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Entries by Alphachimp (525)

Friday
Jan142005

The Guerrilla, the Entrepreneur and the Motivation to Change the World

Reading two or more good books at a time can be like holding two mirrors up to each other; the ideas reflect the other and creates a tunnel through time and space. The effects can be trippy.



Two of the three books I'm reading sketch out mirror figures of the passionate revolutionary: the guerilla and the social entrepreneur.

The Social Entrepreneur



A detailed look at the motivations and trials of Ashoka Fellows is chronicled in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein.







These passionate social entrepreneurs have been tapped by the organization to transfer a social mission into a social enterprise. The Fellowship provides the time and resources for Fellows to quit their jobs and concentrate energy on hammering out the business processes, fundraising, generating community participation and driving political will to ensure measurable change.



Bill Drayton, former head of the EPA and McKinsey consultant, defines the four qualities of the social entrepreneur as:

  • Creativity: Both the ability to set goals in the future and the chutzbah and agility to overcome obstacles.

  • Entrepreneurial Quality: Beyond altruism, energy and managerial skills, Ashoka asks, "Will this person change the pattern in the whole field?" Drayton sums up how they differ from artists, social workers and academics, saying that entrepreneurs can't rest until their ideas take hold across all of society; they stay up at night asking "how-to" questions in a quest to bring theory into action.

  • Idea Resilience: Will the idea outlast the entrepreneur? How many lives will be affected or improved?

  • Ethical Fiber: Drayton tells others to go with their gut and ask themselves, "In a dangerous situation, would you be totally at ease if this person were with you?"




  • Bornstein's blog has a detailed story tracing the evolution of one man's motivation to become a social entrepreneur.



    The Guerrilla



    Oddly enough, investigative journalist, Jon Lee Anderson has asked the same questions about self-proclaimed freedom fighter as Bornstein has asked regarding entrepreneurs. Namely, why do guerilla fighters endure the hardship, degradation, danger, tedium and isolation of live on the run? Why do they risk everything to fight for an ideal; one which they may never see take hold in the their lifetimes?



    Anderson's earlier work, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, originally published in 1992, has been re-released with a new foreword, in which the author emphasizes the dangers of assuming we understand "the insurgents" we face in Iraq.



    As a storyteller his writing is consistently rich and humane. As a journalist , he adroitly crafts a probing analysis of the motivational factors driving young men and woman to join insurgent factions in areas as diverse as El Salvador, Western Sahara, Palestine and Burma.



    "Guerillas are people living in defiance of their would-be conquerors, according to their own laws and beliefs, telling their own stories and legends--making history," writes Anderson in the new foreword.



    His book looks across the motivations of the different groups, with the author involving us in the texture and patterns of life inside the parallel reality of each movement. Anderson examines the hardships of making war while making a living, retelling each group's unique "myths of creation" that give meaning and justification to the resistance. He finds that each faction evolves its own system of justice and rules for joining The Family; death, in most cases, seems to be the only way out.



    A writer who has survived battle zones in El Salvador, Afghanistan and many parts of Africa and Asia, Jon Lee Anderson remained in Iraq during the American invasion and published a first-hand account in The Fall of Baghdad.







    His book on Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997) is the book that established Anderson's reputation as one of the great foreign correspondents of his time.



    On Global Guerrillas



    For a constantly updated blog on the topic, look to John Robb. He has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central/South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Robb served at the Department of Defense Counter-terrorism in a tier one counter-terrorist unit that worked closely with Delta and Seal Team 6; he was a top technology analyst covering Internet technologies at Forrester Research; and, he built a company and grew it from $0 to over $23 m a year in revenue and 135 people. This gives him a unique view of the motivations behind both the guerilla and the startup entrepreneur.





    PHOTO: Infantry securing main gun hole, An Najaf, 14-AUG-2004, John Baker



    Robb examines the influence of connectivity on the effectiveness of small distributed networks to inflict maximum damage on big systems (like the US military).



