Galen Smith

Galen Smith is a graphic designer / art director, and a dedicated documenter of advertising poster defacements. For the past four years his weekends have been spent photographing graffiti in the New York City subway system, there he has gathered thousands of examples of lewd doodles and obnoxious comments added to the advertising posters that line the subway platforms.

In his twenty years as a designer and visual communicator he has created branding systems, music packaging, posters, books, and a wide variety of graphic ephemera. His interest in all forms of graphic communication has been expanded by the study of the poster defacements presented in New York Dick. He has further explored the weird world of NYC graffiti in New York Dumb for iPad, which showcases a wide range of less-than-clever (and generally less-than-creepy) advertising defacements.

Galen is a graduate of Portfolio Center, and a former faculty member at Parsons School of Design. He continues to document poster defacements in the New York City subway system and reports that bored and annoyed New Yorkers show no signs of giving up their pastime of drawing and writing incredibly rude things on advertising posters.