Five Apartments

I started writing this on my phone, thinking I’d maybe put it up on the site. When it was done, I felt it was overly personal and potentially uninteresting to other people. So I tucked it away. Then my hometown caught on fire—the Eaton Fire. In the chaos and sadness of connecting with old friends and sharing memories about buildings that had gone up in smoke, I found myself thinking a lot about the places we live and how they shape us. I decided to get this up. If you’re here for design and type, there are many stories that relate. I made rubber address stamps for the three apartments I shared with my wife, Maria Zizka. You’ll see them below along with some photographs.

The first place I lived that was just mine was a sunny studio on the edge of a courtyard, on a dead-end street, at the top of a hill, in Silver Lake. I had very few belongings. My wife teases that I kept one belt spread all the way out on the top of a cabinet because I had nothing else to put there. The night I moved in I realized the apartment was full of fleas from the previous occupants’ cat. After a frustrating week, it got sorted out. Just over the tops of the hills was a beautiful view of the downtown LA skyline.

I commuted to work, cooked dinner at night, and ran around the reservoir or played volleyball with my brother on the weekends. I did my grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s and cooked a lot of beans and tortillas. The kitchen had a nook with a table and built-in benches, a detail that felt very romantic and very LA.

I worked as a graphic designer at a small place in Hollywood. I very much wanted to be a type designer, but I didn’t even really know what that meant yet. The people I worked with were… spontaneous. At one point, my boss offered me the full set of Pantone books from the office because he had ordered new ones. I was too scared to say yes because I knew they were valuable (at the time, to me, very valuable) and I didn’t want to overstep. Plus I got the sense that things were not above board in the office. I was right—it turned out one of the staff members was embezzling funds from the business. Even so, I still regret not taking those Pantone books home with me!

When it’s hot and everything is quiet and dry, there’s a special thing that happens in Los Angeles in old apartments. You look absentmindedly across the room at a drawing table or a guitar that’s leaning against the corner where the walls meet, and this gold dust just rises off the floor and sits in the air. Time kind of slows down and stops for a second. The tiny remnants of an old building lit up in the day’s last rays of summer sun.

This apartment was the one that got away. I hardly lived there, because I was accepted into Type@Cooper.

I loved living by myself in Silver Lake, and all of a sudden I was sharing a small apartment with three other people and two crazy cats. One of the cats would consistently defecate on the floor. I had this tiny room—you could barely call it a room—and at first the neighborhood seemed so cold and uninviting. I didn’t really have any friends in New York at first. Once Type@Cooper started I met some new people and I had something I could pour myself into, and that helped a lot.

I worked at a letterpress shop, half the time designing for clients and the other half doing mundane tasks like sitting at the foil stamping press cranking out two-up business cards for many hours straight. But god I loved Type@Cooper. I would sprint across town after work to make it to class, and after class I would wander home dreaming about type. Totally cliche, but true. On the weekends, I would run around Prospect Park, go to the farmers market, and lie on my bed in my tiny room working on typefaces.

When I installed FontLab and opened it up, I honestly felt so at home. Type designers will understand why this is amusing. At the time, FontLab felt like stepping backwards into a clunkier and much more opaque form of software. But the concepts, processes, and tools of type design just made sense to me, and as someone who didn’t attend design school and struggled to find a place under the graphic design umbrella, the experience of finally feeling like I had arrived where I was supposed to be was very meaningful.

This year in New York was such a formative time for me, but it was difficult. I missed my girlfriend, and I missed home. But some of the moments I remember very fondly in hindsight. Walking through the Met late on Friday evenings and taking pictures of everything. Stumbling upon amazing block after amazing block of New York City for the very first time. The classroom behind the clock in the old Cooper Union building. Raised eyebrows and helpful hands from New Yorkers as I carried a very heavy air conditioner many blocks, onto the subway, and then many more blocks to my apartment. I love Prospect Park so much. It snowed very early in the year, just after I moved in. Walking around the park watching snow falling from the sky for the first time in my life was a glorious thing.

Maria and I started dating in college, and the whole idea to apply to Type@Cooper came about because Maria had applied and was accepted to the masters program at UNISG in Italy. I’ve always been chasing her and trying to keep up with her brilliance. I wrote her letters the whole year long. After we both completed our programs, we searched around for someone who needed a car driven across the country. Maria flew from Italy to New York, and we drove back to California.

Maria and I found a tiny cottage behind a house four blocks from the beach. And it was ridiculously cheap. Even so, the owner was very skeptical that we could make rent. Somehow Maria convinced her to give us a shot. We couldn’t believe it. We were thrilled and nervous to be moving in together. Suddenly, my cast iron skillet and her cast iron skillet just became our skillets.

In Santa Monica I worked for myself, as did Maria, so we lived a dreamy life that did not involve commuting. I woke up early, played volleyball or surfed, then came home and started on whatever project most urgently needed attention. Maria and I often went on a walk before dinner. To this day I’m still striving to re-create our life by the beach.

This time period in my work life was defined by big celebratory moments like landing my first typeface commissions (which didn’t pay much), and an underlying, constant worry about our financial situation. Our landlord was somewhat correct–making rent each month was not easy—but we did it. Every Wednesday, Maria and I would each get a twenty dollar bill from the ATM and then we’d head to the farmers market together. And that was most of our budget for a week of groceries. All in all, it was amazing to pay the bills while working on my own projects. I took on any design related work that came. Along with the occasional typeface, I created logos for Pilates studios, websites for preschools, and more websites for authors, teachers, and musicians. Lots of websites.

