The Short Version

Weston works fluidly between three-dimensional spaces and two-dimensional surfaces, designing public and private interactions of all scales, from intimate gestures to expansive coordinated experiences, and complex brand systems for some of the most well-known companies in the world.

His practice is research-oriented, strategy-driven, and thrives on collaboration—developed with interdisciplinary teams of digital visionaries, technology and content strategists, architects, designers, writers, and opinionated makers and creators of all types.

His current work is the inevitable extension of brand creation and stewardship, focusing on architecturally-scaled digital experiences. Spaces translating strategy and purpose into meaningful, real-time experiences—visual and tactile, passive and participatory—connecting technology with humanity, encouraging wonder, and rewarding curiosity.

Weston plays an active role as mediator between client and audience, translating and interpreting purpose and vision into provocative ideas through meaningful content, form, surface, and technology. Regardless of client, audience, message, or medium, his design imperatives remain constant:

• EXPLOIT AND CREATE MEANINGFUL CONTEXTS
• EMBRACE DIVERSITY AND CLARIFY THE COMPLEXITY
• TRANSFORM BY DIMENSIONALIZING EXPRESSIONS
• ENCOURAGE CURIOSITY, DISCOVERY, AND WONDER
• DESIGN WITH INTELLIGENCE, WIT, AND OBSESSIVE CRAFT

Weston believes that design with rigor and purpose resonates longer and engages more deeply in the hearts and minds of the audience. Ultimately this is the discourse that he encourages with each project whether large or small, temporary or permanent, corporate or cultural.

The Longer Version

Weston began his career composing typography for pre-Pentagram Paula Scher, then as a designer at the iconic Chermayeff & Geismar developing identities, branding programs, and environmental graphics for clients including Knoll (with whom he continues to work), The New School for Social Research, IBM, and Birmingham Museum of Art. Inspired by (and forced to re-evaluate everything he’d learned to-date) the “Deconstructivist Architecture” show at MoMA and Eye Magazine Issue 3, he left for graduate studies, receiving his MFA from CalArts in 1996. Returning to New York he joined the fledgling interactive group at Siegel & Gale, followed by a dive into broadcast graphics with VH1 and MTV. In 1997 he co-founded Deluxe Design For Work + Leisure with Chuck Rudy, an interdisciplinary studio formed to work with small cultural and non-profit clients including New York Foundation for the Arts, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The New Festival, The New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The New Victory Theater, and Lincoln Center Theater.

He spent the next few years of his career as Creative Director enjoying the dot-com revolution at marchFIRST, got deep (really deep) into ‘brand’ at Ogilvy & Mather’s Brand Integration Group (BIG)—the iconic brand laboratory led by Brian Collins, and finally Wolff Olins (New York). These critically defining years were spent developing coordinated, dimensionalized brands for clients including Kodak, AT&T Wireless, DuPont, Sprite, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Gap, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

In 2006 he co-founded Object Collective with Warren Corbitt, a interdisciplinary studio that adopted a case-by-case strategy driven approach, modeled on his experience with agency and brand consultancy approaches and team structures but executed with smaller fluid teams, for smaller agile clients. Project teams at Object were comprised of leadership from different disciplines including architecture, motion design, brand strategy, interior design, writing, photography, and cinematography. Maintaining a hands-on involvement with all design and creative direction, he developed brands and relationships with forward-thinking clients including Nike, Nokia, NYU Skirball Center, Corcoran Sunshine, Eight Inc, Frank Gehry Partners, Lincoln Center Theater, Signature Theatre, and Lowe + Partners.

In 2012 Weston and Allen Hori co-founded Open Project, a small New York-based collaborative, organic, and process-driven studio. Open Project worked on paper and screen, on surfaces and in spaces, with a widely-focused practice that spanned ‘traditional’ print and digital design, coordinated 360˚ brand solutions for cultural, luxury, and corporate brands, retail packaging, interactive digital media, public and private cultural spaces and environments. Their work lives in museums, in corporate headquarters, in sales environments, in hand, on shelves, and on the street, for clients that included Corcoran Sunshine, Knoll, Columbia University Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, The San Francisco Symphony, First Look Media, The Intercept, Target, Up & Up, BlackRock, Warner Music Group, Anbau Enterprises/Morris Adjmi Architects, Hogg Holdings/AA Studio Architects, Citibank, Cisco, iShares, Coach, GlaxoSmithKline, McLaren, Warner Music Group. Agency partners and collaborators include AV&C, Collins, Apologue, Ogilvy, MRM//McCann, Publicis.

In 2019 Weston joined Gensler New York’s nascent Digital Experience Design (DXD) group which focused on the integration of intelligent, connected, and immersive experiences— whether one-to-one and intimate or architecturally-scaled spectacle—that are defined by brand, technology, and the human experience. Projects were developed in close collaboration with architecture, experience strategy, intelligent places, and sustainability groups and included a multi-experience performance venue, screen-based data-visualizations, brand experience centers, airports, a pharma headquarters integrating intelligently connected experiences with immersive digital expressions, a physically responsive kinetic light sculpture, a laser and light art installation, and a series of connected visual/3D audio ambient provocations. Clients included Verizon, Deloitte, Live Nation, Pfizer, Xandr/AT&T, and IBM.

Weston is currently the Director of Experience Design and Creative Director at AV&C, New York. A globally recognized interdisciplinary experience design studio, creating architecturally-scaled digital landmarks in the built environment. Their design-led practice is investigative and iterative, grounded in systems-thinking, resulting in adaptable, scalable, platform-based ecosystems. Having worked with the company intermittently for ten years prior, he joined the studio to build and lead an Experience Design group, defining design, experience, brand, and strategy processes and methodologies, and integrating the practice into their well-established powerhouse core of software, systems, and production.

And

In addition to his professional work, he has served on the Board of Directors of American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), partnered on the launch of the AIGA Experience Design committee, organizing multiple lectures about design and typography, and experience design. He has taught advanced typography at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts (and definitely will again), and regularly serves as a visiting critic at graduate and undergraduate design programs.

He received his BFA in Communication Design and Art History from Pratt Institute and his MFA in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts.

Awards and Recognition

Weston’s work has received numerous awards from the Type Directors Club, AIGA, the Art Directors Club, The One Club, Graphis, Print, Communication Arts, Dezeen, Interior Design, the London International Advertising Awards, American Advertising Awards, and the Broadcast Design Association. His work has also appeared in multiple foreign and domestic publications and exhibits and is in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

He also won Best Director for a short film he made at School of Visual Arts that nobody cares about, though he is still very proud of it.

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