About me

I live in Philadelphia with my partner Leah and our little Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix named Maude. I was born here and have spent much of my life in the area, though I’ve also done stints in Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York.

I grew up drawing and dreaming of being an animator, and I eventually pursued commercial art and found my way into graphic design. Though my education was mainly focused on print, I soon pivoted to the web. This was in the midst of the regrettable dot com bubble, but I wasn’t opportunistic. I just loved the revolutionary idea that anyone could make their interests and ideas widely available on the web, and as a design medium, its lexicon was still taking shape.

Over the years, as my client work overtook my personal work, my aesthetic priorities shifted from manic self-expression to straightforward clarity. A decade of downsizing in a tiny Brooklyn apartment probably also did its part to inform my somewhat minimalist design sensibility: I tend to keep taking pieces away until the thing breaks, and then put the last one back in. Whenever possible, I aim for my design work to benefit the common good and help entertain, inform, or otherwise improve the lives of underserved audiences.

These days I’ve been reconnecting with my creative roots, getting back to exploring form in the absence of function. The art practice I’m slowly building incorporates many of the skills I’ve accumulated, from painting to programming, and while it inevitably draws from my hardened rationalist design tendencies, I’m making room for more messy and organic impulses as well. A recurring theme seems to be the nuts and bolts of image reproduction, and how chemical, mechanical, and digital imaging systems, generally understood to be functional means to expressive ends, can actually be sublime expressive ends in and of themselves.

This site

I love the web, but I don’t love what’s become of it. It’s over-engineered, overrun with slop, and dominated by data-harvesting gated communities that thrive on invective and conspicuous consumption. So I work hard to make my site an avatar of the open, independent, human-centered web I want to see: It’s a place to share the minutia of my personal enthusiasms on my own terms.

The site first launched in March of 2002, and this, the seventh version, met its public in September of 2025. Among other things, it collects most of what I’ve posted over the years on my own domains, various social networks, and other places around the web and beyond, and I wrote a series of posts about how and why I made it. Previous versions of the site are no longer updated but are still online for posterity:

Fun facts

• I want to be famous, but only so I can be invited on Celebrity Jeopardy!, since I would have a much better chance of winning there than on regular Jeopardy!, where I would surely be eaten alive.
• While I’m basking in my fame, the people booking the Criterion closet and Amoeba Records’ What’s in My Bag? are also welcome to contact my agent, who is me.
• I think the world should have more libraries and trees, fewer guns and cars and data centers, and no billionaires or death sentences.
• I’m good at playing an invisible guitar, and I did so on the competitive circuit for 12 seasons. My alter-ego, Windhammer, is an eight-time US Air Guitar national finalist, twice finishing second in the nation, and once finishing sixth in the world.
• I can play a real guitar, too, but I’m not as good at that.