My daughter at Pre-College

Back to School

In September 1979 I came to Pratt Institute after a couple of stints at two community colleges. Even with a little junior college under my belt and scholarship money in my pocket I was still not prepared for Pratt. Not the program per se, or the talent that oozed out of every student but the opportunities the school presented and the diversity of the faculty and student body. Maybe I was too fragile, or stupid, or unaware at the time because for the prior couple of years I wasn’t up against much competition. Now I was among the talent elite, from around the world and I was a “neighborhood guy” who was lucky to be there. I was brought down to earth pretty quick and that was a good thing.

My family was from the Clinton Hill area and I grew up only a few miles from the school and up until then my entire life revolved around a few squares miles that surrounded the borders of Queens and Brooklyn. Even though I was on campus many times I had no idea, or for that matter conception, of what the school would mean to me in the future. The truth is that without Pratt I would have not amounted to much. I wouldn’t teach. There is no design office. There are no trips abroad or other cities to work on projects. I have a set of skills that were honed at the “Institute” and those skills have allowed me to enjoy a diverse life, one that has been enhanced by my ability to “see,” and enriched by the gifted and talented people I have met there. This is what Pratt bestows on to you. You grab it and run with it!

It’s been 30 years since I started, and today will mark the beginning of my 25th year teaching but what’s more significant about today is that it’s my daughter, Stephanie Bridget’s first day at Pratt. “Pratt gives you more than an education,” a close friend from Pratt remarked yesterday at breakfast. I hope that’s true for my daughter, much the same as it is for me.

Michael Gerbino

A Day in Chicago

It's not often that tourists jostle for photos in front of your work, while a phalanx of photographers and newscasters covering a national story that your design and planning played a part in. Yesterday was all about the headlines– Willis who? Sears Tower gets new name; Willis Tower Becomes Official: Sears Tower Renamed; Daley welcomes Willis Tower. Things like that don’t happen every day and we were a part of it, and I am very proud of that.

Charlie with my daughter Stephanie Bridget, 1991

Influences

This Saturday May 16th will mark the second anniversary of Charles Goslin’s death. He is arguably one of the most influential professors at Pratt Institute and an inspiration to countless graphic designers, illustrators and ad men and women. His art was simple and resolute and he rarely used a superfluous word or image. He simply created timeless, elegant and sophisticated graphic imagery.

In a time when newspapers squeeze ads on their front pages and while I am treated to a daily diet of pop-up ads and bad design smothered in drop shadows, squiggly lines and incongruous images he was poignantly refreshing. It was very simple with Charlie; a paint stroke equates to art, an hourglass suggests time, a heart indicates love. He created simple solutions that a four-year-old boy or eighty-year-old woman could decipher. I miss the simplicity of it all and I miss Charles Goslin.

Matt Stern

Arte del Giorno

By my friend Matt Stern, a portrait of me with hair.

Bridget Titone

Revisionist Sixties

I was gently admonished yesterday by a student for posting the term "old school" instead of OG on my blog. OG in today's parlance translates to "original gangster" and I try to avoid that term at all costs as a kid from a volatile neighborhood where young men flaunted big cars, pinky rings and large amounts of money snugly wrapped in rubber bands. As you can image being a designer, or artist, was frowned upon but I was from an artistic family whose grandmother made her own pizza and a truly gifted mother who wrote poems and painted on anything that was not glued down.

The peace rock is my mother Bridget Titone's artistic response to the latter stages of the never-ending Vietnam War. A war that I was visually treated to every night on TV throughout the sixties and early seventies. You see very little television war coverage in our OG era, Iraq, Afghanistan or otherwise but these brutal conflicts are still very much out there and not giving peace much of chance.

Photo: Michael Gerbino

Influences

This is my first blog.

When I came into the office today I was greeted to a lot of pleasant changes and the name of a carpenter that worked for me in the past came up. We actually met on a construction site when I was a teenager. I was to be his assistant. The only problem was that he did not want an assistant or helper and he dubbed me "Mikey hands-in-pockets" for all the hard work I did not do for him.

We developed a relationship over the years and he became a huge influence on me. This is a man who smuggled himself into the country, in the belly of a gas truck to find a better future for his family. He worked 16-hour days, every day and was the greatest carpenter I have ever met: a genius with wood who single-handedly renovated my office and co-built my apartment with another brilliant carpenter and artist, Matt Stern.

The photo is from 1986 the last year the Mets won the World Series taken with an old school Mamiya RB67.