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October 28, 2006

Meet the Flockers: India Amos

I am a native New Yorker and have lived in NYC for most of my life, excepting college and brief experiments in Berkeley, Sacramento, and Seattle. I went to Stuy and Williams, majoring in English at the latter. My mother is an artist and professor of art, originally from Atlanta. My father, a Brooklynite, worked in advertising and marketing and was an electronics and computer enthusiast. He built our first computer himself; it played the theme song to Masterpiece Theatre. My older brother, the black sheep of the family, is an investment banker; he likes motorcycles and fast cars, and he has better manners than I do.

In answer to cocktail party questions, I say, “I’m a book designer. Interiors only; no covers.” And then the person I’m talking to says something like, “Um . . . like . . . what . . . so, you pick the fonts?” Yes, I pick the fonts.

When I’m not choosing fonts, sometimes I’m making little marks on and around letters. More often, I’m sitting on the couch in my pajamas reading clusterflock. In past incarnations I have been an arts administrator, author’s assistant, bookstore clerk, compositor, construction worker, indexer, managing editor, mushroom vendor, waitress, and webmaster. Occasionally I make stuff, such as drawings or cakes or garments. When I read (which I do only on the subway), it’s usually either technical books, eighteenth-century novels, or Patrick O’Brian.

I probably won’t have much time to write original material for clusterflock, but I will cross-post such entries from India, Ink., as are not already direct rip-offs of preflocked material.

Update, March 2008
Since for some reason people seem to actually look at this bio, I feel I ought to mention here that I’m no longer designing books except as a desultory freelancer. Since January 2007 I’ve been art director at Nextbook, where I do not get to pick the fonts, except those within a single type family (Fedra, by Peter Bilak). What does an art director do? A variety of things, but most of my day-to-day work is this.

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