Christian Acker maintains a busy schedule. When he's not pushing pixels as a senior art director at Zoo York, the Queens, New York designer runs his own creative shop, Adnauseum, and also curates the Handselecta.com project. Obsessed with graffiti handstyles since the mid-1990s, Acker's Handselecta project archives the histories of regional graff styles while also producing high-quality, functional typefaces. And his Adnauseum shop is an outlet for his non-Zoo York design work. Today Acker is 30 years old, a husband, and father of three. But all this activity -- both professional and familial -- has not slowed his stride. If anything, it's helped him to focus. I recently had the pleasure of catching up with Mr. Acker. Here's how our conversation played out. Matthew Newton

What first attracted you to art and how has it kept your interest?

Wow. It’s deep-rooted, I don't even know. I drew before I learned to write and really always loved it from 3 or 4 years old on. I think in the earliest days I wanted to be an illustrator. Doing comics or cartoons. I remember getting into political cartoons and caricatures around 10 or 12. I think I discovered I was more of a designer than an illustrator around 13 or 14. My high school had "Commercial Art" class. I got my hands on U&lc magazine and started really loving type. Around this time I got really into music. Ska, punk, and eventually hardcore. Lots of time in commercial art class doing flyers instead of packaging assignments. The last couple of years my design work has incorporated a lot more of my illustration again.

Kept my interest? Hmmm. That's a weird one because it’s such a part of me I can't even think about it in that manner. Art, and later design, is my earliest self image. I played sports and had other hobbies as a kid, but I was always the artist in the typecasting of juvenile social circles. It was my personality. And later I learned to make the methodology my world view. I can’t help looking at the world with questions of purpose, use, and interpretation. I guess interpretation is the one that I really made my niche. My work is certainly more expressive and about interpretation than the modernist principals of use and minimal form.

Can you tell me a little bit about your 9 to 5 gig—you work at Zoo York, right?

I am the Senior Art Director at Zoo York—the skateboard and apparel brand based in New York City. I've been here for almost five years. It’s a great crew of talented people. I feel really lucky to be a part of it. The graphic team is really diverse and talented bringing a lot of different talents and interests to work with them. It's a perfect melting pot of New York-centric characters for a brand like Zoo. Kimou Meyer is Creative Director, bringing his passion for hip-hop culture and outsider Swiss cartoon sensibilities. I bring a more grimy, DIY punk rock background. My skate art influences were really from my 80's childhood. Powell stuff, Rick Griffin, Jim Phillips, etc.—stuff that tied back to my eventual music interests. A lot of my stuff is that in between design and illustration. Pete Panciera is a pretty core skate rat from New England who skated for Hoodlum Skateboards, and a couple of shop teams. He brings a great design geek/skate-kid combo. And Stephen Halker is our resident artíst. Stephe grew up in Southern California, skating and surfing. He came to New York to study illustration at SVA in 97. He ran a comic book collective with some SVA classmates and did a number of years freelancing commercial illustration projects before we convinced him to join the Zoo. The rest of us are just pushing pixels. He's the guy with talent. He can do just about anything, in any style.

The Handselecta project that you run with Kyle Talbott is an interesting idea -- it seems to act as both an homage to the handstyles of graffiti while also translating those letter forms to usable fonts. Can you tell me how this got started and what inspired the idea?

Kyle and I knew each other in passing for a couple of years before we knew that we both had a background in graffiti. His was more substantial than mine. I had built a couple of fonts by that time and was interested in graffiti, because no one had done a good one yet. Early I was looking to do fonts inspired by graff, but not nearly as literal as they became. One of the last fonts I did before Handselecta was one of the first tattoo-inspired fonts on the market—Sailor Gothic—released by Cubanica in 2002. The idea behind that was similar, looking to a folk art with a small amount of written history regarding the lettering’s development. So it allowed me to interpret the system a bit. Write some rules for myself, create a system to understand it.

I was relatively new to graffiti. I think I was writing for about two years actively before that time, but didn’t know many other writers, so it was all learning by observation. Kyle had considerable handstyles, that he could share. Which just seems like a secret knowledge when you first come across it. He was originally from DC, and learned styles from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and was now living in Brooklyn—so he had a pretty good representation of each city’s style. And he really helped to form the thesis. Kyle was at the epicenter, providing the understanding and connections in the beginning. I was really playing the outsider role as the designer/curator.

Kyle has since dropped back to focus on other projects and his family. And I took the reigns. He is still my sounding board and resident style expert.

Has your knowledge of handstyles grown as a result of this project? Can you recognize a style by city or region, like Talbott?

Yeah, my knowledge has grown incredibly, but my recognition is within reason. I have a lot of the major styles dialed in at this point—Philly, Cholo, Baltimore, New York of a certain era, San Francisco, Seattle. But the nature of styles shifting since the Internet has made it deceiving. A lot of people have styles that may not be indigenious to where they are from—an import of style. I'm always surprised at the shared styles. A lot of places like to claim a lot of the same things as their own. The one-liner for instance or the small start to larger letters as the tag progresses.

Can you tell me a little bit about your multi-disciplinary design studio, Adnauseum?

It's a studio of one. Basically, I finished my degree at Parsons here in New York, directly following September 11, 2001. First graduating class. The economy sucked and there wasn't a lot of work. Let alone work to inspire. So... I started my own company. If I couldn't find work, I decided to try to make work, create clients, instead of exclusively freelancing for other companies. More or less today, it is my vehicle for doing freelance projects. A wide range of work—logos and identities; custom lettering and fonts; garment graphics and illustrations. Sounds like a horrible lack of direction, right? The work is all fun though, and I try to keep it all culturally relevant.

