old business card design, circa 1999

When I was 19, I traveled to Paris for my second college internship (the first was as a photographers assistant in Cleveland. Not as glamorous as Paris, but I still learned a lot.)

For three months, I worked in the art department learning how to design websites while attempting to improve my French.

Over Memorial Day weekend I spent time going through some old files, and discovered these design mock-ups I had made.

It’s amazing that these were done 10 years ago. Check out the browser!

Most of the time, the designers were given a website to create from scratch. They’d fill me in on the specs, give me logos and other assets, then set me loose to create my own interpretation.

Ah, the inside page mockup.

This was the briefly the homepage of my site, when my work was more photo/art based. And waaay before the days of WordPress.

This was my first crack at a corporate website.

Aaand the corresponding inside page example.

I came up with this name just for the sake of the demo design. I think I read something disturbing about conspiracy theory that day.

And the ridiculous alt version.

This was a design for cifani.com, in case my family ever did decide to build a site (we never did).

See them all:

Over the holiday weekend, I finally gave myself a chance to dig through a bunch of old materials from college and grad school. I discovered all kinds of art projects I had totally forgotten about!

Here’s a video piece I created in grad school. It’s one of the very first that pretty much taught me the basics of Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

I’m quite amused watching it all these years later (especially by the part with the flashing eyes!).

I recall having a lot of fun shooting and cutting up the assets for this, but I’m not sure why I decided on such a weird aspect-ratio.

I was clearly quite the rebel all the way back in 2002.

My good friends over at Kulture Kick hipped me to a few events surrounding the work of formative painter & pop iconographer Ryan McGinness.

Over the next month, a number of events and installations are happening around town including three gallery shows, new work at both Standard Hotel locations, and a nude model draw-a-thon (surprising, but not shocking. In March he released his second installation of the series “New Blacklight Women,” and who can forget when he took his series debut to a strip club at Art Basel Miami last year?).

If that’s not enough, he’s also showing SponsorshipREDUX at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects gallery. The work features a dissemination of corporate sponsors’ logos based on work he showcased at BLK/MRKT Gallery in 2003.

And of course, there will be parties.

A listing of events can be found here.

For more:

RyanMcGinness.com