Justin Dauer

Justin Dauer

Creative Lead

Justin Dauer

A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Justin is a multi-faceted, multi-pierced, and multi-tattooed designer who cites Carlos Segura and Josef Muller-Brockman among his design influences. He thrives on both digital and print design, with work in each medium being published many times over. In previous lives, he was a Senior Designer at supply chain management behemoth i2 Technologies, and formed the Usability and Interface Design department at the Hostway Corporation. A Human Factors International-trained usability designer, he was a GUI judge for the 2006 Avion Awards, which honors excellence in airline entertainment.

Justin is the keeper of Xeno Media’s creative vision and keeps our design standards leaping forward like a cheetah after a triple-tall-skim-vanilla latte. He adores writing biographies in the third person narrative and mercilessly thrashing his co-workers daily in Nerf basketball.

Justin’s Perspective

Systematic Icon Design

While a freshman in art school, I decided to try my hand at icon design after reading an article in MacAddict (now MacLife) on the topic. The 90’s were the initial exploration and maturation years of Mac desktop/interface customization, if you will. In 8-bit, pixel-by-pixel form, icon designers, as a global collective, released downloadable sets

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Don’t Diss the Lead

One thing that is often easy to let slip, during a long-term frenetic pace, is thumbnailing ideas out in advance of anything else. Back when I was a freshman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the first couple weeks of Intro to Visual Communications I involved manually cutting out simple shapes and

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