Artist Highlight: Maisey Design

This interview is makes for creative juice boosting fodder if you are feeling weary as we live through another week of lockdown. As we welcome in our new musical range House Party is it time to spotlight some of the wonderful artists who make it all possible. First up is the New York based design brand Maisey Design. Powered by husband and wife team, Stephen and Steffanie Canarelli, we are in love with the bold type prints these guys produce. We also predict they will fly into some of our bestsellers and we know how our audience love a Hip Hop text print!

Where is home for you at the moment?

Larchmont, New York. It’s a small town a few miles north of New York city, on the Long Island sound.

Tell us about the process for creating your Maisey Designs work?

In the largest sense the process starts with trying to find the “voice” of the brand. What is that we want

to say? What is the tone? What is the point of view? And then, what does that look like? That was a

long process. But eventually we started settling into a groove that felt pretty natural. There were

brands, artists, and designers that we liked that we took lots of inspiration from: Jonathan Adler,

Beastie Boys, Swiss Typography, Marimekko, OBEY… to name a few. Not all of these things fit easily

together. The challenge was to make them fit together in a way that reflected our personalities. We’re

a husband and wife team. I have a graphic design background and my wife is a hand-bag designer. I

do a lot of the hands-on execution, but we work together to figure out the right direction for everything.

What are some of the thoughts or influences that are fuelling the direction of your current

work?

Always minimalism. Modernism. Brutalism. The International Style / Swiss Typography. The internet

and everything on it. So many people doing beautiful work in relative obscurity.

What kind of music do you have on your playlist to get you in the creative swing?

Here are a few tracks at the top of my Spotify playlist right now:

“Bags”, Clairo

“Entitlement Crew”, The Hold Steady

“Lawyers, Guns and Money”, Warren Zevon

“Breakfast at Denny’s”, Buckshot LaFonque

“I Love You, Will You Marry Me”, Yungblood

“Creeping Death”, Metallica

“Love Plus One”, Haircut 100

How are you dealing with the current lock down situation, any tricks to keep concentration or

ways to unwind the mind?

Cooking elaborately every single night and imbibing at above normal levels

What’s you in your glass or mug in the studio?

Coffee.

What’s the last book you read?

The Food Lab, J. Kenji López-Alt. (It’s a cookbook. Does that count?)

Quickfire:

What’s your go to sandwich filling?

Mayonnaise. I can’t conceive of any way in which a sandwich without mayo is better than a sandwich

with mayo. I know there are mayonnaise haters out there. To them I say, it’s not too late for you.

Cats or dogs or both?

For me, both. For my wife Steff, dogs. However, we have two young children. So right now, neither.

The worst album ever made to your knowledge?

I’m not sure I concur with the premise of this question. And it’s too hard to answer without indicting

one group of people or another. However, Billy Joel was in a psychedelic heavy metal band in the 70s

called “Atilla” before he became “Billy Joel”. I have never heard this music but I think we can rightly

assume it is terrible.

Would you rather be 5 minutes late or 20 minutes early?

20 minutes early. Being late is bad. Very bad.