Hi, I’m Sam.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR CHECKING OUT MY SITE.

ALLOW ME TO TELL YOU A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MYSELF.

Sam the Designer

I’m a multidisciplinary designer with a love for typography, color, and storytelling.

But let’s cut the crap! Every designer says the same thing on their page so I’ll just end the platitudes right now.

As you can see by looking at my work, there is no specific medium that has yet been defined as my “specialization.” I work across digital, print, experiential, web, editorial, and even dabble a bit in industrial design (I would love to dabble much more).

If I had to pinpoint my specialization, my unique area of expertise, it would be FUN. That’s what I love to do, add a bit of well-considered FUN and WARMTH to everything I touch. A bit of humanity never hurts as well.

I believe this is a reflection of who I am as person. I like to create a little world, something people can connect to. I love anything that strives to make the world a better place, even if it is just in one tiny arena. I love helping to tell untold stories. I love creating interest or fascination. I love obscure references. I love nostalgia, as well as futurism.

Alright. Just check out my work. Hopefully you like it.

With the old man himself.

Sam the Mechanic

If there is one hobby that has defined me more than anything else, it’s working on cars. Specifically, Mopars (Dodge, Plymouth, and Chrysler vehicles) and 70’s motorcycles. I don’t know why this is my hobby. I don’t particularly like popular “car guy” culture. It’s redneck bullshit and I am a metropolitan big-city liberal!

But I can’t shake it. And I don’t really want to.

I’m 30 years old and I have had over a dozen vehicles in and out of possession since I was 16 and saved my money from working at McDonald’s to buy a rusty 1971 Plymouth Satellite for $1700. That’s where it all began. I’ve since rebuilt and sold that Satellite, also had a 72 Dodge Dart, a 71 Dodge Charger that I completely rebuilt from the bottom up, three different Chrysler Lebarons, all of which I have suped up to be bizarrely fast, and a 93 Dodge Van that has more or less been my daily driver here in New York City for the past 10 years. I’ve had about six different motorcycles, mainly 70’s 2 stroke Kawasakis, Yamahas, and Suzukis, I’ve done several engine swaps, rebuilt engines, welded a roof onto a car, customized my van fully, and I’m still going.

I think I got it all from my dad, who is an incredibly handy man in every aspect of life. He got me started by helping me wrench on my broken-down car when I was a penniless teenager, and from there I’ve been off to the races, sometimes literally.

Sam the Mover

Before becoming a designer, I was a mover in New York City, a “man in a van,” running his own business.

I did this for 5 years in my early twenties, right after graduating college. It happened sort of randomly, I was looking for work and doing a lot of odd jobs and somehow wound up helping a friend of my sister with his own moving business. I was a laborer for him for about 3 days before deciding to get my own van and start my own business. I guess he sold me pretty well on the whole lifestyle.

And what a lifestyle it was! Meeting new people everyday, seeing the insides of thousands of apartments, going all over New York City, learning the streets and attitudes of every neighborhood in every borough, getting glimpses of every walk of life that calls New York home. Still to this day, I feel I know New York so much better than the average person and that’s because of my years as a mover. And best of all, I could just work, get paid, and live my life.

By the time I retired my business, I was making about $90k a year. The money was pretty great considering I made it all in cash and worked 7 days a week, but only averaging about four or five hours each day. I was the envy of all my office-dwelling friends. But after five years I was starting to feel burnt out on it. There were many reasons for me to stop. Sometimes it got lonely not having more than one or two coworkers, my laborers. As a skinny dude without the cushion of huge amounts of muscle-mass, the work also took a physical toll on my back. But biggest of all was the feeling that I needed to do something more, something to harness my creativity and tap in to what really makes me, me, to access something that I could offer up to the world more than just a vehicle, two arms, and a decent sense of direction. So, I hung up my mover’s hat—but I will still occasionally do a moving job here and there for extra bucks.

Sam the New Yorker

The biggest thing I learned from being a mover is that I love New York City. To me, the best thing about New York is the multiculturalism and the crazy way all these different groups of immigrants manage to interact. Where else can you have a neighborhood where Jamaicans are living right next door to Hasidim (Crown Heights), people from Poland squabbling in a park with Puerto Ricans (Greenpoint) and an apartment building that has signs in Mandarin and Spanish because its residents are half from mainland China and half from Mexico? (Woodside, Queens).

As a mover, this is the New York I dealt with and fell in love with. The yuppy culture, the hipsters, the gentrification and suburb-ification, this only clouds my view of what I see as the true lifeblood of this amazing city, and what keeps me here year after year. There’s something so energizing about the way people from faraway lands manage to coexist here, sometimes they argue, sometimes they can be assholes to each other, but in the end it always manages to work out. After all, everyone here is in search of the same goal: to get a slice of that American pie—even the people that move here from America! (Yes, as stated earlier, I consider myself a liberal—but Capitalism rules.)

I make an effort to always give back to the city when I can, where I can. I’ve sold New York shirts (designed by me) to raise money for charity. I work with North Brooklyn Mutual Aid to help provide for my neighbors in need, whatever that may look like. During the height of COVID, my main mission was working with Meals on Wheels to deliver food to elderly New Yorkers in dire need. I think if you love New York, it’s important to try to give back in some way if you are able to do so.