I don’t like the word “hero.” It reminds me of Underoos. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Underoos and would probably still wear them if they were made in big kid sizes. It’s just that a hero is unrealistic in a way that is bolded and underlined–overemphasized.

So, when asked who my heroes are, I take a few steps back and pretend I’m being asked who makes me want to live one more day. Whether they are dead or alive, these people have most certainly affected my life and challenged the way I think. There’s a kind of depth to them that escapes into their work like hidden tracks. It feels like we have shared our deepest secrets, even if we haven’t.

Johnny Cash

I loved Johnny Cash backwards. First for “Sunday Morning Sidewalk,” which I accidentally heard one day while trying to find a radio station, then for his work with American Records, then for San Quentin, then for Folsom Prison and finally for those early songs that sound like a slow-moving train. I’ve read nearly everything there is to read about his life and I’ll often listen to whole days of his music while painting. On the subway, I get stared at like a foreigner with a bomb when passengers overhear my iPod playing, “25 Minutes To Go.”

Willie Nelson

I often feel that God put me on this earth to be Willie’s fifth wife, but the thought of making out with an old man kind of grosses me out, so I’d probably settle for being one of his roadies.

Fred Woodward

Long before I knew there was such a thing as typography or an Art Director or people who sat around making all of the things we look at, I collected Rolling Stone magazine. While I loved Circus and its pages and pages of pictures, I never hesitated to cut it up. It felt almost irreverent to make the slightest crease on a page of Rolling Stone–it was the letters. They were more like shapes. Shapes with feelings, which is how I’ve always seen them. I learned later that Fred Woodward was the common denominator in every issue I kept. He was the Art Director

James Victore

James was the first designer I ever heard speak. I thought that meant that every other designer used their hands more than the computer, wore gorilla suits, read books without pictures, and used the f-word at least once in every sentence. Sometimes I think I must have dreamed him up like a Loch Ness monster.

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan cuts his skin for posters, hangs himself outside of windows in very tall buildings like a jumper, lets bees crawl on honey poured on his chest. He seems to be scared of everything, which makes him scared of nothing.

Shepard Fairey

Every time I see his work, I have to stop and think and look again. I’ve even bought his posters without agreeing with their message. Shepard Fairey’s voice isn’t one that is patronizing, but it does remind me that I don’t know much of anything.

Alissa Walker

A friend of mine heard her speak and relayed bits and pieces of her message to me a couple of years ago. I remember thinking that she didn’t sound like an idiot or like so many of those people who give you the candy-coated version of what it means to work in this business of design. When I became conscious of the fact that I had no goals and that I couldn’t think in the future tense, I emailed her and told her these things that most wouldn’t confide in a complete stranger. I don’t know that I expected a response. I think I just needed to say it out loud to an unbiased third party. She wrote me back and asked me ten questions. Questions I had to sit on for three days because none of them had quick answers. All of that set in motion a plan to reconstruct my life and Minus Five. I didn’t feel like I had to have it all figured out anymore. I could just pick a place to start and go. She gave it to me straight, and she did it in a way that said, “You’re better than this. I don’t even know you, but I know that you’re better than this.”

Maira Kalman

Her work has always been beautiful to me, and I get the feeling she would always tell me the truth. I don’t know her, but I would like to.

Daniel Libeskind

A few years ago, when I had first moved to New York, I happened upon Daniel Libeskind’s book, “Breaking Ground” while killing some time in Strand. Not yet a year into my post-school career, I had already become jaded by this business of design and began to believe that maybe everyone else had been right and I had been wrong. Maybe none of it matters and maybe it is style over concept and maybe I don’t have a place in this kind of work at all. I didn’t feel that I belonged, which has always been the case, but I guess I just figured it would be different when I became an adult and got an adult job. Daniel Libeskind, was to me, a real-life Howard Roark. The book was part biography and part out loud thinking and it chronicled his plan for the new World Trade Center site. He went into great detail about the meaning behind the buildings and the space and the process of the political destruction of an idea in slow motion. More than anything, I guess, he made me want to keep throwing myself out there. That somehow, if only to myself, it would be worth it.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat makes me feel like a Catholic during Confession.

Yoshitomo Nara

During school, I kept xeroxes of Nara’s drawings masking-taped above my work area. He gave me permission to keep using my hands and still refer to it as design, even when I was told I couldn’t. Everything doesn’t have to be typed in order to communicate.

El Lissitzky

Sometimes I think I lived a past life in Russia, during communism, sometime around the 1920’s or 30’s, and as a Jewish kid in a concentration camp, who simultaneously saw the guy behind the Grassy Knoll. This is the only way I can explain my fascination and sometimes obsession with: russian letters, book covers, war posters, propaganda, the Holocaust, Hitler and where hatred comes from and how it manifests itself and the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Of course, I know it would be impossible to live all of those things at the exact same moment, but they do sit right next to each other in my mind. El LIssitzky is my imagination if it were to be taken from pieces to order and laid out nicely.