find your inner Phil.
Who is Phil?
If you haven't had a chance to peep my résumé, then I'll give you a little run-down of who I am:
I recently graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth with an MFA in graphic design.
What's that you say? An MFA in graphic design?
Yep. Every once and a while I tell people to refer to me as “Master” Phil, but I'm only joking. Maybe….
I dabble in a number of things, from web and print design to various art projects. I kind of want to become famous for something, but I haven't decided for what. I've always heard that success is not about being in the right place at the right time but about being prepared for when that right time happens. I guess one of my goals is to make like a boyscout and be prepared.
Why am I here?
Well, first of all, I need a job. If you're interested in what you see, then give me a jingle. And by jingle, I mean email.
Second, I'm all about spreading the phil. For those not in the know, phil means love. Thus, spreading the phil is street for spreading the love.
Finally, I aim to make the world a better place. I know it sounds sappy and overly cliché, but it's true. I'd like to think that whatever I end up doing will make life for someone else awesome.
What are your thoughts on art/design?
In all honesty, I can't quite decide what exactly my thoughts are on either subject. I personally always strive for simplicity of form and visual elements, because I feel that it is sometimes easy to lose the crux of an idea in a convoluted pile of “things.”
I try to apply this idea of simplicity to both my art and design practices. It's really easy to throw every piece of information into a small space, but much more challenging to condense that information and still have it serve a purpose.
What's your deal with zombies and video games?
Video games have been a part of my life since I was very very young. My dad and I played his Atari quite a bit, and although I never quite understood the games I thoroughly enjoyed them. Supposedly, though, I flushed a few of his games down the toilet. I don't remember this, but hope that one of them was a copy of E.T.
As for zombies, the more I become interested in things like identity and personality and branding, I think that the stripping of an individual of all human elements—reason, compassion, cognitive thought, etc.—makes for an amazing story. One of my favorite movies, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, did perhaps the best job of linking humanity to consumption and identity. (The Dawn remake from a few years ago seemed to miss this layer. Why? I don't know. The content was originally there, they just decided to cut all two minutes of the one thing that made the movie more than a zombie slasher. Watch the extra features on the DVD.)