I was invited to illustrate the interview “What Kind of Eye Is This” at Issue 2 of Maquette, the journal from Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. The magazine is edited by Alex Zafiris who, for this issue, interviewed Nora N. Khan, an incredible writer, scholar, and teacher. They talk about surveillance, Ursula K. Le Guin, video games, shadow doubles, machine-learning, future-language, mapping (my inspiration) and almost everything else. My admiration for Nora is endless. The theme of the issue 2 is re-orientation.

Located on New York City’s Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum is a museum at the intersection of art and Jewish culture for people of all backgrounds. Founded in 1904, the Museum was the first institution of its kind in the United States and one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. As the Director of Design, my role is to maintain the museum’s brand standards across a wide range of media and contexts, continuing to refine and refresh the Museum’s visual presence and ensure its continued relevance. I lead a team of very talented designers to create print and digital materials for the Marketing, Curatorial, Education, Development, Membership, Special Events Departments, and the Museum’s Shop. Here are some examples designed in collaboration with Celestine Yuan, Christie Zhong, Dana Citrin, Ja Yoon Lee, Naomi Shultz and Nick Sheeran.

I was invited to apply and maintain the stamp-based new graphic language that Experimental Jetset created for New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), a non-profit collective of professionals working with contemporary art to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within the field and to develop a stronger sense of community. The first application was the signage and printed materials for the New York Art Fair. The New York Times called it “the snazziest graphic design.”

The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center have been partnering for the New York Jewish Film Festival, presenting films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience, for 30 years. I was asked to rebrand the festival. The branding system is able to stretch and extend in myriad formations to suit different branding materials. It enlarges or shrinks depending on the size of the document or the screen, creating a frame in every format.

Parallel-Parallel is an online gallery that shows works by international graphic designers which: have been postponed indefinitely, will never be realized or published, were published for an event that will never take place because of Covid-19. Parallel-Parallel was launched in April 2020 by Dorothee Dähler and I, at the onset of Covid-19 pandemic. As several countries went into lock-down, graphic designers around the world found themselves losing work, either through canceled projects or indefinitely postponed launch dates. In order to give fellow designers an opportunity to showcase their work—and to archive these paused/unpublished works—we created www.Parallel-Parallel.com. The project was featured in AIGA Eye on Design, It’s Nice That, Critical Daily, and Weltformat Magazine, who genereously invited us to design our section. We are greatful for all the contributors.

Parallel-Parallel, the project Dorothee Dahler and I initiated, was invited by GRAPHIC magazine to contribute their “Current Issue” which brings together several projects by designers, design researchers, and artists who are concerned with contemporary social issues. GRAPHIC provided us with 16 pages so that we could convey our research area. Parallel-Parallel shows projects in different stages of their creation: some were designed but never produced, others were produced but never saw daylight, and others were published yet advertised an event that never happened or that took place much later. For our submission, we focused on the unproduced submissions. By making a coloring book, we aimed to create an idea of these works, rather than reproducing them, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to realize the colors, effects, and the original intentions within the parameters given. You can purchase the issue on Idea Books, Draw Down, and Actual Source.

In 2020, The Jewish Museum’s Purim Ball, an annual fundraising gala, migrated from in-person to digital. Inspired by the online format, we came up with the concept “Where’s the Party?”– alluding to the dizzying charade of an event with no physical address and also the theme of hiding which is central to the Purim story. One side of the invitation lists the details of the event and the other features a kaleidoscopic labyrinth made out of objects integral to the Jewish Museum and Purim celebration. Designed and produced in collaboration with the amazing Jewish Museum design team: Christie Zhong, Dana Citrin and Naomi Shultz. Photos by Tory Williams and the design team.

Founded in 2011, Mana Contemporary is an art center with campuses in Jersey City, Chicago, and Miami. I was the Creative Director between 2013-2018. I worked on the launch of the new branding and the website alongside an incredibly talented team. Mana Contemporary converts industrial buildings into multi-disciplinary art spaces. Every single building has its own unique history and culture. This new visual identity system is based upon this aspect and reflects each building’s past life: For Jersey City, the symbols evoke the building’s history as an Old Gold cigarette manufacturing plant; for Mana Chicago, the symbols represent electricity, recalling its past as an Edison building; for Mana Wynwood, the symbols reflect its roots as a former international trading site. In collaboration with Immanuel Yang, Poliana Kirst Duarte & Yujin Lee. ManaContemporary.com

Located at the basement, BSMT at Mana Contemporary is a collaborative environment that combines artist-driven programming with 80 studios and open workspaces. It is also home to the New Media Program (NMP) and Mana Residencies. Inspired by the name and location, we developed a modular branding system. Using the same grid, the logo is able to modify itself and house all kinds of letter combinations, always moving downwards. You can watch the installation time-lapse here.

In early 2018, Andrea Salerno came back home with a book titled Flower Arranging, an illustrated home reference manual about floral decoration dated 1966. The book was printed in Holland, yet published almost simultaneously in Des Moines (1965) and Glasgow (1966). The volume appeared to be sold in a no longer existing bookshop in Johannesburg, between Pritchard and Loveday Streets, and eventually travelled back to the Netherlands, where he found it in a charity shop not too far from his apartment in Arnhem. Soon afterwards Andrea and I started rearranging its sequence of flower arrangements. The book can be purchased from After8 in Paris, Inga in Chicago, Kore in Rotterdam.