thomas quinn

The Chicago ambigram shirt I made, shown upside down to really prove that it reads the same both ways. Nashville and Texas shirts also available, but you’ll have to tilt your head weird if you want to see those upside down.

Last year I designed a number of ambigrams (lettering that reads the same right side up and upside down) and decided to make some enamel pins, stickers, and shirts of the designs.

An anamorphic installation I recently completed at the Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky. It surrounded a “distracted driving simulator” in which you could drive a car using an Oculus Rift and a real steering wheel and pedals, which was designed to teach the importance of staying focused while driving.

I just launched Pocketknife—a font I’ve been designing in my spare time for a while. Click here to buy it on MyFonts.

I’m finally able to share the logo I designed for the Gatorade 50th Anniversary campaign that launched yesterday, made up of different athletes, bottles, slogans, and logos from throughout their history. It was a real pleasure to work on this project, not only because it is the most high profile project I’ve ever worked on, but also because I’m a big sports fan and have been a Gatorade drinker since forever. The logo execution might not be breaking amazing new ground in design, but I believe it accomplishes the goals of the campaign: to communicate the history and impact of Gatorade in a single simple mark. Click through the images and read the captions to find out a little bit more about the process.

When I was given the opportunity to design the cover (and interior) of the new 826CHI book "The Windows Reflect Anything", a collection of stories by Chicago high school students, I knew I wanted to incorporate two things: a literal reference to the title of the book, and hand-drawn typography. Originally I was hoping to combine the two by putting some piece of hand-drawn lettering in a window and staging a carefully taken photography, but time and logistics just made that too difficult. Instead, I decided to do the two things separately and combine them later.

The photo was a result of an afternoon walking around Wicker Park, to have the photo be someone relatively close to 826CHI. After taking dozens of ugly photos along Milwaukee Ave, I ended up taking the photo of the reflection of a CTA train window with myself and the 6 corners artist lofts in the reflection.

The lettering was a little more complicated. The final product wasn't too far from my initial sketches, but it was discovered after I had finished my first comps of the cover that I had been given the wrong title for the book, and I had to change my lettering from saying "The Windows Reflect Anything" to "The Windows Reflect Everything". Unfortunately, that meant I had to lose the interlocking W and A from my earlier version, which was a bit disappointing, but it allowed me to add some different type styling. As a result I had to adjust the W in Windows and draw a new lower half of the cover. I kept all of my previous lettering that wasn't affected and drew the final word within the same space as the original drawing, then combined the two drawings on the computer. Adding some coloring and laying it over the photography was the final step.

I recently completed this new anamorphic typography installation for the Chicago Design Museum, a pop-up museum set up in downtown Chicago through the month of June 2013. Anamorphic typography is a spatial experience in which an arrangement of letters look perfectly set from a single point within a space, while looking wildly distorted from any other perspective.

My Etsy store is now launched to sell the posters pictured above. The "Best Things" poster is available in both black and white for $25 and is gold foil stamped. The Helvetica Logos poster is offset printed in silver ink and is $20.

The "Best Things" poster is something I had the idea for years ago. It is an expression of the uneasy relationship I have with branding, and the fine line between communicating the values of a brand and selling a dishonest image. The logos used are:

T Mobile, H&M, Internet Explorer / Beats by Dre, Electronic Arts, Sony, Twitter / Texaco, Hasbro, IBM, Nintendo 64, Gucci, Sega / iPhone (iPod, iMac, etc.), New York Times / Louis Vuitton, Zippo, Ford, Dell / Acura, Toys R Us, ESPN, Netflix, Chili's, Starck / Toyota, Hewlett-Packard, Tropicana, NY Yankees, General Electric, Subway