    In global guerrilla warfare (a combination of open source innovation, bazaar transactions, and low tech weapons), the point of greatest emphasis is called a systempunkt. It is the point in a system (either an infrastructure or a market), always identified by autonomous groups within the bazaar, where a swarm of small insults will cause a cascade of collapse in the targeted system.


    www.globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/

    Monday
    Jan102005

    Artists Embedded in War



    Forward Operating Base (FOB) Cuervo in Baghdad. Steve Mumford, 2004.



    Much has been made of the embedded journalists in Iraq, but what of other types embedded artists?



    This week's show of NPR's This American Life with host Ira Glass, was titled "In Country: Stories from inside Iraq". It included interviews with Arkansas National Guardsmen stationed a few miles from Baghdad and clips from a new documentary TV series about them, Off to War, on the Discovery channel.









    This unit shipped to Iraq with trucks manufactured between 1956 and 1964. Only four of 44 vehicles had proper armor when they arrived. The documentary follows several soldiers and their families back home.



    During the First Gulf War, Executive Producer of the documentary, Jon Alpert, entered Baghdad at the height of the bombing. He was the only TV reporter able to get out of the country with uncensored footage. He provided the first documentation of extensive civilian deaths caused by the bombing. His reports were awarded the Italian Peace Prize by the president of Italy. One year after the war, Alpert returned to Baghdad to conduct an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein.



    Brothers, Brent and Craig Renaud, were born and raised in Little Rock, Ark and have been working with Alpert since 1995 on projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bolivia, China, Pakistan and Iraq.



    Listen to NPR's Scott Simon interview with the Renaud Brothers, Weekend Edition - Saturday, November 6, 2004.





    The same show also profiled Steve Mumford, an embedded artist creating sketches and paintings of the scenes he's witnessed in Iraq: patrols, arms cache demolitions, raids, roadblocks, and life in Forward Operating Bases or FOBs.







    [ More News from Iraq via New York Times International ]



    Art and war have been emeshed through the centuries. The 19th century Spanish artist Goya produced hundreds of images, including a vast series of prints, titles "Disasters in War", depicting the ravages of Napoleon's army in Spain.



    Francisco de Goya. Desastre de la Guerra, 39;  Grande Bazana! Con Muertos! c.1810-1811. Etching and aquatint.



    However, it wasn't really until the 20th century that a generation of artists unleashed an unromanticized vision of war after serving in the armies of Europe during World War I.





    The Night by Max Beckmann. 1918-19. Oil on canvas. 52 3/8 in x 601/4 in.

    Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf






    Wieland Herzfelde. Tragigrotesken der Nacht: Träume. Illustrated by George Grosz. Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1920.



    Die Bruecke and other German Expressionists, such as Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix, used a fast, aggressive visual language inspired by folk art to convey the emotionally torn fabric of 1920's Europe.



    During World War II, young American artists like Ed Reep, were swept up in the conflict as active duty soldiers, but saw the war through the keen eye of the artist.



    Soon after graduating from The Art Center School, and five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Reep enlisted in the Army as a Private. After getting an assignment as an Overseas Artist, Reep skeched and painted throughout North Africa and Italy. He often found himself in the thick of battle and was repeatedly strafed, bombed, and shot at while painting the war. He was awarded the Bronze Star, promoted twice on the battlefield and left the army as a Captain.



    During World War II more than 100 U.S. servicemen and civilians served as 'combat artists'. They depicted the war as they experienced it with their paintbrushes and pens. Their stories have never been told, and for fifty years their artwork, consisting of more than 12,000 pieces has been largely forgotten until the PBS documentary, They Drew Fire, aired in May 2000.





    I fought the war more furiously perhaps with my paintbrush than with my weapons. And I always put myself in a position where I could witness or be a part of the fighting. That was my job, I felt. And I was young, kind of crazy, I suppose. ~Ed Reep


    Modern day artist Joe Sacco carries that tradition into the evolving genre of comics, graphic novels, and a new form of visual journalism. Sacco takes his first-hand experiences in listening to survivors in Bosnia, the West Bank and Palestinian refugee camps.



