Thirty Years in the Trade

Art director, thirty years in the trade, twenty at Better World Advertising.

Halifax

The training was NSCAD, Honors Communication Design. Rhetoric under Hanno Ehses, who taught that every design choice performs an argument. Letterpress under Peter Brooks at the Dawson Printshop, where a paragraph is something you assemble by hand and answer for. The thesis put the two together: rhetorical principles, extended to typography on the web. It took a quarter century to realize the tool.

In my senior year the school itself became a client. NSCAD's identity had been used and altered a dozen ways through the eighties and nineties; graduating into the new millennium, I worked with the school's outreach coordinator, Terry Bailey, to distill it back to its core: an exterior of minimal authority, sleek and conceptual, with room for chaos and creativity inside it wherever the medium allowed. That system carried the academic calendar for 2000–2002, the annual report for the year just closing, the Portfolio Day poster, and the promotion for the lecture series and the school's wider outreach.

Then Impact Communications, and type at architectural scale: the wayfinding system, the welcome kiosk, and the twelve-foot top-of-building signage for 1801 Hollis Street, a landmark on the Halifax skyline. The 1801 subverted its own history: old numeral forms brought onto a contemporary baseline, then finished with a nautical swoosh, a nod to the maritime heritage of the Halifax waterfront.

I slipped away from corporate design work to move toward the things I was interested in, art and music and social justice, and took on the role of Art Director at The Coast, Halifax's alt weekly. Got my ass handed to me every week trying to get out a clean paper while everyone was missing deadlines and the editor was doing his best Daily Bugle routine.

San Francisco

In September 2006 I joined Better World Advertising, the San Francisco studio Les Pappas founded on a single rule: the work has to matter. HIV prevention, foster care, harm reduction, immigrant communities, tobacco, climate. The studio archive holds two hundred and twelve campaigns for one hundred and eighty-nine clients across sixteen issue areas. The pieces that follow are drawn from it: four bodies of work and four standouts, every client named, every award dated.

The tool

In 2026 the thesis finally shipped: Typeset.us, a paragraph compositor that holds a line to the composing room's standard of measure, rhythm, and the rag answered for, and then grades its own output in public, where anyone can check the work. A quarter century between the argument and the machine that carries it out. This edition closes with that story.