About Me; Contact Information

ABOUT ME; CONTACT INFORMATION

CONTACT:

e-mail:

ken@typeseeds.com

I live in Plymouth, Minnesota, near Minneapolis.

legal:

All site content © 2017 by Ken Dezhnev. All Rights Reserved.
The Winged Hat logo is a trademark of Ken Dezhnev.

ABOUT

I started out setting hand type and printing on a Kelsey press when I was a little kid. I was a tramp printer in my teens and early twenties, and have been a freelancer almost continuously since. I’ve worked in nearly one hundred type shops, ad agencies, design studios, publishing houses, print shops, and printing plants. (For detail, see my old freelance site, in the My Digital & Consulting Work section of this site.) On the scholarly and linguistic side, my graduate and undergraduate studies were in philosophy, with a large dose of classical studies and classical language scholarship on the side. I lived and worked mostly in New York City; I escaped to Minnesota in 2003. I currently make my living as a professional resumé writer. I’m a volunteer at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where I’ve been putting the composing room in order since early 2014.

Here’s where I worked in New York, from the early 80s to the early 00s.
I used to put a pin in the map for every freelance client.
Nearly all the gigs were in-house. A couple were staff jobs.

This was all typographic proofreading and digital typesetting and graphics work, with some editing on the side. The old type shop district is visible as a rough ellipse with Broadway (the diagonal street) between 14th and 42nd streets as its long axis. There are some outlying type shops to the west, in an old industrial district. On the upper right is the Madison Avenue area. On the lower left is the Varick Street area, which was the old printing district until the city kicked the industry out, and is now the southern annex of Madison Avenue and a part of “Tribeca.” The pins in midtown, between 5th and 8th avenues north of 42nd Street, are ad agencies, publishers, and a marketing consultancy, plus a couple of corporate headquarters. Off the picture on the Upper East Side are another publisher and a cultural institution. Two pins in Wall Street represent financial specialty shops, both of them owned by nut cases. (Way off on the lower right, in Brooklyn Heights, is a pin for the office of the Brooklyn Bulletin, where, much earlier, when I was seventeen, I worked as an office boy.)

A sample of my early letterpress work: wrong fonts cleaned out of cases.
I pulled a proof before distributing them.
(This was in school, not my home shop.)

BADGES? WE DON’ NEED NO STINKING BADGES.

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