Inspiration: Home Away From Home
Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer and author (you can see his work here). I spoke to him about his SoHo studio and what makes his office feel like home.
Your office has a distinctly residential feel, was that intentional? Where is the office?I believe that I spend more time in the office than at home, so the residential feel is comforting, and probably an outgrowth of the amount of time I spend here. The office is in SoHo, New York City.
What does an average work day involve? On a typical day, I take the subway to work, grab a coffee and start addressing any emails that need my attention. Then I move to the calendar and make sure everything I have to do today is accounted for and the deadlines will be met. The rest of the day could be design, research, coding, light internetting, or proposal writing. Lunch is typically a sandwich, soup or salad, more coffee and probably a cookie. Work winds down between 7 & 9, when I’m either off for socializing, eating, exercising, relaxing at home or a combination of those activities. Then I start over the next morning.
Is there any form of technology that really helps you with your work? The tool that differentiates my machine is the Wacom Tablet I’ve used for the last 5 years. After developing some bad habits using a mouse with a scroll wheel and some frightening numbness in my wrist, I switched to the tablet, and for better or worse, I can now work endlessly without any worries of repetitive stress injuries. Also, the pen makes a good fiddling or percussive instrument while chatting or thinking or getting distracted by music.
How do you organize your space? I would say that the core organizing principle of my spaces is “cloistered disarray”. On the computer, I try to keep my files pretty impeccably organized, but I’m happy to let my desktop stack up with files and virtual brik-a-brak. Every few weeks, I’ll purge and clean the desktop, or just sweep everything into a “desktop junk” folder.
In the physical space, I really like my immediate desk to be tidy, but will allow the papers and books that need to be reviewed and filed to stack up and become cluttered as long as it’s confined to a chair or another table that’s marginally out of the way.
What item from your desktop can you not do without? That would be the pen/key/flash memory drive dish that confines the loose items. I am also partial to the meteorite I keep on my desk.
What is your favorite piece of office furniture? It’s probably more of a fixture than furniture, but the restaurant order grippers that line the wall are particularly fantastic. They create this great visual axis on which any imagery or inspiration I find can slip into without leaving tack marks or holes.
What inspires you? I think the questions WHY or HOW keep me inspired. Whenever I hear a story that answers those questions, I perk up and pay attention and the wheels in my mind start spinning. I think these questions help spawn more inquiries and theories that foster curiosity and help to re-imagine the way things have been approached previously.
[Photos by Ellen Warfield - look out for more from Ellen very soon]