    His artwork guides us through tense, lucid narratives, packed with detail, in Safe Area Gorazde and his two part masterpiece, Palestine.



    The ultimate embedded artist is Art Spiegelman, most famous for his Pulizter Prize winning graphic novel Maus Parts I & II.



    His work is inspired by woodcuts and comics from the 1920s and 1930s, and Maus uses the metaphor of cat and mouse in the retelling of his father's experiences as a Polish Jew in wartime Warsaw and Auschwitz, and later as an aging immigrant in New York coping with the loss of his wife.





    "Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep. When two of the mice speak of love, you are moved, when they suffer, you weep. Slowly through this little tale comprised of suffering, humor and life's daily trials, you are captivated by the language of an old Eastern European family, and drawn into the gentle and mesmerizing rhythm, and when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world."

    ~Umberto Eco


    Spiegelman's most recent work, the tabloid sized book reflecting the very real–and very surreal–streets of Manhattan on and after 9/11.



    In struggling to find a new visual language to frame the events and convey both the comedy and tragedy of the situation, Spiegelman turned back a hundred years to the masters of the broadsheet comics. In an essay, Spiegelmann explains that the artists of the comic strips our great-grandparents may have read as kids, like the Katzenjammer Kids and Little Nemo, were also dealing with the chaos of their age: urban growth, mass immigration, political corruption, ethnic tension, civil unrest in Europe and the US.





    Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda."

    ~from publishers Random House

    Monday
    Jan102005

    BaseCamp: High Altitude Project Management Tool

    BaseCamp is subscription software, PHP publishing, I think, that is scaleable according to how many projects you need to manage at once. Check out the details below and get organized!



    1 project=free

    3 projects = $12/month

    15 projects = $24/month

    35 projects = $49/month

    unlimited projects = $99/month



    Sounds expensive, except that it allows the user to set permissions for unlimited users, who aren't required to pay anything or to have any additional software beside their web browser.



    We started less than a month ago with the 3 project plan, and it swiftly became so core to our business processes, we upgraded immediately. Now we are evangelizing BaseCamp to all our clients. They have a really great BaseCamp Manifesto. So far, they are living up to it and making our mom-and-pop shop a happier place to work.

    Saturday
    Jan082005

    Looking at Houston's Future

    Alphachimp Studio is excited to join Russell Williams Group and Collaborative Strategies, Inc. in facilitating several sessions for the leadership of the Center for Houston's Future.

    Read inteview from CHF newsletter.



    See DigitalGlobe satellite image of Reliant Stadium in Houston, where Superbowl XXXVIII was played between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers on February 1, 2004.DOWNLOAD



    Most American cities and regions are planning for rampant growth, in the face of collosal deficits. And, any city leader worth his salt is asking tough questions about the future.



  • Energy: How are we going to keep the lights on in the face of higher demand and peaking oil reserves?

  • Brand Strategy: How do we understanding the shifting identity of our cities?

  • The Creative Class: What areas are attracting and retaining the most talented people, and how?

  • Game Theory: How can technology--especially simulations and advanced modeling--predict the problems and solutions of entire regions?

  • Population: How are we going to provide adequate housing without losing the soul of our neighborhoods?




  • Check out The Next American City for great articles and interviews tackling these issues. http://www.americancity.org/



    The magazine describes itself as:

    ...a new quarterly magazine by a new generation of urban thinkers and leaders that explores the transformation of America's cities and suburbs, asking tough questions about how and why our built environment, economy, society and culture are changing.


