Meet John Cantrell, a talented designer from Atlanta, Georgia. John was born in Hunstville, Alabama, grew up in Tennessee, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and SCAD in Savannah, Georgia before settling down in Atlanta 10 years ago. He now lives with his fiancé and they have a “tiny-old-man dog” named MJ.
“He has a little white paw like Michael Jackson’s glove, so it was clear he was going to be awesome.”
John’s passion for interior design, photography, architecture, graphics and art has earned him over 502K Pinterest followers!
When did you start using Pinterest and what inspired you to make an account?
I have no idea, but it’s been a while. I probably got Pinterest in 2010 or 2011. At the time, I remember so many other sites for cataloging visual inspiration, but I think they all tried to do too much and didn’t have the simplicity. I remember I had been looking for that type of functionality for a while, it’s too bad I didn’t create it first!
Why do you like Pinterest?
It really goes back to simplicity and having a terrible memory. I needed a way to keep track of all the stuff I had seen that was relevant to my work, but I needed to sort them in some way. Also, some days it was a great creative release to just visually overconsume and get lost in what I started searching for in the first place.
John’s neighborhood, the historic Auburn Avenue in the Old 4th Ward in Atlanta.
You have gained over 503K followers! That’s so cool! What makes your Pinterest unique?
The coolest thing is, I have no idea! I had no idea up until about a year ago that I even had that many followers. I have always approached Pinterest as my personal stash of creative ideas and promised myself pretty early on that I wouldn’t start pinning things that I wasn’t totally in love with them. I mean, why would I?!
What do you like about living in Atlanta?
I’m not originally from here, and honestly I never thought I’d be or stay here, but the last few years have really been an amazing time in the city. There’s a boost of creativity and urban infrastructure that’s really transforming what it means to be an Atlantan. Organizations and in-town development projects such as Living Walls ATL, the Atlanta BeltLine, Ponce City Market, and Modern Atlanta are really awakening a new generation from it’s stogy past. We totally think its become the place for us.
An example of the LivingWalls project downtown.
What are your favorite places you’ve traveled to?
Wow. That’s tough, but I’d have to say my three favorite so far have been Krakow, Madrid and most recently New Orleans. I would have to say Madrid was my absolute favorite, not just for its history and civic beauty, but the people were just incredible in Spain. They were all amazingly hospitable with an approach to life at a balance that I can only dream of achieving here in the US. I remember being out after a normal dinner around 1 or 2 pm and seeing children with their parents playing in the park, and old couples walking hand-in-hand. It is the most endearing culture I could imagine.
A market in Spain.
Tell us more about what it’s like being a guy on Pinterest! Is it easy to find content you find interesting?
Oh yeah, for sure. There’s enough people on Pinterest now that there are all kinds of cultures and subcultures on there to find plenty of folks with great taste no matter the subject matter.
What are your favorite Pinterest boards to pin onto and why?
Probably my Art and Installations or Storefront boards. The they both have this strange marriage in the 2D and 3D worlds that have experimentation with color, texture and form which I really love. Since so much of my work can be very literal, there’s an abstraction in those that I enjoy contemplating.
Your Architecture board is really neat! We also love your Graphics & Identity board. Tell us more about these boards and why you made them!
Thanks! Well, the Architecture one is a pretty direct translation to what I do everyday and I early on I decided to keep architecture and interior design as only one board. It’s a shame that they are so exclusive to one another here in the US, so I thought it would be a good statement to see what came from keeping all of it together. For Graphics and Identity, I really needed a 2D release of specific work that has a language that I could also apply to my 3D work as well in communication and even wayfinding for environmental graphics that could scale to built-work.
John’s project sketch for Sony Mobile.
What is your Pinterest aesthetic?
If I had to give names to things I find interesting and see a lot in my pins, it’s mostly a balance in organizational-complexity and soft-masculinity. The organizational-complexity for me is really just another way of saying simplicity, but without the connotation of minimalism. I’m not 100% sold on minimalism in every context. Also, as a dude, I think I like the rigidity in masculine objects and the culture of building things like cars, buildings and furniture that become object-based, but my design sensitivity always wants to counteract some of that with muted color tonalities, textures and considered details.
Is Pinterest a good place to find your hobby, work, and interest-related pins?
Yes! I go to Pinterest more-so now than I do by Googling or looking at publications. I think there’s the ability to get lost easily by the quality of the content that is much more undefined. If I go to a magazine with the same intent, the results and ideas are likely not as interesting because the images and content can become too specific to one genre. With Pinterest, I’ll start searching for something specific like a space-type or function and end up with an image of an art exhibit, material, or apparel brand that signifies the essence of what I was searching for in the first place.
John’s interior design work at Sony Mobile Americas Headquarters (Photo Credit: Bilyana Dimitrova)
Tell us more about your design work.
Originally, I wanted to go into architecture, but interiors seemed to be more creative, more rapid and have a better connection to the human scale than the schools I saw teaching architecture. Now, I’m at a place where I get to be around architecture but do what I love! It’s all commercial design, so the scale is great and I’ve been able to work with great clients like Sony Mobile and Porsche mostly designing workplaces and headquarters projects for the last 10 years.
What are your plans and hopes for the future?
A part of me doesn’t like to plan and hope very much. It can get you very outcome oriented and for me personally, I enjoy the process of design itself. That being said, I’d like to continue to work on how to better integrate disciplines of media, technology, culture, and data to tell better stories through the design process but also to figure out how spaces can become self-aware in this process over time. There’s a whole landscape of possibilities around 4D futures around what we do with design and I hope I have opportunities to help create them!
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