NAME: Brian Roettinger | Hand Held Heart
LATIN NAME: velis et remis
AGE:29

Brian Roettinger began Hand Held Heart in 1998 as a platform to release music he was excited about and that he felt others should hear. Taking his inspiration from indie record labels like Ebullition, Factory, Gravity, Hopscotch and Veriform, he wanted Hand Held Heart to be a D.I.Y. affair, with “no contracts, no shadiness, no egos.” The most important thing for Roettinger is the friendship and collaboration he has with the bands. “Though the music I release has changed along with my evolving taste—and some of the bands, such as the Liars and the Blood Brothers, have become well known—the spirit of Hand Held Heart, and the way it is run, has not changed,” he says.

Indeed, the label is still run out of the studio in his apartment, and he funds every aspect of the releases himself, always hoping to make a small profit, or at least break even, so the label can continue. This is becoming increasingly difficult with the rising cost of vinyl. In 2002, in Roettinger’s second year at CalArts, Hand Held Heart evolved to include design. Roettinger and two classmates, Lucas Quigley and Sam Farfsing, would collaborate on projects— self-initiated and commissioned—outside their school workloads. “It made sense to us to spend what little free time we had on something that was real. The work was both stressful and rewarding,” says Roettinger.

Today, Roettinger is the only designer at Hand Held Heart. These days he’s only interested in “working on projects in the arts, with friends or with those whose work I respect or am inspired by.” He considers himself to be lucky, as his day job as the institute designer at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has allowed him to be highly selective about the projects he takes on. At SCI-Arc, Roettinger is responsible for the design and production of all printed material representing the school, including invitations and brochures for SCI-Arc Gallery exhibitions, lecture posters, SCI-Arc Press publications, course catalogues and viewbooks. The only downside he can point to is the fact that, as the only graphic designer in the office, he doesn’t have another design brain to bounce ideas off of.

Both Hand Held Heart and SCI-Arc offer Roettinger opportunities for creative expression as well as for finding creative solutions. “Most of my projects have limited budgets, so I have developed something of a process in terms of finding practical ways of printing and designing without compromising the quality of the work. Other than that, the only constraints come from the given content of each project.” Isaac Gertman

(TOP): All images this page are from Roettinger’s HAND HELD HEART project, which releases independent music on vinyl, but has also included work like the exhibition catalog at right for artist Lara Schnitger. For the catalog, all artworks were photographed in such a way that the scale of Schnitger’s sculptures could not be determined from the photos alone. The scale is revealed at the end of the catalog, where details of the sculptures are reproduced at full size.