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Even as a kid growing up in Staten Island, designer Peter Girardi had a thing for graphics. He loved cereal boxes with the ornate, decorative typography and funny characters, and he loved to draw them himself. [para] "I've always been interested in graphic design," he says. "It just took me years to find out that's what it was called." Cereal boxes, cartoons, silly record covers, pretty much anything falling under the auspices of what he calls "crap culture. That was the stuff with the most life in it for Girardi. [para] "I always loved TV," he says. "The crappier the show, the more I liked it. I still have arguments with people who say, 'How can you like Rocky and Bullwinkle and those Hanna Barbera cartoons? They're done so crudely, and they're so badly animated!' Well, I think that's what makes them great. Those guys didn't have a lot of money or time, and they came up with something fantastic."
1 THE TRASH COLLECTORS
In 1995, along with partners Chris Capuozzo and John Carlin, Girardi founded Funny Garbage, which has since become one of the premier media developers in the world. Girardi and Capuozzo had already known each other most of their lives, and one of their first employees was an old mutual friend, Todd James. Those three had met each other as teenaged graffiti writers. "Graffiti writing is where I learned my love of typography and weird letterforms, which has influenced my work more than anything else," Girardi says.
Girardi and Carlin met through working on a project for the Whitney Museum in the mid-1990s called "The Beat Experience," around an exhibit called The Beat Generation. At the time, Girardi was working for the Voyager Company doing CD-ROMs, with inklings of starting his own company. After the success of the Whitney project, Carlin was interested, too. With plenty of experience running his nonprofit company, Red Hot Organization, which raised money for AIDS through producing records such as Red Hot and Blue, Carlin had also been an entertainment lawyer in New York for years. He was tailor-made for the endeavor.
With 50-some employees in Manhattan, Funny Garbage is a pleasing chaotic mayhem, and Girardi's own office is stacked to the rafters with stuff he's...