Standard Design - Interviews for all Standard Design and Tom Pappalardo related projects

HAMPSHIRE LIFE/DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE - August 15th, 2008

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: The Republican, June 17th, 2008
By NANCY H. GONTER

EASTHAMPTON - Thomas J. Pappalardo had a string of luck with design contests when a friend sent him an item about Easthampton City Arts looking for someone to create a mural on a downtown building.

Pappalardo, a Northampton resident who runs a design business, had some successes creating a commercial for an area station and in a Home Depot house decorating contest.

"Someone forwarded me the press release and said, 'Hey, you should give that a try,'" Pappalardo said.

Now, Pappalardo's mural fills a huge brick wall on the side of 71-77 Cottage St. which is Route 141. It faces a public parking lot and is easily viewed by people entering the city over Mount Tom.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the mural will be held Friday at 12:30 p.m. at the mural which was completed on June 1. Pappalardo, Mayor Michael A. Tautznik and the Easthampton City Arts Coordinating Committee will be present.

Ellen Koteen, grants coordinator for the city and co-facilitator of Easthampton City Arts, said Pappalardo's proposal was selected by a group of artists from four submissions.

"They felt his was very vibrant and creative and would appeal to the public," Koteen said. "I think it looks great. I even liked it better than his proposal."

Pappalardo, who lived in Easthampton for a year before buying a house in Northampton five or six years ago, describes the mural as a "very stylized treatment" of the words Easthampton, Massachusetts.

The challenge of the project was it had to be designed about the eight different windows that are part of the building, said Pappalardo who considers himself a designer and not an artist.

"It was actually really hard to do something. It was like if you tried to paint a picture on a canvas with eight holes in it. I decided right off the bat I didn't want to do a picture because it would be to hard to do around the windows," Pappalardo said.

Instead, he recreated the letters that surround the windows.

The actual outlining and painting took much longer than he anticipated. He spent a day and a half just marking it with the outlines. Then a group of friends spent a full day painting.

"I would have thought twice about entering if I had considered how much leg pain I was going to have from climbing on the scaffolding," he said.

Still, he is happy with how it turned out and hopes residents will enjoy it.

"I'm very pleased with it. I was shocked that we managed to pull it off so quickly that one day. Seeing it up there on the wall is great," he said.

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: The Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 19, 2008
by Matt Pilon

EASTHAMPTON - An outdoor mural slated to be painted in the spring will give Cottage Street a new look.

Easthampton City Arts this month unanimously voted to award a $3,000 to Northampton-based graphic designer Tom Pappalardo to paint his design on the outer wall of 75 Cottage St., which houses Whiserkz Pub and faces a municipal parking lot.

The building is owned by Joseph Defazio, George and Marsha Bailey, and Jeremy Hewat, according to the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds.

City Arts Coordinator Ellen Koteen said the owners responded "enthusiastically" to their mural request last year.

Pappalardo, who works under the name of his one-man company, Standard Design, said Thursday that the project will be a first for him.

"I've never done anything like this before," he said. "It's totally cool."

Pappalardo also does animation work and draws the comic "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" that appears weekly in the Valley Advocate.

Creatively dodging eight windows located on the wall, Pappalardo's design spells out 'Easthampton' and 'Massachusetts' in a four-color scheme.

"It was a tricky challenge," he said. "I approached it as a pure typography challenge."

Board member Jean-Pierre Pasche of Eastmont Custom Framing described Pappalardo's use of the wall as "clever," which is part of the reason that his proposal was accepted.

"One of the positive points about that project was that it was using the wall to its fullest," he said. "I think it's going to be a striking image."

City Arts originally solicited submissions with a theme of the "evolving mosaic of Easthampton," but realized once submissions started coming in that the constraints of the brick canvass may pose a problem for a landscape or very detailed concept, Koteen said.

After a round of submissions that the jury committee did not favor, a new round brought in four new submissions.

