Cey Adams discusses his new book

Cey Adams (Photo ©2006 Mike Shreiber)

"[The book is] called Definition: the Art and Design of Hip Hop. The idea is that over the last 20-25 years, basically since the birth of hip-hop, there's amazing talent emerging and a lot of these are people of color. A lot of them are Asian, or middle eastern -- basically, not white. There's all these amazing talent that are coming up, and nobody is really giving their work a voice. Everybody talks about graffiti and everything that happened in the 80's, but in my opinion that story has already been told over and over again. Nobody is telling the story of the young kid that was inspired by Fear of a Black Planet (Public Enemy) or Licensed to Ill (Beastie Boys) and decided that they wanted to become a graphic designer. So my concept was to try to incorporate graffiti and the evolution of graffiti and street art and show that people like Shephard Fairey or the disciples of Keith Haring, just basically to show the thread."
--Cey Adams

Graphic designer, Beastie Boys buddy, and all-around good guy Cey Adams is interviewed on his current book project, titled Definition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop (Collins Design), in Issue #28 (Nov. 4, 2007) of Format magazine. Read the interview at Format's web site.

Note that Adams' book will include "interviews by the Beastie Boys."