Fantastic wax type pieces by Keetra Dean Dixon and Jonathan Keller.



Keetra describes her process in the latest edition of 8 Faces Magazine:

“We cut positive type forms and position them on the top of the grid, and we take hot wax and manually start coating all of those letterforms and catching the drips underneath in the basins. And as the layers cool, we shift the colour of the wax that we’re applying to them and we manually layer again and again until it builds up a mass of wax. Then we have to take the positive letterforms out of the interior of the wax piece.” I'm a bit splintered right now. Since I've gotten the teaching gig, I've been working on curriculum. Actually the act of constructing an experiential design course is kind of long-form experiential design itself, so I'm having fun with that. I'm also planning a giant studio makeover. My practice after relocating to Rhode Island is going to narrow to outputting goods that spur or reflect the creative process. A good example is the retooling crayons I've been making. The goal was to encapsulate a beginner's approach to creativity and combine it with the designer, or artist's, tendency to fetishize tools and view them as sacred. I wanted to create an object that codes a question to users outside of the design or arts practice, that made them ask, Is this a tool to use or an object to keep?

Mission
Unite my love of learning, making and teaching into a singular studio practice. In regards to teaching, to encourage the integration of R&D into more traditional graphic design methods. More generally and for self-authored work, my goal is always to facilitate or reflect social relation, to question understood patterns and standards, and to cultivate an openness with play.



When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer?
I grew up in Alaska and I really didn't know what design was, nor did it occur to me that there was a design action involved in object-making. During undergrad I took an entry-level graphic design course as part of my foundational studies, and was introduced to Gestalt psychology and the general principles of perception. That's when I knew this is absolutely the thing for me! It was a relief to have this general set of guides to help me understand, in a more objective way, how other people were perceiving visual work. That was my first taste of what the deeper design methodologies had to offer. Gestalt psychology totally seduced me into design.

Education
I went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design on a painting scholarship, and later changed my major to graphic design. For my graduate degree I went to Cranbrook and studied 2D design, although a majority of the work I was doing was actually three-dimensional and experiential.

First design job
At MCAD I assumed that I never wanted to work in advertising, but I had zero actual experience in the field. So I decided I should try it out before I ruled it out and I got an internship at Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. I loved it! I was working with fantastic people who were really passionate about what they were doing, and who had a hyper-stringent, hyper-structured internal method. That's actually where I learned a lot of thinking strategies that I still use now. I'm super thankful for that job.

What was your big break?
After graduating MCAD in 1999, I moved out to San Francisco and landed a job with a group called Futurefarmers. They were making waves on the Internet as very early aesthetic form makers, by exploring interactivity in unusual ways, and by making new definitions of what was possible on the web. I had a crush on their aesthetic in general, so when I got a job with them it very much felt like I had made it. 



When I started working there it was just three people including me, and the studio was really an extension of the founder, Amy Franceschini. At the time she was doing 50% client-based work and 50% self-authored work, but she wanted to transition into completely self-authored work. Essentially, my role became taking over all of the client work and emulating her in a way. She would invite me into her office and I would stand over her shoulder and watch her work; it really became this mentor-mentee relationship. During my process of learning the ways of design, I think I lost some of the playfulness and intuitive exploration that just comes naturally, before you've been trained into a method. Amy gave me permission to integrate all that stuff back into my way of working. And she gave me a ton of autonomy, which thinking back on it, was insane but incredibly trusting.