I read in your bio that you were busted by the New York Vandal Squad for graffiti in 2000. How did that experience change the way you viewed graffiti?

I'm not sure it changed the way I viewed graffiti. I'm always a bit of an outsider. I learned typography before I learned graffiti, so I don't have the same mindset others might have. (Whatever that means? Graffiti writers span every class and education strata there is.) I always knew it was fun for a while, but I was finishing my degree and was 21 years old, so I took the experience with a shrug and decided to stop carrying paint and markers on me to avoid any temptation. The thing is that I only really started to "get it" after I stopped. I was a real toy when I was writing on the street. Didn't have much style. Street bomber. Markers, mops, ocasionaly spraypaint. I was just starting to do throwies for a short time before I got pinched. So I got more passionate about it but wasn’t really doing it anymore. Now we're almost 10 years later and I'm still just as passionate, I just found a way to pursue it that is more on the academic side, hopefully while still being as true to it as possible. My pursuit of graffiti has always been the same I think. I'm glad that some still push it, even though it’s illegal, the art still flourishes, but this was my way of helping to take it to the next step. I have a wife and three kids at home now. I can’t spend the weekend in Central Booking. Who will kern my fonts, and write the histories of hand styles?

When I first discovered graffiti, at age 13 or so, I was enthralled by the notion that writers were out in the middle of the night making these marks—hanging off overpasses, scaling bridges, billboards, hitting walls on busy streets, etc. What is it that initially attracted you to the marks you were seeing in the street?

My earliest graffiti experiences were strictly on paper. It was always an artistic appreciation, more than the thrill of illegality. Although those always intertwine I guess. I saw a fair amount around me, but it was your standard suburban variety, in first person. Far from Wild Style Pieces. More band logos behind the strip mall type stuff. There was some pretty advanced stuff happening on the rooftops when I would drive down to Philly or along the train corridor up to New York, where I remember seeing Kaws and Chip pieces in the mid 90's. Occasionally you'd see a Philly style tag up in Trenton, but nobody was actively writing in Trenton. It was too ghetto and once you got out of there it turned into upper middle class suburbia where you'd find more manicured lawns than walls available to tag.

It wasn't until I moved to New york in 1997 that I was really bitten by the bug. I would photograph it for a long time before I started. For a moment I was intrigued by the early Obey and street art-influenced stuff. But tags were my real passion. Anybody could create a logo and photocopy it a hundred times and even murals were a technical feat. But a well-executed tag, that you saw over and over again with a balance of energy and precision—I still am so much more impressed by a good tag than anything else. I'm mostly a fan. Much more than a pro. I'm just seeking out the pros to learn from them and document what I learn.

Graffiti documentation has always been done by the writers themselves. And such it is a secretive practice, there is also a tradition of verbal histories being passed from writer to writer. Do you see your work as an archivist as a way to bridge that gap?

Absolutely. I feel that my role is unique because I span the worlds of graffiti and typography in a real and relevant way. I would hope that I can be true to both of them and archive graffiti through the lens of typography in an academic way—because type was my first love—and through the love of letterforms I came to love graffiti. The strange thing in my case was that my schooling both formal and informal happened in overlapping instances within the same timeframe. Allowing me to show equal respect and attention to both worlds.

You obviously remain extremely busy. How do you manage your time to stay creatively productive while still leaving time for family, friends, and downtime?

Ha. Yeah, I have no idea. My wife is really supportive, which helps a ton. I have three small kids at home. And the oldest is working on his handstyles with me while I'm working on Handselecta. There is no down time. But I don't really mind that because I truly love what I do, and consider myself lucky. I have no hobbies, because this is what I want to do when I retire 50 years from now. The hardest part is working on projects that are so long and drawn out. I break up the longer-term projects with shorter-term projects.

I'm trying to practice being more focused during the work day. I leave the studio, do some reading on the subway ride home, take a break for dinner and story time with the kids and then work after I put every one to bed. I'm working on Handselecta 4 to 5 nights out of the week on average. The other two, I'll be doing logo jobs or illustrations. More than free time I really need to see some projects completed. It’s wearing to have something drag out over years without a finish in sight. But my projects tend to be a small idea with a lot of heavy production and craft involved, I'd love for it to be the other way around. I love those artists, who have such simple execution, but the value is all in that simple idea that looks like it took a minute, but it really took years. My stuff, the idea took a minute, but the execution takes years. It’s nice to turn a corner and see that its an important project that other people are interested in too. More contributors are happy to be a part of it. More interviews. More hand styles. Hopefully more font sales.

What projects do you have on the horizon for 2009?

I'm spending most of 2009 writing a book about hand styles and their developments and geographic differences, it will be a history-heavy calligraphy guide. Teaching handstyles and techniques. I also have about half a dozen fonts from my "coming soon" camp that are in varying degrees of completion I'm hoping to finish up. A year too late, but I had to take some time off last year, when I had to take some time off to deal with some health and family stuff. Other than that I have a bunch of tees being released through Upper Playground in 09. And we'll see what else pops up.

Related links: www.handselecta.com, www.adnauseum.net, www.zooyork.com, www.grotesk.to, www.connect-design.com, www.stephenhalker.com

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