    Selected Articles



  • HUB CITY: Can Chicago Capture the New Economy the Old Fashioned Way? by Charles Shaw

  • REVIEW: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life) by Mackenzie Baris

  • PLAYING WITH URBAN LIFE: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture by Daniel G. Lobo with reporting by Larry Schooler

  • 15 MINUTES WITH: Rich Richman, One of the Country's Foremost Affordable Housing Developers by Seth A. Brown

  • NEIGHBORHOODS: Is East Atlanta Losing Its Soul? by Andrea Korber

  • Friday
    Jan072005

    Tips on How to Change the World

    David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World, has started a blog to capture stories from the field of social entrepreneurs. He has posted a fantastic story, titled Where does the motivation to cause change come from?, about Kailash Satyarth, the founder of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), an organization based in Delhi, India that has reportedly won release for 40,000 slave laborers, many of them children.



    From the "Fair Play" Campaign:

    "SACCS/BBAwould like to have ministers, leaders of opposition parties, MLAs, foreign diplomats, officers, public servants, celebrities, and businessmen declaring that they will not use children as domestic servants. Following this, SACCS/BBA would like to investigate some of them on their use of domestic child labour."



    Through his weblog, Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David cued me into Echoing Green, a group that is building capacity in the area of social enterprise through identifying visionaries, investing in innovation, providing hands-on support and connecting people. They have a great set of articles and how-to tips for organizations ranging from managing people and technology to building strong boards and maximizing the media.



    About Echoing Green



    Launched in 1987, Echoing Green's mission is to spark social change by identifying, investing and supporting the world's most exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch.



    Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society's most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to close deeply-rooted social, economic and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach his/her potential.



    Over the past 17 years, Echoing Green has invested over $22 million in seed and start up grants to over 380 social entrepreneurs and their innovative organizations.

    Thursday
    Jan062005

    Hemmingway's Notes on Dangerous Game

    More commentary on the difference between professionals and amateurs:

    "For any good man would rather take chances anyday with his life than with his livelihood and that is the main point about professionals that amateurs seem never to appreciate."

    ~ Ernest Hemmingway, "Notes on Dangerous Game: The Third Tanganyika Letter", Esquire: July 1934






    (sketchbook from modern day Tanzania--formerly Tanganyika. Peter Durand, 1999)

    Thursday
    Jan062005

    On Writing Well (Part 2)

    After my post on Blogging for a Better World through Writing Well, I was sent another gem from journalist and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, our friend and neighbor Diana Nelson Jones:



    Some words and phrases are blobs. Others are paintbrushes whose narrow meanings instantly create pictures in the reader's mind. They are specific and concrete, not general and abstract. A storyteller uses paintbrushes when he or she can. If nouns like problem, situation, reaction or benefit tumble thoughtlessly from his typewriter, he immediately stops to ask himself if he can be more specific, more pictorial. What is the problem, situation, reaction or benefit he refers to? Can he toss out the blob and replace it with a term carrying needle-sharp precision?



    ~ William Blundell, "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing"

    Wednesday
    Jan052005

    Christmas in the Balkans

    Writer Bruce Sterling spent this winter holiday in the Serbian capital of Beograde.



    With even the news in Iraq obscured by the tsunami catastrophe, it is hard to remember the news 10 years ago: The Soviet Union had dissolved; the Russian army pulled out of Eastern Europe; civil war rippled across the Balkans; and, the UN was bogged down by scandel and indecision watching an unfolding human tragedy.



    In 1994, Christmas was a very bleak time in the Balkans. There was the slow-motion genocide of Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Moslems grinding on. Sarajevo was smack in the middle of a 1477 seige (lasting from March 2, 1992 to March 19, 1996).



    Susan Sontag, who died last week, was still coping with the effects of cancer treatment when she left for the Bosnian capital, surrounded by Serb artillery and snipers.



    From The Guardian



    "There is something about facing a mortal illness that means you never completely come back. Once you've had the death sentence, you have taken on board in a deeper way the knowledge of your own mortality. You don't stare at the sun and you don't stare at your own death either. You do gain something from these dramatic and painful experiences but you also are diminished. There's something in you that becomes permanently sad and a little bit posthumous. And there's something in you that's permanently strengthened or deepened. It's called having a life."