This was an amazing time for Maria and I. We were finally reunited after school, and we were living together with very few responsibilities and very low expenses. We used this time really well, honestly. I can still picture my wetsuit hanging to dry on the tree out front, and I can still remember the exact smells—the carpet, a candle, and a salty breeze coming in the window—of my late night work sessions spent lying on the floor with my little laptop.

Tobias Frere-Jones posted a job listing. I took a few days off from work on other projects to put an application together. The whole time I thought it was stupid, that I would never get the job and there was other work I should be doing. Then I got it! It was bittersweet. I was so excited to be heading back to New York for something amazing, but I remember coming back home from surfing, board in hand, seeing our tiny cottage, Maria working at our one table, and, just breaking, tears streaming down my face. (I cry a lot, though, so this is less dramatic than it sounds.)

This was a tough move! New York in March can be gray and gloomy, and Maria had just begun work on the Sqirl cookbook, Everything I Want to Eat, so she wasn’t able to join me for a couple months. I sublet a room in South Slope from a performance artist whose work centered on bondage. After living in a place that Maria and I turned into a home together, it felt like a step backwards to live in someone else’s space. Apartment hunting was tremendously discouraging, but after so many dead ends, I put a deposit down and moved into what would be our Brooklyn apartment. I spent a weekend scrubbing off grime, and when I finally stepped out into Prospect Park at sunset, things had turned a corner. I passed these months by starting to work in secret with a friend, who also happens to be an amazing jeweler, on an engagement ring. Eventually I picked Maria up from the airport and we had a beer at The Double Windsor, our local bar.

New York this time around was the dream, even after the difficulties of the move. I would wake up, sometimes early enough to run the Prospect Park loop, then on a good day Maria and I would walk outside together, sometimes grabbing a coffee from Colson or an apple cider donut from the farmers market on the way to work. Halfway to the Frere-Jones office, I would say goodbye to Maria and she would head back home to write. I would work on type all day. I mostly packed a lunch and would eat it outside if it wasn’t stormy. We burned the midnight oil regularly, but if I was out at a reasonable hour, Maria and I would sometimes have a picnic in the park or meet friends for dinner.

Beginning work with Tobias was scary and exciting. For a good while, it was just the two of us in the office. Within a week, I realized that I was going to deliver (with many rounds of visual feedback, of course) production-ready work that would go directly into fonts without anyone more senior opening up the glyphs in RoboFont. At the time, this blew my mind. I held Tobias’s work in such regard, and this realization made for a weighty sense of responsibility. I worked so hard, not just on the fonts themselves but on trying to see with my own eyes what Tobias could see. I’d come in early to look at all the old specimen books while no one else was in the office. Being surrounded by all that source material was incredible.

New York is a magical city, but the first time I lived there I was focused on school and I was lonely. This time, I did it right—well, Maria did it right and therefore I was able to be inside her sparkling aura. I dream about these days all the time. Wandering Manhattan on a lazy Saturday morning, sitting by our fireplace while snow was falling. Laughing with friends over pizza at Lucali’s. Knowing each curve and hill of Prospect Park and watching it change through all the seasons. Even the idea of locking up the office and heading home in the snow after midnight makes me smile now!

Maria and I always knew we wanted to live in Berkeley. We had a chance to work together on Maria’s first solo cookbook, and we also were engaged, so we decided to head back to California to start the next phase of our life together. I haven’t talked about this much, but I also had kind of burned out a little on type design. Doing production work on sans serifs for a couple years can do that to you! I thought I’d look for a more general design job in tech as I worked on Maria’s cookbook, and continue designing type on the side for a moment.

Maria and I found an apartment over a garage in the Berkeley hills. It used to be a painting studio, and it was just one big open room with a loft. It was so nice to be back in California, amongst the redwoods and hippie bakeries. It felt like we came home.

Our life these days was immersive and deliberate. We would wake up, make breakfast, work, eat lunch outside on our stairs, work more, and then eat dinner outside on our stairs. Almost meditative, very rejuvenating. I would head into San Francisco once or twice a week to teach or go to a meeting, and the weekends were spent doing the same thing with a bit of reading interspersed throughout the day.

The plan to find a more general design job did not work! I realized type was my thing, and I decided to stick to it. I did pick up the kind of type-forward identity design that I was doing before Frere-Jones, and I realized how much I missed it. I also started teaching at Type West. It was rewarding to be a part of such a young program, and I made so many friends through Letterform Archive. I began a long-running collaboration with Jeremy Mickel, who I’ve now worked with on many projects over many years. Our work together has been a complement to my time at Frere-Jones. I’ve developed new and different skills and I’d like to think I’ve become a more well-rounded type designer. Some notable career moments occurred during these years: my first big typeface commissions that appeared on billboards, my first book cover design, my first time publishing fonts (thank you, Future Fonts).

I love Berkeley so much. It’s definitely my home now, even though I did not grow up here. The geography of the Bay Area is really special, and even though I’m a native of sunnier lands, I love the sight of the fog rolling over San Francisco and heading toward the East Bay. There’s a way of reading cookbooks, shopping for groceries, making meals, and hosting friends that is very particular to Berkeley and has been at the center of my life with Maria since we were in college. Our little studio, glowing with light and full of quiet laughter, friends, and salads. It’s just the best. It’s home.

I’ll always remember the amazing salad with steak and cherries that we ate on our steps. The deer that would wander up our street. The enormous tree Maria decided had to come home with us for Christmas. A day came when it was time to say goodbye to our Berkeley apartment. It came along with sadness, and joy, and fear, and love, and it marked the start of something new.