DEFinition: Graphic Design and Hip Hop

SYNOPSIS

DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop is a visually rich, diverse book designed by one of the foremost Hip-Hop designers working today, Cey Adams. The book will celebrate the widespread impact of Hip-Hop’s visual style in seven chapters on fashion, sneakers, advertising, music, movies and television, street art and fine art, and automobiles. It will be the first book to track the influence of Hip-Hop graphics down the decades and across a variety of media. All of the individual works reproduced in the book will be duly identified and captioned, but much of the text will be in the form of informative and entertaining essays by well-known specialists in each given field. The book’s foreword is by Russell Simmons.

AUTHOR PROFILE

Cey Adams is a legendary Hip-Hop graphic artist, whose career has taken him from subway trains to gallery shows to album covers and stage backdrops to sportswear design and the creation of indelible logos. His clients include Def Jam Recordings, Bad Boy Records, Roca-Wear, Adidas, Comedy Central, and many others.

The book is edited by Bill Adler, a former DJ and freelance writer for Rolling Stone, People, the New York Daily News and other publications. Adler worked as the publicist for Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings and Rush Artist Management. There, from 1984-1990, he promoted the music and careers of Hip-Hop legends Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, 3rd Bass, and Slick Rick to the masses. He has also worked at Island Records, founded his own PR firm and record label, and runs Eyejammie Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan where he writes, publishes and curates photo exhibits. Adler co-curated the Hip-Hip exhibit at Paul Allen’s Seattle Music Project in 2000, and he was recently tapped by the Smithsonian to help curate the institution’s new collection, “Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, Rhymes, the Life,” which was reported in the New York Times on March 1, 2006.

Russell Simmons, widely hailed as the godfather of hip-hop, has made his mark in virtually every medium touched by the culture. He is the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, the founder of the Phat Farm fashion brand, the co-founder with Donnie Deutsch of the dRush advertising firm, and the motivating force behind HBO’s Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam, both of which appeared on HBO and on Broadway. He is also the founder of the HipHop Summit Action Network.