Enough about me

I'm James Ketsdever, a San Francisco Bay Area graphic designer and illustrator and Senior Designer and Principal at Sara Waters Design Group. I work digitally for the most part but have a long love affair with drawing, photography, typography, hand lettering and calligraphy.

My first serious design inspirations were the rock posters of SF Bay Area poster artists like Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, et al. Basically I've had permanent ink stains on my hands for most of my life. Less so since the advent of digital media.

I admit to working in a somewhat chaotic mix of styles. I will typically explore a technique for a while then abandon it like an old pair of sneakers in favor of something new and shiny, which ultimately may work against me as an artist and designer, but there you go. If I live long enough I may figure out where to place my focus. For now, this blog provides a playground/sandbox/laboratory to explore impulses as they arise.

A photojournalist by training, a lot of my work, especially the collage work, consists of images and ephemera from my own image collections as well as those from a variety of online lost and found bins, vintage stores and swap meets. My scanner is my BFF. The digital media work is ever-evolving and something I'm concentrating a lot on lately, trying to execute more work with real paint in the real world. The illustrator Maira Kalman is a hero as is her late husband Tibor, one of my first graphic design heroes.

I will always come back to words and pictures in some form because it will always feel like home, although sometimes it's good to leave home and venture out into uncharted territory once in a while. Thus I'm adding posts lately that are more words than pictures. An occasional poem.

 

 

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