For 15 years, I was the house artist at Maxwell's bar and nightclub in Hoboken, NJ, from 1998 until it closed in 2013. Below are just a handful of examples of some of the work that I did, including logo design, menu design, monthly band schedules, advertisements, and flyers.
I drew storyboards for a handful of Nick at Nite commercials in the late 1990s. Below are some samples of that work.
In the late 1990s, I drew artwork for a cautionary tale of inter-office gossip that was later animated in Flash for a piece on the then-new Oxygen Media website.
In the summer of 1996, I began working at Warner Bros. Records as the East Coast Alternative Marketing Regional out of the New York offices at Rockefeller Plaza. The thrust of the job was to build and maintain a base for developing artists using non-traditional marketing efforts. Basically, we were an in-house street team that dealt directly with independent music retailers and other lifestyle accounts (cafes, bars, bookstores, etc.) that would play music we might send them. It was a great job, and part of the last gasp of an era when major record labels still allowed artists the time to develop and find and audience. When the department was eliminated in 1998, I stayed on at the label in a new position for a half a year before finally packing it in and leaving the music industry.
As part of my Altmktg job, I designed flyers and covers for promotional CDs, wrote ad copy, and crafted mailers, a sampling of which is below. Please note that the typo in the Muffs copy was not my fault, and that none of the contact information in the letter at the bottom still exists! Hell, what's left of the NY branch of the company doesn't even work in that building anymore!
From 1989 to 1996, while managing BBC Records, I contributed a semi-autobiographical monthly comic strip, The Retail Adventures of Kalli & Rex to Warner Bros. Records' DIRT, a "faux-zine" that was sent out to independent record stores, college radio stations, and various other "tastemakers" in the music industry. The strip was successful in those circles, prompting the label to publish a collection of the complete run of K&R when the strip ended (I left music retail to move to—or next to—NYC to pursue my freelance career, and ended up working at Warner for a few years). WB also published a Kalli & Rex Calendar for 1996 as well. Below are the front and back covers for the collected edition and a few samples from the calendar. Both of them show up on eBay now and then.
As part of my job managing BBC Records in Lancaster, PA from 1988 to 1996, I redesigned the store's logo and did all of the artwork for advertising and in-house marketing. Below is a sampling of ads that I did for the store that appeared in a local monthly magazine. The punk esthetic was very intentional, as BBC was primarily an alternative record store.
For a personal history of my time there, go here.
