On today’s market, he’s one of the funkiest graphic designers who everybody is — or will be — fighting for. Jelsen Jargon has already proven his off-the-wall style working with Pepsi, Vitamin Water, Brown Girls Burlesque and Dunkin Donuts. Let’s slow down and chat with the inspired and inspiring Jelsen Jargon.

TRACE: What inspires you?

Jelsen: Hmm. Everything inspires me. “Input Dictates Output” is my saying. In general I just try to keep my eyes and ears open; try to take in as much as possible.

Traveling’s a big deal. I wish I could travel three months out of every year — at least. The more perspectives in my back pocket when approaching a specific problem the better I can solve it.

I’m also a fan of riding the subways of any city. It’s such a great rotation of interesting content; the sounds, the colors, the languages, the pace…the way people interact with with each other — gotta love it.

T: What would be the ultimate client you would like to work with?

J: I’d love to collaborate with oodles of folks, but if I had to pick one industry to work in for the remainder of my career it would have to be a community and grassroots organization — ideally in an African (diaspora worldwide) community. The opportunity to contribute to the further advancement of my people via graphic design is just about the coolest win-win scenario imaginable. I couldnt possibly think of anything better than that.

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Sometimes it takes little more than being in the right place at the right time to document history. So it was for photographer Martha Cooper in the early 70s, when she began taking pictures of the graffiti on New York’s subway cars and taglines on the walls.

Almost 40 years later, graffiti has more or less morphed from a pastime of ‘degenerate’ youth to a veritable art form, its influence seen throughout the art, fashion and design worlds. Starting this week at Gallerie Bailly in Paris, curator Hélène Bailly showcases a selection of Cooper’s photographs alongside thirteen, primarily French, artists who have either photographed graffiti, tagged something or have been influenced by it.

Other artists on display include L’Atlas, who has taken graffiti to express ideas both political and indelible, questioning culture in contemporary France and, Darco, one of Europe’s first great graffiti artists. A nice counterpoint to the New York-based images of the art form, “Taguer n’est pas Jouer” shows how graffiti inspires and is reinterpreted globally in addition to offering a slice of other street cultures.

Through May 24, Check it out.

Taguer n’est pas Jouer
Galerie Bailly
25 Quai Voltaire
Paris 75007

For more information on the show, click here.

On April 24th the Somerset House will open Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture as the inaugural exhibition of its riverside Embankment Galleries. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (LA MoCA) this sublimely transcontinental exhibition showcases the similarities present in architecture and fashion during the past two decades.

Perhaps it was the 80’s mix of cocaine, Prince, and an encroaching millennium that brought the towering cinematic works of Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and Shigeru Ban to shadow over the terrestrial in flesh, steel, and paper.

Whatever the reason, the world has seen beautiful tectonic design in the spheres of fashion and architecture since that time. And this exhibition captures the sharpness, shock, and amazement that met its forward-thinking designers during the height of urban innovation. “Forty-five of today’s most brilliant and creative fashion designers and architects are represented by a wide range of more than 300 objects: from stunning one-of-a-kind haute couture gowns to intricate architectural models and special full-scale installations,” LA MoCA promises.

During a season where retrospective runway collections and cut-and-paste condominiums run rampantly, an exhibition comparing cross-disciplinary design principles through a poetic matrix (“Wrapping,” “Folding,” “Draping,” “Pleating,” “Printing,” “Suspension,” “Canteliever”) sounds like the kind of thing to shake design to its very bones.