RIGHT: 2004 | STOREFRONT | CLIENT: BROOKLYN SUPERHERO SUPPLY CO.

Typographer/designer Sam Potts describes his process as “design by attrition,” as it often involves many false starts, failed attempts and thoughts left unfinished. “Because I am a solo operation, I am left to rely on my own judgment as to what might work, which at times is as difficult as cutting your own hair without a mirror.”

Born in a small town in western New Hampshire, Potts lists his work experience as “snow shoveler, paperboy, bicycle mechanic, meat warehouse laborer, public-housing police radio dispatcher, legal records archivist, copywriter, editor of college English text­books, proofreader and book designer—and sometimes holder of the flashlight in dark places.”

“Sam Potts is the quintessential storyteller,” says Hank Richard­son, president of Portfolio Center in Atlanta, where Potts studied. “He can quilt a story from mere threads, and that quality comes through in everything he designs and creates. He is the consum­mate Renaissance man living in a Bauhaus world.” Having come to graphic design later than many (he studied literature in college), Potts admits he is still learning “how to operate the heavy machin­ery” involved in making graphic design: dealing with printers, pho­tographers, illustrators, programmers, etc. “My first experience in design was as a book designer—book interiors, that is—so you could say I started with typography and found a sweet spot there.”

Since founding Sam Potts Inc. in 2002, his design work for print and web has been recognized by and published in Newsweek, Wired, Creative Review (U.K.) and The New York Times. Mostly, however, his clients are on the small side—restaurants, publish­ers, nonprofits, filmmakers, private art collectors. “My work is pri­marily typographic, defined by the task at hand, designed to be clear and direct and perhaps with a little bit of wit.” Some highly visible recent projects are the redesign commentary on New York City taxicabs, the design of John Hodgman’s book The Areas of My Expertise and virtually everything for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. and 826NYC, the Brooklyn chapter of the writing and tutoring centers founded by Dave Eggers.

Potts believes that graphic design, as one of the more public and accessible forms of creative expression, “must find the most compelling balance between that which is personal and that which is open to the widest possible audience.” Therein, it seems, lies the rub. “A lot of designers might say that this is precisely what design is: serving the needs of the client/concept over one’s own artistic—so-called—expression. But for me, going forward, I have to find a way to carve out more creative latitude for myself. Otherwise design can become too procedural.”

www.sampottsinc.com