 To me, color is like musical notes and I can hear them and I always hear them. For me, my fascination with typography and lettering goes back to the first time I realized that one of the first activities that men did was to record their thoughts and feelings on cave walls. These marks that they made on the walls in a way were kind of magical. There's a direct line that goes from that time to now and except that I feel like some of that magic has been lost. When I first started working in the design world, the predominant way of designing was Swiss design, a lot of Helvetica. Everything lined up with a grid and I felt that this was very stiff and what I really wanted to go for was, in a word, was freedom. I felt I was almost forced to start doing my own letter forms, which in turn always went back to everything that I had experienced and stored away when I was a kid. When I was eight years old, my dad, who was a writer, decided to do a wonderful thing for the two of us and he wrote a story called Two Boys on a Dinosaur. The story was about my brother Peter and I flying around in our spaceship. We land in the Gobi Desert. What do you know but that we find a dinosaur egg? And what happens afterwards is all kinds of complications ensue and it's all very fantastic and wonderful. Reading this book as an adult, I realized that my dad really got who I was. He understood my introverted nature and how I would fixate on things. In the 50s, I was surrounded by all kinds of incredible visual stimuli, whether it was the side of the good humor truck or a billboard that I would see on Times Square. I would just tend to focus in on these things and somehow absorb them. I was fascinated with the stars, with astronomy, with outer space. The way I use certain shapes, like circles, which appear to dominate a lot of my work, which is completely on a subconscious level. But I think it has a lot to do with my striving for some sort of mathematical perfection in the work. This is what I call a mechanical, which is really color separations. It's how I used to prepare my artwork for printing before the advent of the computer. There are copious notes, most of which refer to color. Here we see pantone chips that I've put for reference for the engraver, and I've also noted process color. Then hinged from four different sides of this mechanical are these vellum overlays on which I've done my inking. Each overlay is registered to each other overlay with these three register marks. Now I'll just lift these so you can see how I've hinged them from north, east, west and south. And finally reaching the bottom, which is just a texture over which all the artwork exists. I've had to make sure that in my inking that every place where a color butts up against another color is perfectly aligned. So, again, this process was extremely time consuming. A mechanical like this could have taken me anywhere from 20 to 40 hours of labor to do. My job is to solve another person's problem. What do they want to communicate? How do they want to appear to the world? And can I do that and still be true to my own vision? That's the complicated aspect of what I do. I might start out with a very simple idea or concept, but somehow in some way a lot of these designs take on a life of their own. And they almost direct me to do certain things. And as a result, a lot of my pieces have gotten to be pretty complicated pieces. Most people are very familiar with the first cover I did for Kiss for Rockin' Well Over. They had no idea what they wanted it to be. You know, I just asked a lot of questions about what they wanted to communicate. And when I finally came up with it, it was not anything like they would have imagined, but they loved it. I always end up surprising my clients with things that, and I do enjoy that, especially when that surprise turns into approval. My mission that I feel is to try to put back some of that fascination, some of that fantastic qualities into letter forms and allow them to speak. Not just as consonants or vowels, but in a way almost like ancient pictograms where they're telling a story. And it's not just the story that the letters spell out. When I get fan mail and they may say something that lets me understand that they really get what I was trying to do, that's worth more than the paycheck I get for doing that job. Saul, my art teacher, told me my parents had come to him. They wanted me to go to law school, and he convinced them that's not where my talents lie. That if I tried, I would get into Cooper Union, which would be free. And of course that sold them. He was responsible for what I eventually became.