My Desk - Interviews and Photographs

The space we work in is subject to personal adjustments and preferences. To the extend possible it gets customised and personalised. This is, if working in a large corporate company not always posible to the extend desired and often is reduced to putting up a photograph of a loved one or a colourful coffee mug.

However, how do we choose our workplace if there is a lot more freedom, how do you create your working environment at home? The MyDesk interview series is looking into this and unveils freelancers work desks and other workflow secrets, of course with great snapshot.


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Robb Ogle's desk. He lives in Ontario. Prior, three years were spent in New York after seven years in Boston as a graphic designer and occasional typography professor. Even before that, a lot of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin happened. He is fascinated by words and pictures of words.

Kate Donely describes her 'Desk' projects as "A site dedicate a site solely to canvas of the Desk.

A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s where hours upon hours pass."

The interviews are often very detailed and can be intimate about routines and habits. Very quickly the individual persona shows through. But still the rules for the contribution are very clearly sated "Please, don’t stage it. Don’t clean it (a messy desk doesn’t make a messy mind). Don’t make it something you or your work is not. Keep it real".

THe guardian for a ong time has this as a image with a short text in the Review section of the Saturday edition. Sometimes it was called 'a writer's room' or 'an artist's room'. For example there was Richard Sennett's writing room published on Saturday 25 April 2009.

In the interviews the desk owners get usually very personal and affectionate about the arrangements on the table. The intimacy of the scenery is real and almost always each object has its very own story and reason to exactly feature in this way.

Robb Ogle explains about his arrangements "Ugly little vinyl pitbulls from a bubble vending machine atop one of two Behringer Truth monitors which sound like heaven. Little Nemo in Slumberland vol 1. from Sunday Press Books sits against the wall. Off to the left, rolled up poster by Derek Hess.


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Adrian Tomine's desk. was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He is the writer and artist of the comic book series Optic Nerve, as well as the books Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Summer Blonde,and Shortcomings. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times and McSweeney’s, among others, and he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

"It appears you are quite organized." And Adrian Tomines replays (see his desk above) "Other cartoonists make fun of me for having such a spartan, tidy studio. All my friends have these amazing rooms filled to the rafters with books, toys, artwork, etc., and then my studio looks like it belongs to an anal-retentive architect or something. It’s probably some low-grade OCD thing, but I actually have a hard time working in a cluttered, pack-rat environment."


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Noa Scalin's desk. Noah Scalin is a Richmond, Virginia based artist & designer. He is the creator of the Webby Award winning art project Skull-A-Day which was the basis of his first book, SKULLS.

The importance of the little bibelots is very present in these documentations. Sometimes the technical equipments can play this role and has an individual story, mainly in the case of geeks, but very often additional elements such as figures and collectables, which appear to have no apparent use, occupy these prime spots in the workery scene. It is all about inspiration.

For the full list of reported workspaces see fromyourdesks.com