This blog had to get built really fast in between other projects. Rather than starting from scratch, I built off of the shoulders of a pre-existing theme. It is a good ‘un from Organic Themes called Portfolio. I was attracted to the jquery slideshow on the homepage…and the fact that it is specifically configured to [...]

Last week, I finished up an interactive annual report for the AIDS research non-profit, amfAR. You can check it out here. They have an amazing track record for funding successful scientific research and efficacious community outreach work. Their work also happens to frequently be difficult to explain/understand quickly (as is often the case with actual science…) So showcasing the year’s accomplishments for the general public is a bit tricky.

It’s like an extension of my workspace… all the way into Wordpress.

I’ve been considering it for a while now and just decided to make it happen alongside the website redesign. Perhaps the first thing you’ve noticed is the decidedly unsexy title. This is no mistake. “BLOG” is the most accurate description for this part of my site. Essentially: kellianderson.com is the sausage and the blog wing of it is all about sausage-making. I’m treating it like an extension of my desk, which—at 16 feet long—had previously failed to protrude into virtual space.

Wow, I am so pleased with how this project turned out. (You can check out the final product on my site here.) “Go team!” may be the appropriate emphatic expression here, as this was a truly collaborative effort with Youngna and Jacob. We share similar sensibilities, so we were able to take the kernel of the idea and rapidly evolve it. All of the time saved could therefore be allotted to design work (K) and production work (Y+J) and letterpressing (K.) We worked hard.

The new portfolio website launched after several weeks of hard design/coding work and even harder editing/writing. The concept was to create a romanticized workspace—making all of the tools of an art/design career more whimsical, reinterpreting their rational function. The top of each project page becomes a timeline ruler, against which all projects are dated. Graph paper, crop marks, and incremental perforation forego their functional role to act as design elements, adding depth and texture. Technically-speaking: The front page is a hacked google map (more on how that is done later) and the interior is built with MODx open-source CMS as a backend. No more flash = swift updates, i-device compatibility, and web fonts…oh my!

Historically, I’ve lacked an interest in adequately documenting work. Websites have run their complete lifespan without me ever expending the 30 seconds on taking screengrabs. Drawings have decomposed to a state of smudges and dust before going into the photo studio. The resultant grainy phone photos and lorem-ipsum filled web page comps populated all too much of the old site. There is no good excuse for this sorry state of affairs—but I suppose that I felt that once a project was complete, there as nothing new to learn about it.

The term CMS (or Content Management System) describes technologies which separate the functional/structural code of a website from the content of a site. They are particularly useful for websites with templated pages (like portfolio websites) and make these sites much more efficient to update. In this article, I’ll provide a little bit of insight into how/why my new site was created— and will also cover choosing the right CMS for your portfolio site.

An old plate+scissors= a new project In this new series, “letterpress hacks,” my intention is to share some things that I’ve picked up through experimentation and/or the misuse of materials.   It will cover unconventional (i.e. incorrect) shortcuts, alternative uses, and tools that I find useful in extending (i.e. hacking) this truly fantastic printmaking medium. [...]

In my maiden post, one of the reasons cited for creating the blog was to keep myself accountable to my self-initiated projects.  But sometimes (like this entire November for example), opportunities present themselves that are too good to pass up.  This past month, I have been working with two start-up companies that I admire. Each [...]

Food styling by the extraordinary Meghan Guthrie In the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to share a recipe taught to me by my grandmother, who is something of a culinary genius (from New Orleans, a place with high standards.) She typically takes a good recipe and simplifies it to its most delicious and basic [...]

It has been very project-y around here lately! One of these projects just went live, and I wanted to do a quick, predominantly visual post about it. It’s for a new company called  Collaborative Fund. Although the fund is an amalgamation of several people’s ideas, it is really Craig Shapiro’s project. Craig recently stepped down [...]

The WordPress platform—at this stage in its development—is a huge beast, but is also a perfect petri dish for design experimentation. It is super-powerful, advanced, and open source… Also: People like it. Take all of those amazing advantages and add the fact that WordPress trends towards redundancy. Most sites created in WordPress end up looking… well, [...]

Girl Walk // All Day A few days after placing his film-to-be on funding site Kickstarter, my friend Jacob approached me to to create some static visual elements for his project about movement.  Already immensely popular and not even 100% shot yet, Girl Walk, follows freestyle dancer Anne Marsen as she charmingly contorts her way [...]

Drawing little brightly-colored buildings is one of my favorite ways to pass the time.  (It is the closest that I will ever get to being an architect.)  This obsession first got a platform when working on the hankerchief-map wedding invite and I’ve been able to revisit this indulgence lately while designing packaging, infographics, and stickers for [...]

Art fair season has descended upon NYC. In attendance will be collectors, gallerists, artists and art fans galore. Ocular stimulation—the good and the bad—will ensue. This annual ritual is great because it conveniently brings together a ton of new art (excitement!), but it also ends up being very trying at the same time. Walking through [...]

I sadly missed all of the new music at SxSW (again), but appeared there in spirit via some design goods.  I created posters, banners, stencils, hand fans (who knew?), and postcards listing Dig for Fire’s showcase this year.  You can experience the showcase vicariously through the videos filmed last week—which appear on the front page [...]

