katruth.info

I'm going on my third year in the same apartment in Cap Hill. I feel really lucky to have found the place at all and I like my management company, neighbors and walkable historic neighborhood. Rare words online, right? I dunno, I feel like you may really attract the energy you put out, and if you're intentional with your energy and inspirations you may find that it takes time to feel out a person or space. And with space, it's taken me about two years to dial in my living area.

I have spent so much time the past two years in Denver going to various thrift stores in the city and the surrounding suburbs, any destination trip required a stop at the local Arc or Goodwill. I have really truly balled out, it's the nicest city I've ever gotten to thrift in and I lived near the Bay Area! Just so much vintage furniture from estate clear outs. This process of seeking and finding, trial and error, sifting and sorting through the mismatched masses has completely informed my taste and style of interior design and decor. I also have rented all of my adult life, so it's all about things you can set up and nail to the wall, nothing too permanent. 

Moving every few years as I usually do, my idea with this new set-up was to make sure everything I have is lightweight and modular. I got really into midcentury plastic – a new material at the time that was being used in injection molding projects for really interesting, cutting-edge space-agey furniture and decor. I like finding this kind of thing on the cheap in varying conditions because I can enjoy it and not be too precious about it. 

The specifics I look for: postmodern plastic-frame clocks, space age coated metal lamps, brushed-aluminum-framed artwork, Snoopy, Moomin, Miffy, '70s sketch art, vintage art books and materials, vintage novels, oversized everyday objects in varying mediums. Eldon postmodern office supplies. Italian space age anything. Alessi, Hank Lowenstein, Milo Baughman, Matisse, Picasso. Ingrid, Heller, melamine and teak and acrylic, bentwood and chrome and art glass. I just have so much fun with it and thrifting and looking things up has taught me so much about the history of art and design. Yay!

Take a look at it all, I'm not really sure what to call it. It's not an aesthetic per se, it's just me.

Decorating the Apartment

I've spent a lot of working hours in Adobe Illustrator, but I wouldn't say professionally. I started working with CS3 in high school journalism, begged for the CS5 software for Christmas in 2010 and got busy vectorizing and laying type to my heart's content. Unpaid, for fun. Since then, I've worked my magic mostly for friends and work acquaintances, just whenever someone has an event or promotion and it comes up. Because my forays into design are so sporadic, it feels like my style and ability have stayed the pretty much the same all these years. If you don't use it, you lose it, as they say.

In high school journalism we were working with black and white and full-color newsmagazine page designs, and we were just kids so it was us finding magazine layouts we liked and straight up jacking them. Tweak a few things. I won some national awards for this. We were excited about licensing fonts from the Hoefler Frere-Jones type foundry. I imagine adults were like, wow it's cool that teenagers are using these industry standard programs pretty well! But it really is weird how these programs are still the industry standard – I could be 16 years into a career? Never thought of it that way. No, I did and at every turn I chose to freelance slash not make a big deal out of it. Because in my mind, I was borrowing, stealing, cheating, basically just pretending to be a professional graphic designer.

Anyway, for the past two or three years I've been really inspired by tales of the graphic design of old, laying out cuttings and doing pastings and using light-box desks and whatnot. I was completely taught and raised on the digital side of things so now that I'm an adult I want to get to the root of everything. The skeuomorphism of every one of these Adobe programs evaded me in my youth, because I was unaware of the original processes for design. Things just existed and were the way they were. But when I crack open an old 1970s issue of Horizon magazine and see these beautiful, interesting vibrant designs and advertisements it kind of clicks for me. I was copying copies of copies of copies.

What I'm getting at is that I long deeply for truth and knowledge. In order to be a master of an art or craft, you must understand its inception and evolution and from there, learn how to create among the things that inspire you through technique and experience. This is not at all how I see my experience with graphic design. I'm simply a part-time participant in a beautiful art form, but it's a joyful experience every time. When I do it for friends.

Decorating the Apartment

Making Graphics for Friends