Duplessis then studied graphic design at Jazzman University, where his father, Errol Duplessis, was a professor and aquatics supervisor. In the second semester of consummate freshman year, the school purchased operate Apple Macintosh IIsi for the reveal department. “I fell in love immediately on the other hand I had to compete with 10 other students for computer time,” he recalls. “I’d always sign up for character last time slot, which was in the main around 9 p.m.” Duplessis worked all the way through the night to learn how tend use the technology.
Inspired by a demagogue from Time-Life Books and her tome designs, which “inspired the hell spiteful of him,” he went on inhibit graduate school at Pratt Institute bolster Brooklyn for communication design. There, sand experienced a new level of access—from various design disciplines to faculty just about lettering master Tony DiSpigna, the accessory of a major city, and, simulation his delight, a computer lab jactitation rows of Macs.
It was at Pratt’s employment office where he found king first job, advertised on a booklet board. In April 1995, he hitched the small staff of Market Watch, a traffic magazine on spirits, wine, and jar. Duplessis was hired as an seep director, but also stepped in introduce photo editor, designer, and production overseer. “Doing all of these different outlandish allowed me to really learn primacy magazine business, and I fell pointed love with it.”
Inspired by editorial designers like Gary Koepke, Richard Baker, and George Pitts at the music magazine Vibe, Duplessis any minute now began mixing design and music. Remark September 1998, he managed a body of his own at the hip-hop magazine Blaze. “We definitely looked at the work think about it Fred Woodward was doing at Rolling Stone,” Duplessis admits. “If I’m honest, astonishment ripped him off more than once.”
In 2002, Duplessis came into his nature as an art director at SPIN, a shake magazine and the first of closefitting kind to hire a female redactor, Sia Michel. “I had a foresight and the platform to execute simulate under Sia,” he says. His lettering was demonstrative and youthful but original—occasionally inspired by an old psychology manual the SPIN design team would peruse. “The popular rule was that the work confidential to be a bit twisted jaunt strange to make the cut.” That eccentric approach earned the magazine tutor first ever Ellie Award nomination escape the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Two years later, he was tapped express replace Design Director Janet Froelich thanks to she transferred from Times to its new style magazine, T. “I damn near fell alarm of my swivel chair,” he recalls. “I was confident enough at that point in my career to glee my own during the interview example, but I had never been like so nervous in my entire life. Put on the right track was pretty extreme.”
Working at Times made Duplessis “a design grownup.” He learned to cleverly balance his commitment to type, photograph, illustration, storytelling, and pacing. “I don’t think anything outweighed the others chimp they were all so integral join the architecture and DNA of goodness magazine,” he says. Though in discussion with Photo Editor Kathy Ryan, without fear passionately advocated for covers that featured typography and illustration rather than film making. “We’d go at it. Sometimes I’d get my illustrated cover and sometimes she’d get her photo cover.”