DAN: I'm 25, married, I live in Syracuse, NY, and I have been running a one-man design and illustration studio called Esoteric Design for almost 3 years now.
Where are you from? A small town in Upstate New York that no one's ever heard of.
Design education: Illustration major (BFA) at Syracuse University, class of 2000. Took a few graphic design and photography classes while I was there, but mostly self-taught on the digital stuff.
How did you start out as an artist and designer? I've always been drawing, like since I was 3 years old, so it's just been a constant progression from there. Just from my head, drawing concept cars, monsters, and stuff until I was like 13 or so, then I got into comics pretty heavy. In college, moving to a city really inspired me. I loved it, my work became significantly more 'dirty', and graffiti became a huge part of my life, it actually WAS my life entirely until I started making money doing freelance design.
Your traditional art is some of the best I've seen in awhile, what inspires you to create? Two things. One, urban decay and general urban surroundings. Rotting buildings, train yards, rusty fences, vacant lots, old signs, junkyards, factories, it all just visually excites me to a ridiculous degree. My wife thinks I'm crazy when I make stops on the side of the road to take pictures of old rusty factories and shit. I could live in a factory. Two, other artists and art. Good graffiti, street art, stickers, good design, typography, anything visually creative that's done well and is unique inspires me. I can never surf the web very long or look through a whole graf mag because I have to stop and go do my own shit.
What advice can you give to up and coming mixed media artist? Hmmm...No matter what you use and how you use it, just do what you like and eventually your audience will come. Don't listen to anyone. Like I went through a staples phase in school, where a lot of my work had metal staples as a visual element. All my friends and professors thought I was nuts, but I still think it was really cool, and I've sold some of these pieces. The people who bought them love the staples. Oh, and also, get your work on the web as soon as possible, and start pointing people to it.
For spray paint, what types of tips do you prefer working with? Mostly German thins. Sometimes fats to do fill-ins, but the thins are pretty versatile for everything. I use Krylon for the most part, because it's what was always easily available, and German thins work great with Krylon.
What do you do besides design? I collect a lot of different kinds of music, I'm still really into cars, and I hang out with my wife and our dog. Art and design definitely dominate my life, though. I seriously wake up at night thinking about graffiti or about how to get through the ugly stage in the piece I'm working on. There isn't enough hours in the day...
Do you think Macromedia Flash is cool or overused? It can be cool, but is definitely overused, in my opinion. There are too many people who know how to use it that don't have enough talent to keep it tasteful. They use Flash as a substitute for good design, and the worst part is, a lot of ignorant people are still really impressed. There are a lot of good flash sites, though, so it could go either way for me.
What do you think of Design Community sites such as DIK, Urban Collective and Pacdesco? I think they're great. They really keep everyone up to date on what's going on and they keep the industry moving forward. Every time I go to a design community site I am inspired to create more new work, to make my presence felt among all these talented designers I just checked out, you know?
Music plays a major role for Designers, what is your choice of music these days? I'm always into a lot of different kinds of music; I have music playing every minute of the day that I'm not sleeping. Right now the heavies in my rotation include Non-Phixion, Mr. Lif, Quasimoto/Madlib, Peanut Butter Wolf, Nas, Biggie, old WuTang, Freaky Flow, J Smooth, Datcyde, John Tab, Andy C, Lion, Joe Parker, James Brown, Jherk777, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams Sr., Jacob Miller, CanOx, Pantera, Kweli, Bad Religion, Rancid, NOFX, Crowbar, Atmosphere, Hatebreed, Shadows Fall, Rage, the Transplants, Six Feet Under, Jedi Mind Tricks, Portishead, Pennywise, Obituary, and of course the great KRS-ONE.
If there were one thing you could add to your workstation to increase workflow what would it be? Time.
Besides digital graphics, how would you compare present art styles from 20 years ago? Do you think there are similarities? I think there are some similarities, but I really can't comment much because I'm kind of ignorant as far as art history goes. I don't want to speak about shit I don't know much about. I know what I like, and I know where it came from, more or less, but that's about it. I do think it's always a progression, like current visual artists' work just spins off of who they liked when they were coming up, just like music. So of course there will always be similarities, especially over such a close time period as 20 years.
Where would you see yourself if design and art did not exist? I don't think I would exist. Everything I can come up with as an answer to this question has design or art in it somewhere.
What are your bad personal and design habits? I procrastinate on some things, like fixing crap around my house, and I always try too hard to please everyone. I also sleep too much. I need to get more done, and sleep less. As far as design goes, I think I worry about everything being perfect too much, like I obsess over certain elements being in one spot or another, colors, etc. I'm too much of a perfectionist.
Design styles you dislike: I don't usually enjoy anything with gaudy, offensive, or fluorescent colors. I don't like certain font applications, like the various fonts that are supposed to look like typewriter letters. I don't like stuff that's too busy to have a focal point, and is just too in your face. But there are exceptions. What it comes down to is talent and skill - if you have talent, you can make anything look good. I dislike design that's done by people who really should have hired someone to do it for them while they spent their time utilizing their own talents.
What artist has the most influence on your work? I don't think I can name just one - lately I've been really into Kinsey's work, Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, Fatoe, Andy Howell, Dug One, Mode2, Sake, Rik Catlow, like 30 other graf writers, and I haven't looked into it yet, but whoever is doing the new look for comedy central is pretty sick.
Do you have any new projects coming up that you can tell us about? Nothing special. I have small shows here and there every once in a while, but for the most part, I'm just trying to be as prolific as possible, and get as much work out to the people as I can.
Thank you for doing this interview, any last comments? Nah - but thanks for being into my work - peace///
“A little while after the release of the first tokyoplastic; it was getting 40,000 hits a day, which was very surprising and cool and made us happy and we received a lot of enquiries from potential clients. Prior commitments meant that it took a whole year just to get to the position where we were able to start accepting the offers.”
“Style is a good thing - but if anything I would like to be as diverse as possible - stylistically. To corner oneself into a certain style only means that one is limited. It's the age-old debate over specialization versus generalization. I find that as a designer - if a client were to present a problem to me, I need to be fully capable of solving that problem in any way possible..”
“I've just been drawing like mad since I was two feet tall, and haven't stopped. When I was younger I was really into cartoons (I'm sure most kids were), and I used to sit in front of the TV for hours drawing what I saw. Then I started making my own characters and drew them in scenarios with the characters I saw in TV. Then I discovered comics and it was all over, ALL of my money went towards those for
the next 8 years....”
