My business partner Heidi Meredith recently blogged on Imprint about our leap into entrepreneurship after grad school.

Hopefully others will find the post inspiring—as we didn’t realize how empowering it would be to actually take the risk in order to do what we love.

Not long ago, when I was first learning how to screenprint, I made a simple owl.

I would share the screenprint, but I no longer have the original. I’m sure you get the idea. Since it was my first time screenprinting, they were not all perfect. In fact, four lonley owls sat tucked away in my closet with no where to go until the other day, I thought why not just paint over the mistakes. Instead of simple owls they can be elaborate owls!

Since grad school I’ve not focused much on making art for arts sake. I’ve been mostly focused on my business, GOLD. So this was a fun little excursion.

So what am I going to do with these guys?

This one went to my dear friends Wilder and Christina in Portland who are having a baby.

This one I like to call Spooky. Spooky will go to one of my nephews or nieces, or my business partner Heidi. The bat in the background was inspired by her cat, Bat Baby.

The one on the left I’m keeping for myself. The exotic owl, I’m not quite sure yet.

I made one grammatical correction and had also re-sized each label to fit its respective food.

I promise this is the last post on food, then it is back to normal business—Helvetica, Pantones, letterpress, books—but this simple little jam is too good not to share! It is the product of a plum tree residing in my back garden. Fruit trees were an unknown in our yard growing up in upstate New York. The pear tree my dad planted never did give us any fruit.

We did have blackberry bushes and wild strawberries, but never anything quite like the plum. Which is why, when I noticed this small oval shaped fruit hanging low off a tree in the garden I naively exclaimed “figs”! “No” corrected my landlord Betty Mathews, “plums”.

Her mother had planted the tree 35 years ago. And when they fell off the tree last summer in early August I wasn’t the slightest bit prepared. Before I had time to figure it out, the birds had eaten the best of them. Feeling like I had let a good thing go to waste and not being able to get the mysterious shaped yellow plum out of my head—I wandered over to Omnivore Books to satisfy my fruit curiosity.

I was even curious if I could find a recipe in one of her rare vintage books that matched my plum. I fixated on one recipe for a subject known as the ‘french plum’ that seemed to fit the description of my dear little fruit for a brandied plum. The thought of plums soaking in brandy, becoming toppings for ice cream or the garnish of a cocktail thrilled me. But there was one problem. I was going to have to wait a whole year for my next opportunity.

On another visit to Omnivore, I purchased a book CANNING: For a New Generation, by Liana Krissoff. Her interpretation of a plum jam, with nothing more than plum, lime, sugar, and cardamom became the destiny of my worthy plums. I thought about making a nutrition label, but I doubt more is necessary than those three little words.

When asked to re-think the nutrition label, one would hope that we don’t think this just means applying an aesthetic treatment or turning the existing label into the cartoonish infographic style that is so popular at the moment, particularly to the food industry. Of course this would be useless. I think this is the general attitude people have towards design, that it should be dumbed down, like a PowerPoint graphic, such as the new food plate design taking the place of the food pyramid. We already see that everywhere on the front of package nutrition information being placed on cookie packages and sugary cereal boxes that promise you will get your omega-3′s and daily fiber intake with the consumption of their product.

As for the label in use now, it is proven to be confusing and pushes the weight of importance towards facts that our out of date and are probably not the best way to chose a food. The type of person keeping track of their calorie intake and sodium levels isn’t going to buy the box of Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner. The goal I have with my label designs, and there has been much more thought than those submitted to the competition, is to find a way to educate about the consumption of the food, to enhance the way we receive information, and to shift the focus on why we are eating what we are eating.

I know the ingredients are not a part of the current label. That was the point.

In a matter as complicated as this there seems to be almost no solution. As I’ve mentioned before, and as Micheal Pollan, Harold McGee, and the other judges have pointed out in their critiques, these submissions are not the final answer. It would take more time, more expert advising, and more work on addressing cognitive recognition issues such as color blindness. Not one person has the answer.

As for where I see this going, since some are saying these designs may be considered in the actual re-design the FDA is currently proposing—I will say I am skeptically optimistic. Skeptical because I am not sure if the American people want a change in their food systems—even though we now have obesity rates close to 30% in nearly every state. Optimistic because their are those with enough enthusiasm to have inserted this conversation into the public dialogue.

I knew I had to have that peach, and I knew what a pretty picture it would make.

On that day was also the first batch of figs—a personal favorite of mine. What I probably like more than the fig itself is its color. The deep reddish purple, with olive green undertones.

As I was becoming more interested in the color of my subject than the rendering, I switched to an abstract mode of painting. Placing colors in a grid, laying side by side those I found most pleasing.

Oddly enough, or simply because these were the colors on my palette, this abstract painting represented both the peach and the fig.

This is my final submission to the ReThink food label competition. Having been partnered with Harold McGee on this project, together we decided to focus on a redesign of the current label as a realistic approach to the implementation of a new label design in America, with the ingredients as the primary element.

The labels presented here work as a system using color to indicate food groups, a mathematically proportionate representation of ingredients by order of listing, and calling out of important nutrition facts using color of ingredient to which it references.

Simple iconography is introduced to indicate serving size and a thumbs up or thumbs down for whether a excessive amount of ingredient is good or bad. Over all it is meant to bring important information to the forefront and closer to an at a glance approach.

The final submissions will be posted on Good and News21 soon!

Rethink The Food Label | Nutrition. Conversation. Design..

I’ve been interested in this conversation since the beginning of my thesis research. In fact, it was one of the runner-ups for my actual thesis. Many of you who might know my work and process probably know this. In a topic studio on contemporary health issues I attempted to address this issue through the epidemic of obesity. The project involved a semester of research, and a lot of work on the messaging, but the label solutions I created are still on the conceptual level.

My initial goal was to redesign the entire nutrition label. Creating a visual code for the elements of the food. In this idea, each food would be given a map, based on its actual make-up. The system might seem complex, but I envisioned it working as something that could give people a general read on a food’s composition at a glance. I also saw it working as a QR code. Allowing smart phone to scan and bring up more specific nutritional information about the food. I thought about how this might work as a system in a grocery store. These are some initial sketches for the concept.

Since the system would require some degree of learning, like an alphabet, I thought about how to incorporate guides, kiosks, shopping carts, and learning games for young children to teach about food composition.

Anyway, you can see some of the work I ended up producing here. But what I’m really excited about is picking the project back up for this competition, and I’ve been paired with nutritionist and food writer Harold McGee, which I think will be pretty amazing. Another great thing about it is Micheal Pollan is one of the judges, whom has been one of my biggest influences in food politics. One of my label designs even specifically was designed around his common sense approach to eating in his book In Defense of Food.

So stay tuned to see what happens with this over the next few weeks…

My first official gig out of grad school was hand painting the letterforms of Gotham, a typeface rooted in the architectural signs of 20th century. I was asked by friend Joel Wasko to help out with the lettering for the set of a commercial he was producing. It turned out to be a fun project that pulled me into the world of art on film for exactly six days last week.

I fell in love with the process, which took two-and-a-half days to complete. Every counter, bowl, stem carefully accounted for, without the smooth vector shape of illustrator but the slight imperfection of the hand and the texture of the brush and paint. Occasionally I missed an inner drop shadow on an ‘m’, or went on in disregard for the white chalk outline of the trace letters.

First I had to trace the letters using a digital projector. In this case it was helpful to have the digital projector for easy transfer of the prepared files to the projector.

Then with a letter designed I began painting the elements—the white of the letter, an orange shadow, and a thin blue outline.

All the while, many other hand painted props were being made at this scene shop.

The final results.