Koteen said that a painting by the Amherst-based group Get Up Get Down depicting the history of the city from its native inhabitants to the future was the board's second choice.

Koteen, who was not on the jury committee, described the winning design as simple yet dramatic.

"I like it a lot," she said. "It's very creative."

The money that will pay the artist comes mostly from the state Cultural Council but also from a $500 local Cultural Council grant, which will pay for supplies.

The wall will likely be powerwashed and primed in March, and the painting work would start soon after, Koteen said.

BLOGCRITICS INTERVIEW: Tom Pappalardo the face behind Standard Design, author of Broken Lines
Katie McNeill - published May 11, 2007

Broken Lines: Book One of Four, Maybe is simply about good and evil. You have evil firemen vs. a Cowboy complete with six shooters, a Spaceman who feeds red licorice through his suit, and Maggie the waitress. These characters come together to form Standard Design's delightful self-published illustrated novel.

What is Standard Design?

Standard Design is me, Tom Pappalardo. It's the name I do design work under. In the context of Broken Lines, Standard Design is also the publisher, I guess, since it's self-published. By me. Tom Pappalardo. And I'm Standard Design. See?

Would you mind telling us what Broken Lines is about?

Broken Lines is about a good and evil, death, redemption, and boredom. And lousy coffee. Lots of lousy coffee. You've got a grumpy cowboy and a goofy spaceman on a road trip in a stolen moving van. They save a waitress from her rather uninteresting life and boom! - she's tagging along on their cross-country mission. Naturally, they are being pursued by Bad Guys.

What made you decide to do an illustrated novel?

Well, I'm always sitting on a backlog of story ideas - some comic, some prose, some just scribbled outlines that could go either way. But my actual output has historically been pretty low, because, you know, I work for a living and stuff.

So it occurred to me that maybe I should just combine a bunch of unrelated ideas into one big story. I knew it would be a major undertaking, take forever to do, and require a lot of discipline that I don't by nature have, so I had to create a set of rules for myself that would let me complete the damned thing without giving up a third of the way through it, you know? That meant allowing myself the freedom to switch from drawing to writing to whatever I needed in order to get the story down on the page.

So the book's "illustrated novel" format is sort of the result of my short attention span, my impatience, and ultimately my desire to force the story out of my head and onto paper. I have found it to be a very enjoyable way to tell a story. It works. I like it.

Where did the idea for Broken Lines come from?

Broken Lines is a reaction against a lot of junk I see in movies, TV, and books that just drives me nuts - dialogue that makes me cringe, contrived plot twists, characters with no history or personality. So even though the story itself is a bit outlandish, I wanted Broken Lines to be grounded with characters that talked like real people and responded to weird situations like normal people would. I wanted everyday settings, and I wanted an extremely unromanticized, uncool, un-"comic booky" take on a hero story. I mean, why doesn't Batman drive a 1999 Ford Econoline moving van? They're very spacious.

I have to ask you about The Firemen because I laughed so hard while reading about them. Why did you decide to make firemen evil?

Well, the pragmatic answer is that I needed an army of bad guys that all looked alike so I wouldn't have to sit down and design a new character every time I needed a new bad guy on-scene. So, you know, they're my lazy equivalent of storm troopers, I guess. Other than that, the choice was pretty random. Just a bunch of dumb dudes wearing full-face oxygen masks. I had a serious doubt about making them firemen after 9/11 because real firefighters were being so revered for awhile. But fortunately, America has a short memory and we've gone back to ignoring their important contributions to society. So thank God for that.

What do you think is most appealing about your work?

It's got moxie.

Do you have a favorite character from Broken Lines? Why?

Currently, it's me, the omniscient narrator. I hog a lot of the funny lines, because I want everyone to think I'm clever and witty. My second favorite character doesn't appear until Book Three, so hold your breath til like, 2010.

Would you mind sharing a little bit of what the future holds for your heroes?

Their future is everyone's future: Lots of sitting around, a few laughs, then death. Then maybe a few more laughs.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/05/11/180940.php