Dots & Pixels: How and why did you decide to take a leap and open Circa 78 Designs?
I’ve always been interested in art and wanted to go to art school, but that didn’t work out. I studied English in school and worked in publishing as a proofreader and a copyeditor for a few different companies. In 2010, I started at the Urban Outfitters home office in Philly as a copywriter, eventually moving into their web production department.
My friend and I opened this boutique store in 2006, selling clothing and art that we made, and that was the first time I thought that creating my art would be a really fun thing to do to make a living. I started really making art again in 2014 and sold it on Instagram and Society6. It just kind of snowballed from there.
After more than a decade working in print, why do you think people still crave this medium?
I think part of the appeal is the limited nature of print — at least for the kind of work I do. It’s the idea of something that is not available all year, something that is kind of special. I think people want something more than stuff they can get delivered to their door in 24 hours…I think people want to be part of a small group that grabbed this really cool thing in the short moment it was available.
Do you know what it is about the 1970s that keeps inspiring your work?
I was born in 1978. I have a picture of myself as a kid on Christmas morning with a Hungry, Hungry Hippos game and the box it came in is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It has all these arrows on it and the colors are just perfect…it’s one of these things that’s just burned into me. It’s hard to just switch it off. I do a lot of animation work too and I’m always trying to capture a Sesame Street in 1982 kind of vibe.
This year’s 12-month wall calendar is such a cool project. Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting it together?
When I started doing calendars a few years ago, they were one-page, year-at-a-glance calendars, but I always wanted to do a 12-month calendar you would hang on the wall. Because it’s a calendar, I try to choose colors or designs that represent the month.
In terms of process, I work mainly digitally. I make designs in Illustrator and tweak them in Photoshop. By August, I usually start thinking about what I want the calendar to look like. I gather stuff I’ve created throughout the year, put everything in Illustrator so I can see the year and decide what I want to feature. Each month’s image is printed only on one side. I do that so people can cut out the images and keep them. The idea is to create prints that people can pop in a frame and are worthy of hanging on a wall.
I spent a lot of time on Etsy, eBay, and Pinterest before designing the first wall calendar looking at old calendars from the late 70s and 80s to see how they were laid out and what they looked like. My goal is to create something that could have been hanging on my wall when I was five years old — that’s kind of the touchstone for everything I do.
