Infrared NYC, by Paolo Pettigiani

Taken from various locations within Central Park, Paolo Pettigiani’s eye-catching images portray the Big Apple in a new light. Positioning the city’s skyline as emerging from the park’s bright raspberry treescape, Pettigiani explains, “The purpose is to highlight the majesty and the contrast of nature included in the famous Big Apple’s skyscrapers.”

Having graduated in Visual Design and Communication from the Polytechnic University of Turin, the photographer counts his other big passion as snowboarding, and spends his winters as an instructor on the slopes.

Quinceañera404

ERA404 Turns 15

Originally published in the ERA404 Newsletter on April 4, 2016:

Dear friends, family, and clients,

Happy 4/04! It’s a momentous one, too. Fifteen years ago, I began moonlighting as a freelance graphic designer in New York City, while working a day-job at a now-defunct dot-com. My first gig was designing the CD packaging for a DJ that was a friend of a friend. My payment was a 12-pack of Heineken. I had purchased the domain for ERA404 back in college, after a geeky but whimsical conversation with a group of designers at my summer internship in Grand Rapids. The name is somewhat esoteric these days, but kudos to those who still chuckle at its etymology.

I was strictly a print and identity designer back then, but expanded to environmental design and strategy when the DJ referred me to his colleague who produced events around the five boroughs. The event producer was patient and helped me as I struggled to learn the ropes of the industry and the city. Luckily, New York often rewards the hard-working and passionate. My first big event design, the USS Target, was featured in The Wall Street Journal and afforded me emancipation from the precarious dot-com. Living on COBRA health insurance out of a tiny studio apartment in Harlem, I began amassing clients and pulling more all-nighters than I had during my four years studying Visual Communication at Ferris State University.

Oftentimes, I would hear these clients express disappointment when I told them I didn’t do web design or development. ERA404 was, after all, a programming joke. While FSU offered a New Media program, my love of the halftone dot helped me ignore the seduction of the pixel. My fledgling company suffered because of this shortsightedness and I shared my frustrations with my brother, Mike Citarella, who was then working as a 3D artist for a post-production facility in midtown. Do you remember that kid in your high school that secretly programmed the formulas for calculus equations behind a secret back-door link of a game of hangman on a TI-82 graphing calculator? That was Mike.

Mike offered a simple, elegant solution: Learn how to design interfaces and let me handle the rest. In 2006, Mike joined ERA404 and consequently allowed us to offer our remaining two disciplines: digital and motion. For the last decade, as our Technical Director, Mike has managed our freelance network of programmers, leaving me to the designers.

In celebrating ERA404’s quinceañera, I’m helpless to think about her growth over the last decade and a half. I’m sharing this with you because everyone we’ve worked with or worked for in the past fifteen years has a similar story. Our stories are what make us unique. When we begin a new relationship with a client, it’s their stories that help us create pieces that are both original and personal. In these stories lie the beauty of the design and the ingenuity of the code.

Thank you for sharing the last fifteen years with us and I hope you continue to be part of our story.

Don Citarella
Creative Director
ERA404

Our Ten-Year Anniversary

Two weeks ago, I turned 32-years-old. I’ve barely come to terms with the fact that half my life ago, I already owned a driver’s license and could legally drive in the State of Michigan. And now I’ve come to realize that next week marks the 10-year anniversary (the “tin” anniversary) of the date I threw everything into a U-haul and moved to New York City. Within the span of a week, I accepted a dot-com job offer, graduated from college, said goodbye to my friends and family, drove through the night and slept in a truck on the streets of Polish Brooklyn until I leased an apartment and began my new job days later. It was exactly 800 miles from my alma mater, five states away from the rest of my family and the longest week of my life.

Three years ago, I wrote a list of accomplishments to mark my 29th birthday. I won’t do that today as I’m afraid the undoing of some of those milestones would only depress me. And today isn’t a day to contemplate my own achievements, but rather to reflect on what New York City has done for me in the past decade. Read more