Dan Friedlander gave me my first paying job fresh out of CCAC. Dan was the owner and architect of Limn Co., and he was crazy. You see, Limn Co. was a famous modern design furniture store, with its own art gallery. Dan was also the publisher of Limn magazine featuring art and design. And just to round things out, Dan had just opened a hip new restaurant by the name of Cafe Monk. Dan wasn't in just one of the most difficult businesses to keep afloat––he was in four, all at the same time. He was wild eyed with a mop of unkempt hair, his phone never stopped ringing, and he spoke in short bursts of unbridled enthusiasm. Dan was the perfect blend of dreamer and doer, and he was giving me a shot. In the 9 months I was with Limn I birthed an astounding number of projects that dipped into every one of his enterprises. It was an amazing learning experience with an incredibly diverse range of projects that included delivery trucks, store signage, hang tags, postcards, magazine ads, billboards, presskits, gallery shows, websites, and an incredibly ambitious web experiment which was ultimately about 10 years ahead of its time. This was all on top of my primary role of art director for Limn magazine which was headed towards a metamorphosis...
The Limn delivery trucks needed to be iconic for an eclectic San Francisco crowd. Who better to adorn them than Le Corbusier and Philippe Starck?
What good is one store when you can have two? For the opening of our Sacramento sister store Dan asked me to create a series of billboards that would be a little on the quirky side. We had this little stuffed animal floating around the office and I thought what a great mascot it would make, and as you can see it was filled with tons of personality.
Limn was located in the heart of San Francisco's digital alley, and we in the middle the .com crash. Dan asked me to create a billboard that had some punch that would be hung on the Limn building. Ultimately these were a little too punchy. Personally I like to think they were ahead of their time.
One of my favorite assignments was creating arwork for an art show! The show was titled "Distortion & Desire" and it became just that for me. Eager to work outide of the digital realm, I created paper negatives of type and brought them into the dark room allowing me to distort and warp the type with an enlarger, and then processing the images as though they were film.
