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Ian Allen Works
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Ian Allen
Photographer · Designer · Creative Director
Seattle-based creative available for all manner of projects — freelance, contract, or full time.
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7 Minute Workout
12 bodyweight exercises. 30 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest, done in one continuous circuit, no equipment needed.
Based on the ACSM "Scientific 7-Minute Workout"
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- Domain
- Album Promo Design
- Medium
- Print / Digital
I buy a lot of records based on concept, intent, visual presentation, or when the work resists easy classification. This Charles Curtis release was one of those.
The album consists of four tracks, each of which can be played alone or in any combination, from two tracks up to all four played simultaneously. Ideally across four separate sound systems, so the listener can get lost in the resonant space between them.
The design concept followed directly from the music. Four points of emanation, intersecting. Sound waves colliding and generating new textures at each point of interaction.
- Domain
- Album Packaging
- Medium
- Print / Digital
Translating the tactile and sonic texture of a record into a static visual is one of the more rewarding design challenges. The goal here was a cover image that felt like it was shifting or morphing even in print.
Looping the forms into an Escher-style illustration created a sense of cyclical motion that suited the music's structure. Given that the album is designed to be experienced in layers and combinations, the idea of a form that folds back into itself felt like the right visual analogy.
The release was a limited 12" vinyl.
A tea shop approached me to develop their brand identity, including logo, labels, and business cards. The shop would be called Bardo.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is the transitional state between death and rebirth, the gap between one life and the next. Bringing in the related concept of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, the label and logo had to have a circular foundation.
To distill a life cycle down to something immediately legible, I mapped it to a clock face. Bardo begins at midnight and ends somewhere before dawn, occupying the liminal hours between the close of one day and the start of the next. That constraint gave the wordmark its placement.
Over two years as a freelance designer at The New York Times Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, I worked across feature stories, covers, department pages, and special issues. The special issues were consistently the most interesting work, each one an opportunity to build a distinct visual world within the magazine's framework.
The cover above was for a story on international Supreme Court rulings. An illustration option had been developed but wasn't working, and on the day the issue needed to go to press I was asked to work on backup options. The concept came quickly, as it had to! Construct a globe from a grid of color tiles, then have the copy department provide relevant phrases and words to populate the color fields on the globe.
The iPhone had come out two years prior, the iPad was not to come out until 2010.
One of my favorite expressions of the issue was the Table of Contents, I proposed we represent some famous screens and ratios in black rectangles, and scale them appropriately, the first page was the largest known screens with one screen carrying over to the next page to transfer the scale. From the Godzillatron all the way down to the iPod Nano.
The screen ratios were then used throughout the 'feature well' of the issue as title cards.
I worked on the cover and feature spreads for this issue over the holidays of 2008, inspiration for the type treatment came late on this one, but the simple and juxtaposed type expression and incredible collection of illustrations really helped to illustrate the story.
For this feature I grabbed an old catalog of stock illustrations, scanned them in and created these animal illustrations.
This was a highlight of my life, being a lifelong Conan fan. To see my name on the schedule for the Conan cover story, Thank you for this one Rem!
A friend and longtime hot sauce collector came to me with a dilemma. After decades of accumulating bottles, a new relationship and a nomadic lifestyle made keeping the physical collection impractical. He needed a way to preserve it before letting it go.
The goal was to produce an archival-quality photo book while keeping manual labor to a minimum. I sent him a link to a small USB-powered product photo booth and a tripod for his iPhone with one instruction: photograph every bottle head-on and send me the files.
I processed all the files with a Photoshop action to automatically key out each bottle and render it on both black and white backgrounds. In InDesign, I designed the book architecture and then ran a script to populate the document automatically, placing one image per page. Front and end matter were designed after this.
For illustration, Midjourney had launched just weeks earlier. The results were rough by today's standards, but early enough to be novel and usable for this particular project. I am not a fan of using AI image making or artwork for any paid gig, artists should get this work.
A 501-page hardcover archive of the entire collection. Printed through Lulu.com, with a retail price of $130 per copy. What could have been a weeks-long manual production job was reduced to a largely automated workflow. The entire book was designed and sent to the printer in a single afternoon.
- Medium
- Web App
- Stack
- HTML/CSS/JS, Claude Code
A friend running a climate and sustainable living startup asked me to rethink the recipe format for their sustainable dishes section. The problem was straightforward: cooking from a screen means constant scrolling, and once you are in the procedure the quantities have been left behind in the ingredient list
The format combines everything into a single continuous experience. Serving size adjusts all quantities dynamically. The shopping list and mise en place double as checklists. Quantities are woven directly into the procedure narrative, so if you have not pre-portioned everything beforehand, you are not hunting back up the page.
