Kutztown University Communication Design

Alumni Spotlight

October 2006: Projekt, Ink

Projekt Ink is the studio and brainchild of May 2000 graduate Sean Costik. Sean’s work has been featured in Graphic Design USA, Graphis and Creativity 31. A short interview with Sean follows.

When Kutztown graduate Sean Costik was eight years old, his mother took him, his younger brother and his sister to the local pool for a long day of cannonballs and belly flops. After a few hours, as kids are prone to do, he plucked a few odd coins from his mom’s purse and bolted for the concession stand. Struggling to peak over the top of the counter, he slid the wet coins to the young girl behind the window and asked for a box of ‘Mike and Ike’ candies. He bounced back to his towel and began sucking them down one by one. But as he did, something happened. He stopped. He looked at the box... REALLY looked at the box... the colors, the typography, the funny little characters, the pattern of candies strewn across the background and thought, “Somebody made this—what a great job!” At that moment, his future crystallized before his eyes. His course was set and he landed at Kutztown University 10 years later.

Entering Kutztown University in the Fall of 1996, he had no idea what was in store. “I remember sitting in the lecture hall of Sharadin [Art Building] listening to David Bullock talk about QuarkXPress,” Sean recalled. “I thought it was software I had seen in my MacMall catalogs used to morph one person's face into another! Although I always knew I wanted to design, I really had no idea what was involved or how that process took place.”

That quickly changed, after four years of typography, critical thinking, graphic design and advertising classes he graduated as the May 2000, Karen L. Anderson award winner, presented to the outstanding graduate in graphic design.

Upon graduation from Kutztown, Sean accepted a position at the packaging design firm The Bailey Group, where he designed for clients such as Johnson & Johnson, Maxell, McNeill, Welch’s—and of all things—Just Born Candies, the makers of ‘Mike and Ike.’

“When I sat down with The Bailey Group at Kutztown’s annual portfolio review,” Sean recollected, “they showed some examples of their work—when I saw the ‘Mike and Ike’ box in their portfolio, I pretty much knew I was going to work there.”

After one year at The Bailey Group, Sean went to work as a designer/art director for the award-winning, multidisciplinary design firm Partners Design, where he designed for clients such as Boscov’s, Carpenter Technologies, Clover Farms, Discovery Federal Credit Union and the Reading Hospital.

“At Partners I really grew as a designer. With only 5-6 employees, including the owners Jeff and Jack Gernsheimer, it was an extremely close interaction on a daily basis with an amazingly talented group of designers. Watching them work was inspirational. They continually searched for solutions, always striving for better and brighter work—even in the face of a client's seemingly illogical request. It’s a great studio—and it was an invaluable experience that molded me into the designer I am today.”

From Partners, Sean went on to graduate school at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where he recently completed the school’s two-year Masters of Fine Arts program.

“The graduate program at Tyler is focused around the idea of authorship.” Sean explained, “Each semester the graduate students were given 2 themes, around which developed a project for each theme from start to finish. No parameters were given in regards to the theme, it could've been a book, an interactive piece, packaging or virtually anything else we or our professors thought was appropriate. For example, one semester’s theme was ‘gender’—which I developed into a complete line of bath products for little boys. The idea behind the entire line was this notion of boys hating to bathe. So the product line consisted of products like ‘Yuck, Muck, Slop, Glop, Crud, Mud, Scum, Sleaze and Gunk’—the entire line was called ‘Scuzzee Scrubz.’ The project entailed name generation, identity development, sales correspondence and the actual packaging—which required much more than just the labels, my apartment was littered with food coloring, fishing lures, glycerin soap bases, hair gels, shampoos, conditioners. At one point, I was even playing with garlic and chili powders!”

Since completing his Masters degree, Sean is currently pursuing his lifelong dream of starting his own design firm. Based in Philadelphia, he’s named his firm ‘Projekt, Ink.’ Coming from Polish ancestry, Sean explained ‘projekt’ is Polish for ‘design.’ He hopes he has enough ‘projekts’ to keep him busy for years to come.

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