I just finished up a really fun project—a paper record player wedding invitation! In the booklet-style invitation, a bit of paper-folding amplifies the sound of a sewing needle moving along the grooves of a flexidisc record. The hand-spun record yields a garbled, but scrutable listening of an original song by the couple. It requires a [...]

I managed to squeeze in a [relatively] quick personal project/experiment over the past few weeks, combining an interest of mine (rare books) and a domestic void (a blank makeshift wall in the apartment.) Squinting at a master engraver’s work ranks highly on my shortlist of nerdy thrills. These little treasures are hidden within bound volumes [...]

I just finished an ambitious infographic for Collaborative Fund envisioning how the concept of collaborative consumption could replace traditional consumption in the average home. Collaborative consumption is a simple idea: use the connecting-power of the internet to help people to share things that they don’t need (or don’t want) to buy—resulting in a more efficient [...]

I just designed a bright orange popsicle truck that evangelizes solar energy. It is actually a popsicle truck covered in popsicle-shaped-infographics about solar energy that distributes free popsicles! The multitasking contraption also runs off of solar energy when stopped, effectively demonstrating how solar can power the activity of a bustling kitchen. This fun project, lead [...]

I recently worked on some projects with/for Jeff Mangum of the Neutral Milk Hotel, making things like posters, cards, shirts, and a new website. The new website features unreleased Neutral Milk Hotel songs, a new vinyl box set, a radio show, and a long descent through clouds moving in parallax—check it out!  (Built in MODx.)

In less than a week, I will bid adieu to Brooklyn to travel to north-central Norway. High up in a mountain town, I will be presenting my work via slideshow+videos for the first time at Grafill Edit (it will be, in fact, the first conference I’ve ever attended as well.) A subsequent, shorter presentation at [...]

It is the end of the year already, the perfect time to reflect, to quantify…to make tons of infographics (of course!) This bunch was actually made about a month ago, but are just getting published now. Although perhaps these examples are more like “info-strations” than strict infographics (which is more of a defined, specific thing [...]

I just noticed a trend in my own work (which I’ve  been regrettably slow to post lately…): everything has been “about” the almighty dollar lately.  There’s been more substantial discussion regarding U.S. economic policy in the news— which is increasingly being scrutinized like a machine, whose various features exert invisible, systematic influence over our lives. The [...]

I’m happy to report that my TEDx talk from last year is up. (Thanks TEDx Phoenix!) Aside from just showing/explaining pictures, the talk makes the case for creating absurdist/surreal work that disrupts our preconceived notions about the world through small, intimate experiences. This type of work can defy conventional expectations by presenting the hidden “talents” [...]

A few things that I designed are now for sale on the internet!: a benefit poster and a couple of temporary tattoos. I created a “children’s poster for adults (or for children)” for Help Ink. Proceeds benefit Room to Read, an organization that promotes literacy by improving access to books and education (with a focus [...]

On Friday, we unveiled a system for attribution on the web called Curator’s Code. Initially, I was ever-so-slightly skeptical about the Curator’s Code. Creating a formalized “system of attribution for internet content” sounded a bit like piling on rules—and perhaps even creating limitations—in the blissfully limitless (and essentially anarchic) space of the internet. And then I [...]

“Springtime in New York / when demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze.” —Jonathan Richman, Springtime in New York I recently finished up some press invitations for a Brooklyn Philharmonic concert. They incorporate the borough’s handsomest of street-features: the brownstone row house, as well as historical maps, typography, and a fake-newspaper-as-a-concert-program. Led [...]

Just returned home from a few weeks traveling and speaking at Semi-Permanent Sydney and Auckland to a luscious pile of printed maps from Herb Lester in my mailbox. Collaborating with the mapmakers a few weeks back, I designed a map along their specific-and-wildy-appropriate theme of “Paris for Pleasure Seekers.” (Why else go to Paris?) Written/researched [...]

I worked with the team at OFFBOOK last year to create their logo. So when they were planning an episode about logos, they invited me back in for an interview. We chatted a bit about process and about this shorthand-system-of-communication that we call logo design… and we reminisced about just how many different iterations of [...]

I’m tremendously excited to report that two newspapers that I designed are on display (and FREE for the taking!) in the main atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. For two more days only (and the museum is free on Friday), so go now! (After the 30th, they may be available elsewhere, stay tuned…) You [...]

“As Real as it Gets” is up through Dec. 22 at ApexArt in Tribeca and you should…Go check it out! When you think “future-prediction”… Does a crystal ball or an algorithm flash across your mind? OK… so an algorithm has probably never flashed across anyone’s mind (ever), but the point is that notions of future-prediction [...]

Like many others, I felt a sense of urgency to do something after the Newtown shootings last year, but wasn’t sure what I was qualified to contribute. That’s why I was so excited when Ted Alcorn from Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG)—a non-partisan coalition of 900 mayors who advocate for smarter gun laws—approached me in January to [...]

Excited (and anxious) to be speaking at Typo San Francisco this afternoon. I used the talk as an excuse to try out something that I’ve long intended to play with: paper lettering! Many of the text-only slides in my presentation needed some additional attention. So for each one, I came up with a different, semi-legible [...]