Recipe ingestion and parsing runs through the Claude API, which accepts either a URL or raw text and structures it into the format automatically. The design is mine. The build was vibe-coded with Claude Code.
Like a lot of people, I had been following the Artemis II mission closely. I had actually photographed half of the crew years earlier for a Men's Health piece when they were newly inducted into the astronaut class, so I felt a real connection to the people aboard.
When the mission launched I went to NASA's site to follow along and ran into an immediate frustration with their built-in visualizer. The capsule occupied the center of the viewport at all times, and there was no way to look past it at the Earth or the Moon independently, the way you might if you were actually looking out a window. I already knew what the capsule looked like. I did not need it in frame constantly.
I wanted to build something that gave a terrestrial viewer a genuine sense of what the celestial bodies looked like from the Orion windows. The orbital mechanics had to be accurate, realistic texture mapping, and proper pupil dilation relative to brightness. That last detail matters more than it sounds: with the sun that bright, stars nearly disappear during the coasting phase. You would only see a full star field on the dark side of the Moon or Earth.
The result became a real accompaniment to watching the live broadcast. I could check positional accuracy, terminator placement, and global rotation in real-time. The now widely circulated earthset photograph from Artemis II was simulated near perfectly before the actual image came back, when I saw the actual photo I was really pleased that it had been simulated as well.
During the transit you could change "lenses" for a closer or wider view, and change view focus: Moon, Earth, prograde, or retrograde. Now that the transit has completed, there is a playback function with speed control to replay the mission.
- Medium
- Web App
- Stack
- HTML/CSS/JS, Claude Code
A friend completed a multi-week bread immersion course in France covering a wide range of baking disciplines. The school provided an Excel sheet with ratios and calculations that was so dense it was effectively unusable or at the very least discouraged its own utilization. The valuable information was in there, but the format made you want to close the laptop rather than start baking.
The goal was to identify the variables a baker actually needs to control, anchor those at the top, and let the results fall cleanly below with a clear call to action to begin portioning. Everything else recedes unless you really need it.
Magnet Board: Client Image Delivery
Delivering photography to clients has traditionally meant sending a link to a generic file-sharing service, a folder of numbered files, or a static gallery with no way to communicate back. The client scrolls, maybe emails a list of filenames, and the photographer spends time cross-referencing selections.
The goal was to design something much more fun to use, a delivery experience native to how photographers and clients actually think about images, spatially, comparatively, and collaboratively.
PasteBoard presents each delivery as a freeform canvas. Images arrive as draggable cards that clients can arrange, resize, zoom into, and flag as selects or rejects directly on the board, without downloading anything or writing an email. Notes can be pinned anywhere on the canvas for context or direction. The layout persists between sessions, so the conversation carries forward.
The real-time layer is where it comes together. The photographer and client share a live view of the same board. When the client flags an image or moves a card, the photographer sees it happen. When the photographer mutes an image or repositions cards, the client's board updates instantly. There is a video linked here to demonstrate how both versions of the magnetboard react to input from one another.
Access is pin-gated per delivery with a server-side lockout after failed attempts, and each board expires on a set date. Images are served from cloud storage and can be downloaded individually or as a filtered zip: selects only, everything except rejects, or the full set.
For the better part of a decade I collaborated with Aether Apparel to produce imagery for their billboards, retail stores, lookbooks, and website. Locations were a shared conversation: I would propose options, and the team would make final calls based on budget. Together we shot in Japan, Norway, Iceland three times, Joshua Tree, Germany and Austria, Alaska twice, Southern Utah, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
I would arrive a week ahead of the crew to scout locations and build a shoot day itinerary structured around the best available natural light. In winter Alaska or summer Iceland that planning is not optional. The days are long in either direction and a bulletproof schedule is the difference between getting the shots and losing them to a wrong place, at the wrong time.
Casting was an ongoing part of the collaboration. Aether's customer is a specific kind of person, someone you could genuinely believe could live in the glass mansion on a hill and take out their carbon fiber sloop for the afternoon. Finding people who read that way without looking like they were performing it was always an interesting challenge.
The shoots were guerrilla by nature. We would move fast through a city or landscape, cycling through outfits on the fly and chasing slivers of light as they appeared. There was always an architectural element in the mix, a deliberate tension between built structure, natural landscape, and the clean modern silhouettes the clothes created in any environment.
