hostel in the Colorado Rockies, but you can download and look at this digital facsimile.
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The mini book of sorrows is a publication that accompanies the album we're ok. Each page has the lyrics to a song laid out in a playful way that relates the meaning of the words to the typographic layout.
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Concept art as music or music as concept art? Music that is technically music, but impossible to listen to.
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Back before the invention of sound recording technology music used to be much more communal. People would gather around the piano and sing the latest hit songs, which they bought as sheet music. If you wanted to hear a song played you either had to know it yourself, or know someone who did.
I'm grateful to live in the era of recorded music, but I can't help but feel it's contributed to a more passive experience of music. It's something you listen to, but don't participate in.
The Cowboy Collective is all about encouraging participation, so it only seemed appropriate to make sheet music for the Songs of the Cowboy (Vol. 01) album. Hopefully folks can gather around a piano (or other instrument) and play a cowboy song or two.
I wanted to recreate the charm and aesthetic of older sheet music, so I took a great deal of care in researching music from the late 1800s. I made a custom music notation font that's based off of references from the era, and I adjusted the page layout to resemble the designs I was referencing.
Of course my main goal was to have fun and to make it easy to read, so I included more modern inventions like chord symbols, and just went nuts with the cover pages!
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An illustrated essay exploring internet culture, digital art, alienation, capitalism, and memes.
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It's hard to see the water you're swimming in. We are so normalized to the culture we live in that it becomes invisible to us. One of the benefits of moving abroad is that it helps us to see the stuff about our own culture we take for granted.
I moved to the Netherlands for school in 2019. I knew at the time I was trying to escape the US, just as much as I was trying to go to school. The election of Donald Trump really solidified this belief in me: that America was an unsafe place and that I needed out. In my time leading up to my departure I felt an increasing sense of panic. I was afraid I was going to be killed in a shooting, or by a cop. Just going to the grocery store filled me with a kind of disabling panic. Some of this fear was irrational and misplaced, but it would be wrong to say that America is not a violent culture. We have on average over 40 murders and close to two mass-shootings a day, and I don't know anyone living in the US that hasn't been victimized by some kind of violence.
My attitude when I first got here was that I might escape the violence of American culture. I felt that I was nonviolent myself, and if I lived in a nonviolent place I would no longer feel the fear and panic I did living in the US. Some of this turned out to be very true. People in western Europe are less victimized, and feel safer on a day-to-day basis then they do in the US. This makes social connections easier and stronger, as there isn't this mistrust that has to be overcome. But I was wrong to think the violence of American culture was something I could escape, or that doing so was even desirable.
The safety I felt living here gave me space to think and reflect on who I was and where I came from, and with this reflection emerged a very scary and important realization: we teach American boys to be violent, and, being an American boy myself, I am just as much a participant in and member of this system as anyone else. If I were to claim that I am somehow fundamentally different from the culture of American masculinity I was raised in I would just be lying to myself.
I started writing to process my feelings and try and explain what and why I felt to others. I thought it would be a couple of pages, and only take me a day or two to write, but the more I wrote the more I realized I had to say. I spent over a week writing constantly, every chance I got. It was compulsive and therapeutic. I hardly ate.
It was as though a life-time's worth of experiences and unprocessed trauma were waiting for the moment they could be set free, and now that I had opened the flood-gates there was no stopping it. I realized things about experiences I had over ten years ago that I hadn't given myself permission to think about. I saw my own actions in new lights. I saw the people I've hurt over the years. I called people and apologized for things I did six years prior. I cried a lot.
American Boys is the document I wrote in this time. It is raw, intense to read at times, and messy, but full of brutal honesty and filled with love and forgiveness. Self compassion, but also compassion for everyone who's been victimized by the system of violence that permeates American culture. It is true that American boys hurt each other and act in ways that promote and reinforce a violent culture, but it is also true that the people acting the most harmfully are also often the most victimized.
I no longer agree with all of the conclusions I make in the book. I wrote from my own perspective and experiences, but there are reasons people act violently that relate to things outside of my experience, and I think I fail to account for this at times. There's a kind of bitterness I felt towards groups of people and attitudes that I no longer feel. I also learned the ugly truth that Dutch culture is violent too. Our cultures are not so separate.
I no longer agree with all of the conclusions I make in American Boys, but I know those perspectives were an important and necessary step to getting to where I am now. I think writing this book is perhaps the most important work I've ever done. It's painful, and hard for me to revisit, but our capacity for pain is important to who we are, and to understand the experiences I write about in this text is to understand much about who I am as an artist, maker, thinker, and person.
I know it's not flashy or multimedia, or very exciting, but sometimes the most important things in this world aren't flashy, multimedia, or very exciting. You may not understand or relate to many, or even most, of the experiences and feelings I talk about. That's fine. It's for and about something very painful, and not relating to it means that the pain is something you haven't experienced. I don't need it to be understood, but I need it to be recognized as valuable. Things can be valuable without being understandable to everyone. By sharing this text I am sharing something very personal. Understand this before reading it. Understand that knowing ourselves is the most important step to being a good artist, and this text is me embodying that process.
