Rediscovering Busytown, NYC 🍎🐛
When I was a kid, I was destined to be a designer. My best friend, sister, and I used to play a game called “hotbox” in my room. It was an unofficial, busy ad agency of three. I was the art director (before I even knew what that term meant), handing out briefs for Ford, Apple, and McDonald’s, all scribbled on yellow legal pads, taped to the walls, and stacked messily for the plot. I’d turn on every lamp and multiple fans in the room to make it feel like a proper office, deadlines and all. (For the record, I’ve since learned about child labor laws, and I swear I’m a much kinder Art Director these days.)
I’ve always been drawn to whimsical, strange worlds from Fraggle Rock to the Moomins, Babar, and, of course, Richard Scarry’s Busytown. I loved the vehicles most of all. Matchbox cars were my childhood currency, rewards for taking naps, sitting quietly in church, or making it through family events I didn’t want to attend. Somewhere in the mix of toy cars and picture books, my love for typography and design was already taking root.
A few months ago, while visiting a friend’s gallery opening in Pittsburgh, I passed a shop with chalk markers on the window frame. I’d been stuck on branding my new logo for weeks, attempting to produce a “sigil” for my site, racking my brain over complex letter combinations of my name, but nothing felt quite right. On a whim, I picked up an icy blue marker, doodled my initials, added a pair of googly eyes, and a tiny bridge between the lenses, and there he was. Lowly. A strange, charming little worm who just so happened to perfectly represent me as an artist. I took that doodle, drew about a hundred fifty more, refined it in Illustrator, and before I knew it, my new brandmark had wriggled its way into existence.
The wild part? Lowly had been waiting for me all along. Digging through an old blog entry—in fact, the first ever on my website—a sketch I’d made exactly 10 years, 10 months, and 20 days earlier showed my initial pass on the logo! A slightly less polished Lowly, missing only the glasses bridge that ties my initials together now. Back then, I hadn’t yet changed my name legally to Phen Nels Grant. When I moved to NYC and finally added “Nels”, which is a nod to my great-great-grandfather, something clicked visually. Lowly had been there all this time, waiting for me to catch up. Tell me that’s not proof that I had the answers inside this whole time! Sometimes it just takes a decade, a move to a busier town, and a chalk marker to see it clearly.
