NAME: Wyeth Hansen | Casual Aesthetics
LATIN NAME: tyrannosaurus rex

Since graduating from RISD’s graphic design program in 2003, Wyeth Hansen has worked in New York as a freelance designer, art director and animator for clients such as MTV Networks, VH1 Networks, Sundance Networks, AIGA, Ghostly Records Intl., JDub Records, Firehouse Films and HunterGatherer.

Self-initiated projects have been a constant current in his working practice: Often, work that begins after hours finds its culmination in a professional commission. An animated piece Hansen did during school was seen and turned into the “Choose or Lose” campaign for MTV, and a “Garden of Earthly Leisure” poster that he “made offhand at work” became his first 2K T-shirt and was in several gallery shows. “The little steps I take on my own can inform the work I get hired to do later,” says the designer.

One of the larger of these little steps is his Casual Aesthetics manifesto, a statement in which he outlines what it might take to be a “formally responsible designer.” Speaking of the project’s genesis, he says, “When I was working on a project with wide parameters, I would become frustrated if things were less than satisfactory. I wasn’t able to articulate what was wrong with the piece or what would make it better, and I thought that if I had a personalized system of reference I would be better able to understand where it was I was trying to go.” As such, the manifesto works for Hansen like a “mobile crit, somewhere between [Eno’s] Oblique Strategies and [Müller Brockmann’s] Grid Systems.”

Once he had developed his “mobile crit,” or “flexible guide and measure for dissecting work,” Hansen began to consider its application beyond his personal needs. “Working in motion graphics studios, I’ve witnessed some creative processes that I feel are really damaging and backwards. I thought I could introduce the notion of ‘formal responsibility’ and help other young designers.”

The manifesto will be published as part of a series of two-color pamphlets that will also include texts by other writers Hansen thinks relate to his project. The pamphlets will be sold through the Casual Aesthetics site and small bookstores. His inspiration for this aspect of the project comes from “an old book series called ‘The Critical Idiom’ segmented into literary genres, such as Tragedy, The Grotesque and The Epic. I liked this model for taking one element and working it out over the course of 24 pages or so.”

For materials related to the Casual Aesthetics project, Hansen uses a typeface he designed called Didon’t. The typeface takes the hairline thin lines of Bodoni and Didot to their logical extension— by eliminating them. “I like the face because I think it employs many of the attributes central to the philosophy of my bizarre theory,” says Hansen. “It is by nature highly individualized: It’s not for everyone.” Alice Twemlow

(TOP) RIGHT: Stills from a music video that Wyeth Hansen and Ryan Dunn created for the Mobius Band, an electronic-tinged minimalist group on Ghostly Records. BELOW RIGHT: Covers from The Book of the Week Club, an imaginary collection of forgotten writings.