Our Creative Process Branding The Drip
Meet illustrator, designer, and artist Kit Mills!
When I was in New York last month, I went to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space to see the exhibit, Grave New World, and to meet one of the curators and featured artists, Kit Mills. The art in Grave New World explored the “dual nature of these dark processes”—death, destruction, decay, and dystopia, and their relationships to rebirth and regeneration through multi-media works and performances.
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space is located in C-Squat, a building with a rich history of housing artists, musicians, and activists as a former squat space in the Lower East Side. In the late 80s, people began moving into the (at the time) city-owned building, which previously had been gutted and damaged by a fire in 1979. C-Squat became a creative collective, a beloved punk rock venue, and at one point featured a DIY half pipe for skaters in the basement. As one of the longest-standing squat spaces in the city, it represented the fight for housing rights, affordable living, and intentional community. In 2002, C-Squat residents and 10 other Lower East Side squats came to an agreement with the city to buy their buildings for $1.00 and bring them up to housing code. If you’re curious to see inside, check out this 2015 New York Times album, Photographs from C-Squat, a Punk Homestead.
The museum itself is a small storefront filled with photographs, zines, and artifacts. It extends to a subterranean gallery filled with preserved graffiti from its historic punk days, where I saw the Grave New World show. I realized that I had walked past this building several times without knowing the significance this space holds. I’m so glad to know of it now—it made me more aware of the history of urban activism in the city, the tensions caused by urban renewal, and the imaginative ways spaces evolve. The art by Kit Mills in Grave New World featured drawings of Neponsit Beach Hospital in Rockaway, Queens. He described his inspiration as:
“I’m struck by the contrast between the crumbling, derelict hospital buildings and the vibrant scenes of queer social life taking place in front of it. The abandoned hospital is host to new pieces of radical graffiti and symbology, another visual representation for marginalized communities managing to thrive among the ruins of both physical and social structures.”
Kit Mills also happens to be the incredible designer, illustrator, and creative brain behind The Drip’s branding. Kit’s work has been featured in the LA Times, the Harvard Business Review, Vice, the Village Voice, and Eater. I feel very lucky and grateful that the Substack team connected us, especially after I gave the following visual descriptions for my initial branding concept: “sketchy-feel,” “graphic lines,” and “I want to see the artist’s hand.” I absolutely loved working with Kit—he brought so many fresh interpretations to the ideas I had originally presented. I’m a huge fan particularly of his expressive line work and ability to iterate on precise details. And as a designer, I’m inspired by his creative process and range of illustrative styles.
Since our initial branding conversations, I wanted to feature Kit’s work and talk more about the process of developing the look and feel for The Drip. It’s even more exciting for me now that I’ve experienced Kit’s art and curated spaces in real life.
Branding The Drip
This branding story begins as a love affair with Kit’s Instagram grid. Once I saw his portfolio, I scrolled through every post and narrowed down 6 illustrations that drew me into each of the worlds and characters he created.
The expressive and graphic lines in each of these drawings felt so compelling, and the yellows popped against Kit’s inky strokes. I wanted the same kinds of textures and color treatments for The Drip.
When Kit and I first met over Zoom, we talked about visual concepts for intersections, overlapping ideas, Venn diagrams, and symbols that represented art and hip hop.
We landed on the mixtape—mostly because that’s how I had always thought about the concept of this newsletter in my head. (Each week I would write a “track” to a monthly mixtape theme.) I also wanted a bit of nostalgia, and the cassette tape, as a recent historical artifact, felt right here. As a kid, I was so obsessed with listening to the radio that I always had a blank tape at the ready to record my favorite songs, usually half cut-off with the DJ talking over it. CD mixes took over in high school, then playlists in college. It’s all the same love language.
After some back and forth, we arrived here, as the main illustration for The Drip’s landing page. (But I have to say I’m still very enamored by the unhinged vibe of option #6 above!)
Next, we tackled the email banner image. I was always so excited to see all of the options Kit came up with after each round of feedback. I knew I wanted to keep the tape and play around with the loops overlapping in option #4 below. (Option #1 was another favorite of mine.)
