Black Riders Design is a small design company focussing on providing communications solutions through writing, editing, graphic design, and information architecture for both print and electronic media. Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Black Riders Design provides its services to a variety of clients in the public and private sector.
Our founding partner, designer and writer is Winston Pei, a man who has no qualms with writing about himself in the third person. In addition to over ten years experience in graphic design, writing and publishing, Winston earned a Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction in English from the University of Alberta, attended the Design in Publishing Workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and most recently completed a Master of Arts degree studying the book designer as literary author.(Click here for more)
Winston is joined by creative partner Brad Burns, a theatre designer, illustrator and fine artist who brings with him a diversity of experience in art and design as well as drama and award-winning interior design. Also a graduate of the University of Alberta, Brad teaches art, drama, and technical theatre in addition to working on paintings, sculpture and other commissioned works of art in his spare time.
Our company draws its name from a book entitled Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, written by Jerome McGann and published by Princeton University Press in 1993. The book gets its title from Stephen Crane's first published book, Black Riders and other lines, whose typographical innovation inspired a second poet, Robert Carlton “Bob” Brown to say the following of his own optical poem “Eyes on the Half-Shell”:
I like to look at it, merely sit and look at it, take it all in without moving an eye. It gives me more than rhymed poetry. It rhymes in my eyes. Here are Black Riders for me at last galloping across a blank page.
We hope you enjoy your visit to our virtual studio.