About
Hi, I'm Tsilli Pines, and this is the website that stitches together all of my various endeavors. I'm a designer and artist living and working in Portland, Oregon.
I have been working as a web designer and front-end coder for over a decade. I started out at a studio named Nettmedia right out of school, and learned a ton alongside people I still admire. However, my client work has primarily been done in the company of the talented folks at Fine Design Group, where my long-suffering colleagues put up with me full-time for 8 years. I started as a Senior Designer and evolved into Design Director at the studio, but most of what I did there was in the trenches.
I have designed award-winning projects for Francis Ford Coppola's Rubicon Estate, SB Architects, and David Bowie. My client work has appeared in STEP, HOW, and Print. I taught briefly at the Parsons Design & Technology MFA program, and I really enjoyed that.
I design and make Jewish marriage contracts under the name New Ketubah, where I seek to marry a traditional art form with modern design. The first ketubah I made was for my own wedding. Since then, my collection has appeared in Bride's local magazines, DailyCandy, Something Old, Something New, Brooklyn Bride, and Josh Spear, among others.
I created a line of modern Judaica under the name Alef Betty, where I also share some fun oral history. The Hebrew alphabet posters I designed got featured in DesignSponge the day after launch.
But other things came first. In 2002, I started documenting my personal work, which at the time, consisted mostly of hundreds of Polaroids. The gracious folks at fStop Images found me and asked if I wanted to contribute to their then-fledgling royalty-free collection, which I did for a couple of years. Veer was an early distributor and they invited me to design some desktops for them. I got in the habit of making calendar desktops and have carried on with it almost every month since 2003.
I got interested in printmaking and sewing, and continued experimenting with photography. I also worked on a few digital collaborations for interesting, now defunct online projects. But the most lasting practice has been a simple one: making cards for the people I love, little pieces which I sometimes remember to scan and post.
My first solo show opened in May of 2008 at Ogle Gallery in Portland. I made a series called "The Figures" and the show received a kind review in Art Ltd. and made the "Visual Arts Best of 2008" list in the Willamette Week. My parents were super proud at the opening, which made me happy.