Kit describes his own creative process here:
“The process itself varies depending on the project, but in general I start by making a handful of crappy little composition sketches that just block out ideas and show how each visual element will be arranged on the page or within whatever boundaries this piece is going to live in. If I’m working with a client, I’ll ask them which direction they like the best, or which elements of each idea they like and want to use, and then make a more detailed sketch based on that feedback.
“At this point I might also block in some ideas for color.”
“After a little more back-and-forth, we settled on a final version of the line work and color palette/arrangement, and then I put the finishing touches on the final piece and sent it off!”
“Of course, if I’m working on a personal project that doesn’t involve outside clients or editors, this whole feedback-and-response process takes place inside my own head. I do my best to be a decisive and communicative client to myself, but sometimes we have a hard time compromising on our visions.”
I loved how Kit iterated on the tape loops to hint at the shapes of a Venn diagram. This also inspired the look for the page breaks:
Kit was not only speedy between feedback rounds, but also, every new idea felt delightful and unique from the rest. Back in April, I didn’t expect to launch this newsletter with its full branding ready at the start, especially since I connected with Kit a week before my first post was set to drop. Kit turned it out, above and beyond anything I expected. It meant a lot to me! I was nervous about putting my writing out into the world and connecting visuals to voice in this way felt powerful.
A Quick Q&A with Kit!
So we can further get to know Kit, I asked him a few questions that I’m always curious about when interacting with fellow artists and writers. In Kit’s own words:
What sparks your creativity?
“I read a lot and watch a lot of movies, and get a lot of visual inspiration from looking at individual frames of movies. It’s all composition + time, sort of like comics. Medieval art is also a big interest for me, both the wild orgiastic hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and more sedate but mystical religious icons of saints and martyrs. The different types of marginalia and grotesques used as decoration in medieval manuscripts are also fascinating and often very funny to look at.
Research is a big part of the creative process, but it’s also really important to me to leave my apartment and go outside and go to shows and talk to my friends and ride my bike around. I’m not really someone who can hermit away and devote to a project for more than a couple days at a time—I need outside influences in order to function and keep my machinery running.”
What intersections do you work in?
“It feels like I’m constantly being pulled between the urge to make precise, detailed, technically perfect work and the counterpoint urge to make expressive, wild, and confusing art.”
How do you build community through art?
“This is an interesting question. My creative/work practice itself is pretty solitary, but I’ve found that in order to keep working as a freelancer it’s absolutely essential to have some kind of community around you to help you get gigs and to watch your back. If I’m approached to work a job and can’t do it, I recommend a friend who can. Also, there are databases and rate disclosure groups for illustrators and other commercial artists (Litebox.info is a good one) that list the clients, publishers, and agencies that people have worked for and what their experiences were like—what the job was, how much it paid, whether or not they were paid on time, whether or not it was work-for-hire (meaning the copyright belongs to the client or another third party, not the artist). If you know that a magazine paid someone else $500 more than they’re offering you, you know that they’re trying to take advantage of you. It sucks that it’s on freelancers to advocate for ourselves around things like this, but resources like this definitely help.”
What are you working on that you’re excited about?
“Right now I’m illustrating a graphic novel with the comic writer, Magdalene Visaggio. It’s called Mother Night and it’s about about queer vigilante justice in a small Catholic town in Arizona, with some supernatural elements. I’ve drawn a little over half of the book so far and I’m aiming to have the rest drawn and inked by the end of this year. It’ll probably be published around the end of next year.
To see more Substacks *blessed* by Kit’s branding, here’s the (growing) list:
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy by Alicia Kennedy
Between the Layers by Ann Byrn
Keep Calm and Cook On by Julia Turshen
A Writer’s Journal by Joyce Carol Oates
Gary’s Journey Through Hell by Gary Shteyngart
To see more of Kit’s work (and you definitely want more):
Portfolio: mitkills.com
Instagram: @kitmills
Finally, a huge thank you to Kit Mills for all the wonderful work and fun collaboration.
We’ll get back to this month’s theme of hip hop, museums, and context before the month is out!
Thanks for reading.
Awesomeness
Awesome designs.