Who Dis
Based out the Lower East Side, NYC. Justin Timberlake played a character based on me in the 2011 film “Friends with Benefits” staring Mila Kunis.
Rap Name: Lil Bicep
Deputy Art Director at GQ. § Partner at QUAL AGENCY & QUALITYPE. § Founder of SLIME CO. § Le CLUB MAINS Coming Soon.
simon@abranowicz.com / Instagram † Tumblr ‡
Art Direction
Sneakers of GQ.Com
Art Direction and styling for GQ.com’s favorite sneakers. Photography by Matthew Martin.
Esquire: The Code
The Code is Esquire’s front of book section dedicated to menswear. When I was the Deputy Art Director, I was put in charge of directing the majority of the shoots for this section. This involved concepting, sketching, styling, art and photo direction as well as designing the pages. Here are a few of my favorites, whether they ran or were ultimately killed.
Le Club Mains
Jewelry company focused on hands. Jen Yuan, Kao Yumin and I design and make the jewelry. Photography by William Abranowicz.
Slime Co
slime co is a clothing company developing out of New York. The brand began as a simple exercise in creativity on all planes. A means to pursue uninhibited design and audacious photography. Photography by Gabby Jones, Amina Gingold, and Eric T. White.
Sloth Cloth
Clothing company started with Maya Champion while we were students at school. Photography by Allen Chiu.
Design
FC Goldschläger
Identity for Grand St based soccer team FC Goldschläger. It’s a pretty bad name, named after a pretty bad drink. In spite of this, I crafted a brand that absorbed the energy from the small soccer pitch, located on Grand St, smack in the middle of a chaotic section of Chinatown and the LES.
The Good Few
Branding for rock band The Good Few. Logo, typefaces, album and single art, merchandise, as well as flyers for each gig. One of my favorite clients to work with and very fun to see perform live.
Various Logos
A selection of logos for various clients, teams, organizations, events, people and businesses.
Jossy’s Giants FC
Jossy’s Giants is a soccer club with heritage, competing for over 15 years in different leagues around NYC. In my second year on the squad, I branded the club with the crest of the beast. Exuding poetry on and off the pitch, “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Giant” is the club’s slogan, so much of the visuals focus on time.
FBBS
The Five Borough Banya Society is an organization of friends who gather for periodic visits to NYC’s finest bath houses. These baths, (or ‘banya’ in Russian) offer a meaningful respite from the rigors of modern life. Away from technology, obligation, and clothing, friends reconnect and sweat out life’s worries, without distraction.
Cardozo Art Law Society
Identity for the Cardozo Art Law Society at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School. Art Law is the body of law including domestic and foreign law, including multilateral treaties and conventions, that regulates and is applied to artists, fine art, and cultural property. This definition informed my design ethos, using type and color that are run-of-the-mill. I wanted to create something own-able and recognizable derived from this palette of typically mundane devices, thereby playing into the theme of intellectual property.
Partap Brothers
The Partap Brothers are proud ambassadors of the Sikh community. They have spent more than 3 decades in North America and abroad perfecting their talent. Their absolute dedication to classical Kirtan, or the musical recitation of sacred Sikh texts, is of great pride to Sikhs everywhere. Branding, writing, illustration, and design by Qual Agency.
Editorial
GQ Style Fall 2018
With the redesign of GQ Style, our goal was to make an overall more bold and engaging design. Utilizing thick strokes, a chunky sans serif, and large blocky body copy, the Fall 2018 issue of GQ Style (staring “Tyler the Creative Director”) is sleeker and more singular than ever.
GQ Style Holiday 2018
The second issue of GQ Style after our redesign allowed us to further explore our new design system; black and white, single typeface, and loosely conceptual typography. By building on the foundation of what we created for the Fall 2018 issue, we cement our bold and distinct aesthetic into the luxurious pages of GQ Style.
GQ
Currently serving as Deputy Art Director under Rob Vargas. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to be involved with this magazine, either on it, in it, or making it.
Businessweek
After a summer internship at Bloomberg Businessweek, I was brought on as a freelance Art Director. It was one of the best places I could have ever imagined working and I learned a lot from the amazing team in my year there.
Esquire
Served as Deputy Art Director at Esquire under the Great Anton Iouknovets. Here are a few of my favorite pages I designed in my time there.
Illustration
GQ Web
Image making for GQ.com. Conceptual illustrations and collages, and of course some male grooming.
Kai Ji Man
Illustrations for Taiwanese fishing company Kai Ji Man. Qual was commissioned to design and develop a website using my illustrations to help tell pieces of the brand’s rich history. Here are a few of my favorite illustrations.
Commissioned
A small selection of commissioned illustrations for various clients.
Personal
I started to like my drawings in the 10th grade. Here are a selection of my favorites since then. For more, follow my gram.
300 Entertainment
300 Entertainment is an independent American music label founded by Lyor Cohen. 300 was one of Qual’s earliest clients. Over the past few years, they’ve enlisted us to produce material for them, from single art and tour posters to snapchat filters and merchandise.
Typography
Qualitype
Qualitype foundry is a subsidiary of Qual Agency. Here are a few specimens of typefaces we have designed for various purposes and outlets.
NeSense
Ne.Sense is a fashion retailer operating out of Taiwan. Ne.Sense hired Qualitype to design a custom typeface (we called it Ne.Sans) to be used across all expressions of the brand, from clothing labels, to event invitations, to physical spaces, to the Ne.Sense website.
American Originals
Custom typeface for William Abranowicz’s (my dad) book American Originals, published by Vendome Press. I tried to make something as expressive and imperfect and human as the spaces Bill was drawn to photograph.
