Thank you for visiting The Flavor.

The Flavor as a site has been kicking around since 1997 when Shawn Hazen bought the URL. It’s gone through many phases but has finally found its true calling as a venue for the designy things Shawn comes across. It strays from pure “Design” occasionally into the nebulous area of “things that interest designers”, and hopefully it’ll interest you.

Shawn Hazen runs Hazen Creative, Inc., a brand and communication design studio in Chicago. He came to Chicago in 2006 to join the Chicago branding agency Remedy as their Design Director. He’d spent the previous three years as an art director at Apple. Before Apple, Shawn worked in publishing for quite awhile–first as an art director and designer at pop-culture publisher, Chronicle Books, and then as a founding designer for architecture magazine, Dwell. His first gig out of school was with MetaDesign. Feel free to email Shawn.

When at Chronicle Books, Shawn met his wife Lisa Baggerman Hazen, a designer, writer, and marketing specialist, who also occasionally contributes to The Flavor.

Shawn has numerous other design-related blogs, including Chicagotype.com, where he documents the eclectic world of commercial typography in Chicago, and Book Worship, which shows off his collection of graphic book covers from the 60s and 70s. There are many others. Head over to Hazen Projects to see them all.

Thanks to WordPress.com for being the best web publishing platform. This site has been reworked and customized so many times it no longer bears any resemblance to the original. Nonetheless, the germ of the site was the theme “Sapphire” by Michael Martine.

And special thanks to Dalton Rooney for developing the great slideshow plug-in used on the features. If you use WordPress, you should go get it, too! He’s very friendly and helpful.