Portraits

Good art is pointable. Something complex occurs, and you can’t quite explain how you feel about it. Instead, you find the appropriate book, song, poem, whatever, then point to it, and say “That. That is how I feel.” It’s a shorthand that stands in place of your own words. It speaks for you.

That’s what led me back to Velazquez’s Las Meninas.

Velazquez’s Las Meninas

The simplest way to think about Las Meninas is as a painting about being painted. Western art has its fair share of notable portraits—DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, Warhol’s Marilyns and Elvises—but of art’s grand works, Meninas is the only portrait of its viewer, depicting the process of being observed and rendered. The painting is deeply unsettling, because Velazquez himself is creeping behind the canvas—staring, measuring, judging, while his brush hovers above the palette. He is remaking you to an audience, but that canvas stands stubbornly away from your view. You are being reproduced, but that reproduction is inaccessible. Increasingly, this is how I feel about technology.

One of the more bizarre things about modern life is that everything you do produces data, and these by-products can, in theory, be reconstituted into some sort of likeness. This belief forms the foundation for everything from Facebook’s advertising platform to the NSA’s PRISM program. All one needs is an insatiable appetite for data, the bottomless belly to store it, and the brain to make sense of it. Enough email forms a persona; enough likes produces a disposition; enough GPS coordinates suggests predictable behavior. From there, one can paint a picture, and that picture can be sold to advertisers or used as evidence or leverage.

I am unwittingly having portraits painted of me, and you are, too. Perhaps this is the cost of modern technology: by being connected, you grant one of these tubes—be it Verizon, Twitter, Facebook, PRISM, or anything that contains data in aggregate—an attempt at your likeness. At this point, the value of a portrait is unknown, so both painter and subject are willing to go along with the tenuous arrangement. The painter thinks they can capture a valuable and useful likeness; the subject either believes the portrait will be distorted, or is unaware they are being painted at all.

Velazquez's Las Meninas

The institutions that call for radical transparency very rarely exhibit it. Facebook will always know more about you than you will know about it. Google will be the only one to know how all your emails coalesce into a more meaningful picture. No one knew PRISM existed until a few weeks ago. We might know that we’re having portraits painted of us, but we will never have the canvas turned in our direction. And, if these painters did turn their easels around, I’m not sure which would be more terrifying to see: a distorted, monstrous version of myself, and say “that’s not me,” or myself mirrored back, reconstituted—the exhaust fumes of my day-to-day life somehow made solid.

Frank Chimero Designing & writing

Hi, I’m Frank Chimero, a designer from New York. Currently, I’m on sabbatical walking NYC, investigating new creative tooling, and researching Brian Eno’s collaborations with machines.

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Portrait of Frank Chimero

The Shape of Design A short book for new designers about the design mindset

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Writing Selected essays
and lectures

An anvil tied to a balloon
Everything Easy is Hard Again Is it twenty years of experience in tech or five years, repeated four times? 2018
A grid of wood cubes
The Web’s Grain Design by thinking inside the box model 2015
Time lapse image of a galloping horse
What Screens Want Design as choreography instead of composition 2013
A rose growing out of a pile of dirt
Only Openings Some problems must be tended instead of solved. 2014
Two torn pieces of paper matched together
Designing in the Borderlands Designer as translator, integrator, and merchant of ideas 2014

Blog 2009–?

About CV and bio

Hi, I’m Frank Chimero, a designer and writer from New York.

Previously, I was Creative Director and Head of Brand at the payments platform Modern Treasury. Before that, I co-founded and led design at Abstract, a design workflow and knowledge base startup that was later aquired by Adobe.

I also spent fifteen years running a solo design studio and consultancy, designing across product and brand for technology and media companies. Clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Nike, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many early stage startups. I helped design a few things during that time you’ve probably used, from NPR’s online audio player to Wikipedia’s article pages.

In 2012, I wrote, designed, illustrated, and published The Shape of Design, a little book for new designers about the design mindset and making things for other people. Since the book’s launch, it has become a staple text in design education and found an enthusiastic audience beyond the design community.

I have a big love for museums, beat-up pocket-edition paperbacks, ambient music, antique JRPGs, and Phil Collins. (Nobody’s perfect.)

Experience

  • Sabbatical
  • Creative Director and Head of Brand Modern Treasury
  • Creative Director Fictive Kin
  • Self-employed Studio Frank
  • Co-Founder and Head of Design Abstract (acq. Adobe)
  • Self-employed Studio Frank

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Awards

  • ADC Young Guns 8 Art Directors Club
  • New Visual Artist Print Magazine

Speaking

  • AIGA National Conference
    US
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  • An Interesting Day
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  • Awwwards Conference
    DE
  • Build Conference
    UK
  • Creative Works
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  • Cusp Conference
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  • dConstruct
    UK
  • Design Speaks
    US
  • Design Thinkers
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  • Do Lectures
    UK
  • Etsy
    US
  • Harvard University
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  • How Design Live
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  • Interlink Conference
    CA
  • Kerning Conference
    IT
  • Mailchimp
    US
  • Mirror Conference
    PT
  • New Adventures
    UK
  • Portable Series
    AU
  • School of Visual Arts
    US
  • Shopify
    CA
  • South by Southwest
    US
  • Substans
    NO
  • Webstock
    NZ
  • XOXO Festival
    US