Profile

My Life in Visual Communication and Aesthetics

I don't know what I would have done if I'd been born in an age before corrective optics allowed us nearsighted people to benefit from using glasses. I love to look and have been lucky to be able to pursue a career in art and design. Whether I'm creating the look-and-feel of a user interface or printing photos for an exhibition, I'm guided by my eyes and work to create visual harmony.

I've been creating websites since 1995 and have an aesthetic of colorful chunkiness. My work is informed by my drawing and photography background and I enjoy working on entertaining and humorous designs. I created youth-oriented sites for MTV Networks for 8 years and currently design for Hearst Magazines Digital Media department.

I look to art for meaning, and explore ideas through independent projects. Some of these projects are represented on this site, but I also print my photography and create site-specific installations.

Pushing Pixels for Profit

Moving to the City

My life began in 1995 when I moved to New York City to go to grad school at School of Visual Arts. After the torture of using rapidograph pens, t-squares and triangles in my undergrad designs courses, the physical cleanliness of digital media production was a revelation. In addition to working on my photography and painting at school I interned at a few web design companies, including Studio Archetype (now Sapient) cutting graphics for the cross-site navigation of IBM.com. It was full speed ahead in the late 90's and I was glad to get in at the ground floor of an industry where no one had more than 3-5 years of experience.

Promises of Stock Options and IPOs

When I interviewed with MTV.com in 2000 there were visions of stock options and a publicly traded MTV Interactive dancing in our heads. Two years and three rounds of layoffs later, most of us were happy to still have a job building microsites for raunchy reality shows. I bounced around the world over the course of 2002-2004, photographing the sets of the Real World in Paris, Las Vegas, Chicago and Philadelphia. I worked on the redesign of MTV.com in 2001 and the facelift of 2003, and was the keeper of the key to the cross-site styleguide.

Back to the Headbangers Ball

In late 2004 I jettisoned from MTV.com to pursue the launch and growth of MTV2.com. What a thrill to build the site that housed the return of Headbangers Ball, the only video show I remember from my highschool days. Didn't host Adam Curry move on to better things? Yes, he did.

The MTV2 site was built in Flash and this gave us the opportunity to have fun with animation and site design, like Andy MIlonokis' laser-beam eyes and Wondershowzen's embedded video.

A Pro-Social Social Network

MTV2 went on autopilot in the winter of 2006/07 while the company restructured. My responsibilities expanded to include the redesign of the Latino music site MTVTr3s.com and the recently launched Think.MTV.com. Working on Think enabled me to use my talents to help guide young people to pursue activism and political engagement. I've been volunteering off and on in the city, helping kids in Harlem learn to use computers and working with the ACLU of NJ. It was exciting to work on a site with MTV that looks beyond the TV screen and shows young adults that they can affect change in their community, their country, and the world.

Meaning and Expression

Paying Big Money to Present My Ideas

I suppose I was naive to think that I could move to New York, pay for grad school, and make a living selling and exhibiting my painting and photography. I sold my soul to Sallie Mae by going to grad school and I think I'll still be paying student loans from the grave.

It wasn't until I received a Masters degree from the Photography department of School of Visual Arts that I actually started taking pictures. Until then I had been using found photographs as a starting point for paintings and drawings that explored how male sexuality is shaped by cultural representations of women. After two and a half years I'd run the idea into the ground but still had to present it as my thesis. While working on that thesis I began taking and combining snapshot photos taken around New York City.

Flatness and Depth

With the "Picture Pairs" I explored visual juxtaposition and the contrast in depth and flatness seen in images. I found myself shooting a lot of vans and eventually spent a couple of years trolling the streets photographing them exclusively. I abandoned any sense of depth and focused on the undulations and random damage of work vehicles in the city.

Dark Clouds on a Sunny Day

On September 11, 2001, I recieved a call from my wife while I was getting ready for work. She'd been downtown when planes hit the Trade Center but managed to get one of the last running subways uptown and was safe. I grabbed my photo equipment and ran to the Hoboken waterfront, thinking I'd snap some shots before going to work. Instead I witnessed and photographed the collapse of one of the tallest buildings in the world, an event that my mind found impossible to comprehend for a long time, even though I'd seen it with my own eyes.

I like to believe that my other work is more meaningful, but the statistics for this site tell me otherwise. My pictures of the collapse and aftermath are consistently the highest trafficed area of the site, by far. Early September always sees a spike as remembrances and anniversaries drift into the public conciousness. I find my images embedded in conspiracy blogs and I was contacted by the fire safety department of the federal government so they could use high-resolution images to study the collapse of the towers.

Different Times, Different Work

Ove the past half decade I've had the pleasure of helping raise two daughters. Their births started a new phase in the life of myself and my wife. Creating and exhibiting new artwork has been difficult with the strains on my time, but I know it gives me a new perspective for work in the future.