    It was this mindset that took her to a besieged Sarajevo in the early 90s to direct Beckett's Waiting For Godot to the sound of bombing and sniper fire. Alan Little, who attended the opening night, described her presence there as being of "tremendous symbolic importance at a time when symbols really mattered. She didn't just swan in for three days and then leave. She stayed and worked." But she says few of her American friends understood her commitment.




    Terry Gross brings us Sontag's story on NPR's Fresh Air.





    A "Surviaval Map" depicting Sarajevo under attack.




    Fortunately, the arts survived in Bosnia, and Sarajevo plays hosts to many festivals throughout the year. Nebojsa Seric-Soba is a 33-year-old Bosnian artist who stayed in Sarajevo through the war and formulated an artistic credo under the siege.



    As a soldier he thought about war but dreamed about art.



    During the day, when his imagination carried him away, he jokingly thought about the possibility that art and war might intersect on the battle field.





    PHOTO:Bruce Sterling



    More about art in Sarajevo at Q+A: A magazine of Art and Culture.

    More maps and resources on Bosnia from the University of Texas, Austin here.

    Wednesday
    Jan052005

    Blogging for a Better World through Writing Well



    Click for enlargement




    By far, the biggest influence on me this year has been BlogNation. And, the best in the bunch is the crew at www.worldchanging.com.



    Since scribing for Alex Steffen's speech at Pop!Tech this October, I have been inspired to rise to the Worldchanging standard of publishing, in terms of:



  • Awareness of trends and tools

  • Collaboration with like-minded souls

  • Searching for meaning and utility

  • Publishing (ala PHP and blogware)

  • Social enterprise and entrepreneurs

  • And, most difficult, good writing




  • As we at Alphachimp try to raise the bar in sharing thoughts and tools on visual learning, graphic facilitation, problem solving, strategic planning, etc. we are always looking for simple rules to give structure to our work.



    I find the Worldchanging's Draft Contributor Guidelines to be more than worthy of emulation.



    1) Only positive recommendations. It's fine to review a tool which is itself critical or negative, but only if it offers something unique and useful to people working on that problem (or seeking to understand it). For example, Alex plans to review a book which describes the anatomy of failure � why things fail, and how � because its critical insights are really useful to people who want to succeed in their work. But the recommendation of the resource itself should be positive, overall: otherwise, why are we wasting the reader's time?



    2) Always a fresh angle. The resource reviewed should be either new (or newly-available), or the recommendation should explain why we're recommending this resource *now*: has there been a news event which this resource helps to better explain, or is an inferior new resource getting a lot of buzz (such that readers would be well-reminded of the existence of this older, superior one?)



    3) Pithy writing. Write short and strong. In general, while we like to prattle on (especially Alex), we aim for short recommendations, no more than three paragraphs(some things take longer to explain, and sometimes you'll want to review several related items in one recommendation, but the denser and pithier the writing, the better). Try to start with a strong, declarative first sentence.



    4) Excerpts. Including a few quotes from the resource recommended is a great idea. We italicize all stand-alone quotes, as well as putting in quotation marks. If you have a longer excerpt, you might think about pasting most of it into the "extended entry" box, which allows those who are interested to read more, while keeping the front page tight. A good guideline for choosing excerpts is that of the old Whole Earth Review, which is that a great excerpt illustrates the nature of the resource you're recommending and also provides an interesting thought or crucial bit of information for the casual reader who won't follow the link. Cherry-pick, in other words: pull the best quotes from the resource as excerpts in your recommendation.



    5) Why It Matters. It's a good idea to include not only a description of what the resource is but also some explanation about why it matters: Why is it good? How is it useful? How do you use it? What's innovative about it? What are the implications if its use were to spread? Feel free to be opinionated!




    Eventually, everyone I know who writes for a living--whether prose, fiction or code--gets cornered by me at a dinner party, and gets pestered for references and guides on writing well, for print and web alike.



    Columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Diana Nelson Jones, recommends the tried and true The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. A very handy on-line version is available at www.bartleby.com, which describes the work, originally published in 1918, as such:

    Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.




    Writer, actress and martial arts expert Blaed K. Spence of Treehouse Creative Studios, directed me straight to The Old Man, Himself, Ernest Hemmingway.



    I am fortunate to have a book of his collected journalistic pieces that I've carried with me for over ten years, By-Line Ernest Hemingway : Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. My particular tattered copy was pulled from a pile of trash in the bedroom belonging to an American band living in, of all places, Szczwiejoice, Poland.



    New Media designer Jason Simmons of GradientLabs directed me to a more modern topic addressed by Adam Mathes, Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata



    This paper examines user-?generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. MORE..




    A couple of more conventional titles I discovered during a holiday troll through a bookstore:



    On Writing Well, 25th Anniversary : The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (On Writing Well) by William Zinsser

    This is not a didactic lesson plan, nor a pompous "Behold! I'm a Writer" book. Instead, it is warm and conversational, while being very tightly written and focusing on the principles of good writing; which boil down to simplicity, clutter, style, the audience, words and how to use them. He also covers the basic forms of writing: interviews, travel writing, memoirs, tech writing, business, and the art of being funny.



    The Art of Styling Sentences by Ann Longknife and K.D. Sullivan is a slim, orderly exploration of the mechanics of sentece structure. The authors teach the reader how to craft better sentences. Period. They claim that the key to writing with more style--and with more variety--comes through understanding the 20 basic patterns of complex sentence construction. At first, I had flashbacks to diagraming sentences in Junior High, however, after the first two chapters, I came to read other writers' work with a renewed sense of appreciation for style.



    Feel free to send us any other recommendations, especially on writing for the web, for example Glenn Harlan Reynolds' The Good, The Bad, and the Bogly.

    Monday
    Jan032005

    New Year Inspiration: Art, Work and Studio Space

    In the wake of such destruction (and bickering over who is more generous and who is less stingy), I have been seeking inspiration from creative spaces and the creative people who inhabit them.



    Thanks to my friend, Jeanette, a fiber artist outside Chicago, I have received an dose of motivation in the form of David Seider's book, Artists at Work: Inside the studios of Today's Most Celebrated Artists.





    Seidner's photos of dramatic work spaces belonging to his friends, mentors and heros are augmented by his essays on the hard-working artists in the context of their private, creative laboratories.



    The studios profiled include modern masters: Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Francesco Clemente amoung many others others.





    Studios by the Sea: Artists of Long Island's East End
    is another glorious photogallery of artists' spaces, but the venue has left Manhattan for the weekend for the Hamptons.

    [Thanks to Jeanette for introducing me to it, and the Saiia-Shrimplin's for the gift certificate that bought it!]



    Showing the truly glorious along with the truly humble, this book by Bob Colacello and Jonathan Becker aptly illuminates the constant Bohemian tension: The compulsive need to flock together with like-minded souls, while craving to carve out a piece of solitude for one to work.



    And, most important for us to witness and to understand, whether the individual is tidy as a pharmacist or messy as a trainwreck, all the artists follow a single commandment: "Go to your studio and get to work!"



    Speaking of art as work, Milton Glaser has actually written the book on the topic; and, he has earned the right to brag about how much art and work has has done over the last 50 years.







    Hugely prolific, Glaser is one of the few true Renaissance men in this country: He is an original intellectual, an inspired teacher, a lover of Italy, as well as a deeply passionate New Yorker by both birth and training. Milton Glaser was a driving influence of the visual language of the 60's and 70's.



    Along with contemporaries Peter Max, Red Grooms and Seymour Chwast, Glaser is one of my personal heros in bringing joy and discipline to every project.



    Whether Glaser is redesigning a restaurant interior, creating the ultimate logo for a new beer or for NYC itself, laboring upon a series of illustrations inspired by Dante's inferno, or composing a poster for Shakespeare in the Park, his love of color, shape and metaphor weave through his entire body of work.