Type design, textiles, book covers and more: Willie Shaw brings function and beauty in equal measure to his graphic design practice

It’s Nice That: How did you come to be a graphic designer?

Willie Shaw: I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia called Havertown. I think I was always drawn to design without knowing what it was called. When I was little I was obsessed with road signs and symbols like the handicap icon. I drew a lot of graffiti in my notebooks. I was also drawn to Apple and their products. There was something magical about the way Steve Jobs spoke about them.

Something clicked for me in high school when I took a class on advertising that taught Adobe Illustrator. I asked for the program for my birthday and got a little obsessed with it. I had always been a good student and planned to go into medicine or engineering. I spent a year of university on a pre-med track but I failed my first chemistry exam, which sparked me to realise that this was probably the only chance I’d get to study design, so I took a leap of faith and applied to the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Dieter Rams is on the opposite end of the design spectrum. His strict adherence to modernist principles of form and function made me think critically about the world around me and how it had been designed. It’s one of those things where once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I’ve always been drawn to logic and problem-solving and his level of quality and craft really blew me away.

INT: Can you talk us through your creative process and how you want your work to progress after graduation?

WS: My favourite kind of work, regardless of the subject, has some level of interaction with the end user. Printed matter that people pick up and read, information hierarchies that make something easier to understand, signage that guides people through an experience. At the start of a project, I do as much research as I can on the subject and pull a bunch of reference images together. Once I’ve got a fair amount of material in front of me I sketch as many different ideas as I can, quickly and at a low fidelity.

Most of this early stuff is terrible but it helps to get the obvious or cliched ideas out of the way; interesting stuff usually starts happening after the 20th sketch or so. I’ll come back to my sketches in a day or two with fresh eyes and pick out a few things that have potential. From there it’s a process of iteration and refinement: doing many versions of a few concepts and graphically refining them.

Of course, none of this happens in a bubble. I’m constantly showing work and getting opinions from friends and from whoever is in the role of creative director. At SVA, that was my portfolio instructors Pablo Delcan and Ben Grandgenett.

Right now I see graphic design as a way to get my foot in the door of the broader art and design community. I want to learn the business. How to get work approved, how to attract and manage clients. Down the line, my dream would be to open a small and nimble studio that can direct any kind of creative project: architecture, branding, objects, graphic design, art direction, industrial design, clothing. I’ve heard a lot of creatives that I respect say it’s better to be a specialist than a generalist, but if that’s true, it’s a lesson I’m going to have to learn the hard way.

INT:Take us through a few of your key projects and the stories behind them.

WS: Roads With Cars And Songs is a photobook that pairs shots of cars driving on highways with curated playlists. The original assignment was to create a photobook with images sourced from the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library. I spent a month combing through their files of images before I settled on these photos of cars on highways. The images were nice on their own but my instructors and I felt it needed another dimension to give the book a reason for existing. The idea to pair playlists with the images is a reference to the music we listen to on road trips. Each playlist draws from a different genre or mood or time period—I wanted everyone who picked up the book to be able to find a collection of songs that they felt connected to.

I love working on book covers and print work in general. It’s a lot of fun designing things that make me want to pick them up and examine them. I’m particularly fond of the box set I designed for a set of Stephen McCauley books. The gradients on the covers references two characters who are moving in and out of each other's lives.

Sometimes I will design a typeface if I need something that I can’t find; other times I’ll draw a letter that I really like and then I want to see what the whole font looks like. Cadmium, for example, is a variable font which ranges from ultra-bold to thin. It started with this super thick ‘G’ that I had drawn for an identity I was working on, and I ended up using it as an experiment to teach myself about variable fonts. Firminy is a quirky sans with letterforms inspired by the church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy, France, which was the last major work by Le Corbusier. Both of these typefaces could use a good deal of refinement; right now, I’m working on improving my level of craft.