Wow, it’s been a hot minute since I graduated NYU’s ITP program in 2015! This blog was solely dedicated to chronicling my graduate school adventures, and I left it up online since the posts drew steady traffic. Here’s an update to what happened to me post-ITP!
(First though, a shameless plug. If you have enjoyed reading this blog and want to follow me elsewhere, you can find me on Instagram @dirtalleydesign and on Twitter @dirtalleydesign).
Anyway, here’s what I look like these days in my natural environment – playfully posing under local murals…
Since graduating, I worked for a web mapping startup called CARTO as a Support Engineer. As is wont to happen, while working at CARTO, I immediately started a side project – a map art business called Dirt Alley Design. Not surprisingly, I left my role at CARTO last year to focus on Dirt Alley Design. Here’s what I look like these days screenprinting my map art…
As I chronicled in this blog here and here, in graduate school, I explored various ways of physically tracking triggers that led to my migraines (factors like temperature, air pressure, etc.) While I didn’t take these experiments beyond graduate school, I have reduced my migraines through a low carb diet, exercise, sleep, and swearing off pain killers. I no longer see there being much benefit in focusing on “triggers” for migraines, and instead am working to lower overall inflammation in order to keep headaches at bay. To that end, I recently started a ketogenic diet as recent studies have shown it can decrease migraines (more posts on keto to come!)
While I would love to programmatically generate print art (and who knows, maybe one day I will!), for now, I have gone pretty analog with my business. I design by hand lovely fantastical maze maps using street grid data. What does that mean? It means I transform street data into solvable mazes!
Each maze map is screen printed by hand and I have many cities available (including Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, SF, etc), check them out over here.
Last year, I released 12 new city mazes, attended several events where I sold my prints, and showed my work at a local gallery, and also at my local climbing gym (where I frequently climb!)
You can read more about what I have learned in each year of my business on the Dirt Alley Design blog, especially these two posts:
March 1, 2018 - Reflections on my First Year in Business
January 30, 2019 - Go Big or Go Home: Year 2 of Dirt Alley Design
To sum, I love running my own business, am hopeful to have less migraines over time, and would like to get back into more of the technological interests I had in graduate school (time willing!) Since there has been steady interest and web traffic to my blog over the years, I will keep these posts live as long as possible and will post new updates time willing. Thanks for reading!
