Aaron Shinn

August is a super premium tea brand I cofounded with my partner Gina Zupsich. I’m responsible for product, brand, design, marketing, photography, and more. We’re a small team and as a cofounder I have to bring all my skills to bring this brand to life.

From teenage years writing graffiti to building brands as an adult, typography and lettering have been a central part of my design practice.

I do pretty much everything typography related: hand-drawn lettering, custom typefaces, logo and icon design, brand standards and color systems.

Artform (artform.co) was a professional platform for the fine arts. It was cofounded by Benjamin Millepied, Nicholas Britell, and Aaron Shinn with backing from Ev Williams. It didn’t make it to series A but was on track to be an excellent product. I was head of product and design director, responsible for every aspect of the app, UX, visual design, etc.

Visionaire is a quarterly multi-format art and fashion journal. Each issue is a completely different format than the one that preceded it, and the contributors are the absolute cream of the art and fashion world. I worked as an art director and designer, working with the artists and editors to shape each issue into a gorgeous finished project.

Photography by Dan Forbes
 

I led an in-depth human centered design workshop series for a global apparel brand to help them lead the workwear category. In extremely fast sprints, we went into the field, interviewed users, designed products for them, and built prototypes. This process helped the client break out of preconceived notions of what workwear ‘should’ be and helped them design for unmet customer needs.

For an Alexandre Plokhov menswear collection, I helped create an ambitious art look book with the brilliant photography team Cope-Arnold.

The book expands on Plokhov's runway presentation (which I art directed with Dustin Arnold), inspired by Xavier Zimbardo's documentation of Russian orthodox monks living on Mount Athos. The book, entitled Apostate / Acolyte depicts a journey from darkness to light through dramatic, cryptic imagery.

The fifty-two page book measures 285mm (11.25in) by 420mm (16.5in) and is printed in los angeles in quadtone black and white, bound by hand in black thread, and wrapped in an unprinted foil-stamped cover.
 

I was contacted at the inception of Kimochi Sound – a vinyl-only dance music label from Chicago musician M50 aka Area – to design artwork for the label's first release. The challenge was to create a strong visual signature for the label with practically no budget. Even printing was out of the question. All artwork was to be produced by the label owner himself by hand. 

In order to accomplish this, I began prototyping different hand-made printing processes, eventually settling on laser-cut stencils and spray paint as a way of creating imagery. 

In painting each record by hand, M50 has taken full ownership of the painting process and has began to add stylistic flourishes beyond what I specify in the renderings I make during the design process. It's a joy to see how the raw material of the stencil art comes to life when it's executed by someone else.

This project has been very therapeutic for me, in that there's barely any time spent on the computer at all. The stencils start their life as sketches, which are traced before being sent out for cutting. The center labels are also hand-lettered and printed with minimal cleanup. It's a sweet feeling to lead from the gut and get away from intellectual design now and then.

In 2015, the Chicago Reader did a cover feature about Kimochi Sound.

Kimochi has now released over twenty releases and shows no signs of slowing down.

I spent several years as an art director and designer at V Magazine and V Man magazine. I worked under design director Greg Foley and creative director Stephen Gan.

I worked with legendary fashion photographers like Mert Alas and Marcus Pigot, Mario Testino, Mario Sorrenti, David Sims, and many others.

During my tenure I also was given total control of the grid and typographic standards for V Man.