Bio:
Moyer is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and Yale University. One of three founders of communications planning and design firm, ThoughtForm Inc., Moyer has participated in projects for Bayer, Caterpillar, IBM, Highmark, Humana, McDonald's, Philips, Steelcase, Westinghouse, but never the CIA. Wrote and designed the monthly column, Panel Discussion, for Harvard Business Review for six years. Cambridge Marketing Review (a quarterly) is republishing the original HBR essays and illustrations. Recipient of The Silver Star Alumni Award from the University of the Arts, 2006. Selected as an AIGA Fellow in 2008. Moyer lives in Pittsburgh with The Amazing Karen.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
I’m a retired graphic designer who now has the freedom to squander my days on self-inflicted projects. I draw at least a little everyday and post the pages from my sketchbooks on Flickr.
The drawings I like best make me laugh. Sometimes it is obvious that a drawing could be the basis for a good product. To me, a “good product” is one that can be beautiful, useful, and funny.
I use the crowd-funding platform, Kickstarter, to discover if people like my idea enough to justify a production run. So far, I have had more than 20 successful Kickstarter projects and a few flops.
When a Kickstarter project ends, any surplus products that have been produced become available here on this site until they are sold out.
I have a long list of projects I’d like to complete before I kick the bucket. As long as the projects continue to be fun and people are willing to support them, I see no reason to stop.
The Calamityware series started in 2011 when I inherited a traditional, Willow-pattern plate and decided to sketch it in my notebook. I couldn’t resist the temptation to add a pterodactyl in the sky. When people saw the drawing on Flickr, several urged me to figure out a way to reproduce the image on a physical plate. My first Kickstarter project sprang from that idea.
Blue-willow patterns have been going strong for 300 years. It’s great fun to take that heritage in a new direction.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).