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A short story in which nothing happens. Inspired by Infrarealist writers such as Roberto Bolaño.
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A short essay in which I make a (to my knowledge) novel argument on why abortion is permissible. Abortion is a very controversial topic, and I don't think I handle it as delicately or clearly as I'd like to, but the essay is very provocative in a good way, and can inspire new perspectives.
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All of these poems feel like they belong together to me, but I don't currently have a formal way of recognizing their kinship. Perhaps someday they'll all make their way into a publication or website or experimental video game, and this spot in my portfolio will only have one link, but for the time being I am breaking form and putting multiple entries under the same headline.
These are by no means all of my poems, (I have been known to tweet a poem or two in my day, like this one about a mouse, this one about a squid, or this poem about teeth) but they do all have something important in common, which they do not share with my other poems. They are all free verse, personal, and feel more like a diary entry then a poem at times.
They are written from my perspective, and the feelings of these poems are all real, but they aren't autobiographical and shouldn't be taken as such. I'm going for poetic truth here. I also recorded myself reading some of them.
I Don't Want to be Political
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love letter to Tinka
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thinking about love
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An essay about how progressive communities can sometimes use exclusionary language.
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I write a decant amount of Tweets. Some of them manage to be funny. It's a mix of meta jokes, absurdism, observational comedy, and puns. There's some terrible ideas, some unhinged rants, and some poems. Once, I made a joke about fonts that was so popular it probably got liked by someone you know. I Tweet about birds, capitalism, dreams, food and a bit too much about Scooby Doo. Many of my Tweets are mediocre, but some are so funny that I laugh when I read them to myself.
I have a feature on my website that displays a random tweet, which I like because just looking through my Twitter makes it hard to see older Tweets, so I'm reproducing that feature below.
Click here for a random Tweet!
Zeros is a short science fiction story about a group of people who are able to send a very small amount of information back in time. The story follows their struggle to make sense of the information their future-selves send them. I wanted to explore this idea of knowing exactly how a story will end, but not knowing how to get from point A to point B. In this way Zeros is a little like a mystery. I also took this as an opportunity to explore character development.
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A music video to the piece Aesthetic Responses to Repetition in Unfamiliar Music from the album Challenging Contemporary Art Music
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A 30+ minute long video where I rant about men and violence that I made after getting assaulted in the woods. It explores similar themes to my book American Boys, but in this I am playing a character whose naïveté is used to question cultural norms.
I don't know if my main priority is to be funny or to make a point. Sometimes I get so caught up in tangents that as an audience it can be easy to loose the thread. This is my first attempt at a video essay, and figuring out that balance between humor and commentary is something I'm still working out.
It's worth a watch. I'm going to make more videos of a similar nature in the future, and I think it will be interesting to see what seeds are planted here that will develop into something fuller.
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original music composition
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A video in which I talk about experiencing grief and moments of great loss. Quiet, meditative, and sad. I made this in May of 2020 when the full gravity of the pandemic was just setting in, and the grief I was feeling that I talk about in the video was about that. I wanted to try and create a feeling of empathy and shared grief between the viewer and myself, so I speak directly to the audience with the assumption that they are experiencing a kind of grief along with me. Because I don't know what the viewer might be grieving, I don't talk about anything specific, and instead just talk about what I feel is universal to feelings of grief.
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This is the music video to the piece The Naming of Creation from the album Challenging Contemporary Art Music.
I wanted watching this to have a voyeuristic quality, like you are seeing something that wasn't meant for your eyes. I wanted it to feel like it was a video from a museum or cult that's divorced from its context.
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This is the music video to the piece Not Again from the album Challenging Contemporary Art Music.
I made this music video around the same time I released the font Jost* (which used to be called Renner* but I had to change the name for legal reasons). I wanted to use the music video as an opportunity to practice kinetic typography and show off the new font.
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"Experiments" are little projects I've done to test out an idea or concept. Most of these projects have taken a day or two at most, and they aren't really things I would present to an audience in a big way. For school, I think it's important to have some sense of my creative process, and these give a behind-the-scenes look at how I work, which is why I'm including them.
I trained an AI to make up new tweets using my exsisting tweets as source material. For some reason the AI sometimes uses swear words that don't exist in any of the source material.
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I started asking people I matched with on Tinder to define art and putting their answers together on this web page. Tinder is a really interesting space, and it certainly impacts the kinds of responses I got.
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A collection of colorful things and the colors they are.
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Everything is Fine!
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Two songs often will have a specific quality in common, and sometimes this quality can be rather unique, like using construction tools as an instrument. You couldn't make a playlist where every song has that one quality in common, because there wouldn't be enough songs to fill the playlist, but what if you had a playlist where each song related to the next in a specific way? What if you could control which quality you want to hear more of?
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An experimental way of visualizing music.
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An experimental way of visualizing pitch.
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Made with love by Owen Earl