Building a DIY Robust NAS Using Old Towers and a Mac Pro
Instead of buying a proprietary NAS appliance like Synology or QNAP, you can use a repurposed tower case as a dumb drive enclosure connected via a SAS HBA card to a powerful host machine running TrueNAS Scale. The host machine handles all compute, ZFS, and networking. The tower is just a powered metal box with drives and fans.
The Host Machine — Mac Pro 2012
The 2012 Mac Pro (dual Xeon, 64GB RAM) is an ideal TrueNAS host. The 64GB RAM gives ZFS a large ARC cache so frequently accessed data is served directly from RAM. A Samsung 850 EVO SSD handles the TrueNAS boot drive, kept separate from storage pools. After removing an unused USB 3.0 expansion card, PCIe slot 2 is free for the HBA. Native gigabit ethernet gets upgraded to 2.5GbE via an Intel I225 PCIe card. TrueNAS Scale installs bare metal — free, ZFS native, full web UI, and built-in remote access tools.
The Drive Enclosure — Repurposed Tower Case
A Corsair 500R picked up at a PC recycler (RE-PC, Seattle) for $60 serves as the drive enclosure. It has 6 native 3.5" drive bays plus 4 x 5.25" optical bays, which convert to 3.5" drive bays via 3D printed adapters — printed free on a Bambu printer using files from Makerworld. That gives 10 total drive capacity. The case came with 10 fans pre-installed. No motherboard is needed — the PSU is jumped permanently using a paperclip bridging pin 16 (PS_ON) to any ground pin on the 24-pin ATX connector. Fans are powered via existing Molex bridge cables already in the case.
The Connection — LSI 9300-16i HBA
The LSI 9300-16i is a PCIe 3.0, 16-port, 12Gb/s SAS/SATA host bus adapter running in IT mode — meaning drives pass directly through to TrueNAS with no hardware RAID layer in between. ZFS sees individual drives, which is essential. Four SFF-8643 to 4x SATA breakout cables run from the HBA in the Mac Pro to the drives in the tower. The card handles both SAS and SATA drives natively, and 16 ports covers the current build plus a future second enclosure for expansion.
ZFS Pool Architecture
RAIDZ2 provides 2-drive fault tolerance, equivalent to RAID6. One important ZFS constraint: the pool is fixed at creation — you cannot add single drives to expand an existing vdev. Expansion happens by adding entirely new vdevs that join the existing pool. Multiple separate pools are preferable to one large pool for failure isolation — a drive failure in one pool has zero effect on others. ZFS checksums every block on every read, detecting and healing silent bit rot automatically. With 64GB RAM, hot data is served at RAM speed from the ARC cache. Get your drive count right before building — vdev size is permanent.
Drive Strategy
Enterprise SAS drives from data center decommissions cost significantly less than consumer NAS drives because they carry no Synology compatibility premium. Seagate Exos and HGST Ultrastar pulls offer enterprise duty cycles at lower prices. SMART check every drive before committing to a pool — the critical attributes are IDs 5 (reallocated sectors), 187 (uncorrectable errors), 197 (pending sectors), and 198 (offline uncorrectable). Synology DSM can SMART scan drives installed in bays without adding them to a volume, making it a convenient triage tool. Keep drive sizes uniform within a vdev, but mix vdev sizes freely across pools. Buy extra identical model drives as cold spares while the price and availability hold.
Network — 2.5GbE Local
A NETGEAR MS308 8-port 2.5GbE switch replaces the aging Airport Extreme. An Intel I225-V PCIe card upgrades the Mac Pro's built-in gigabit to 2.5GbE. A Cable Matters USB-C to 2.5GbE adapter connects the M3 MacBook Pro. At 2.5GbE, local transfers run at ~300MB/s versus gigabit's 125MB/s — a meaningful improvement for large Capture One catalog work. Existing Cat5e/6 cabling supports 2.5GbE so no rewiring is needed.
Remote Access — Tailscale
Tailscale is a free WireGuard-based VPN. Install it on TrueNAS and the Synology backup unit. Both appear on the same private network regardless of physical location, with no port forwarding required. A nightly rsync job from TrueNAS to the offsite Synology runs automatically over the Tailscale tunnel, encrypted and zero-config.
Backup Architecture
The Freedom Unit is the Mac Pro running TrueNAS with the Corsair 500R drive enclosure — the primary photo archive. The Primary Unit is the original DS1513+ with DX513 expansion, loaded with 7x 6TB WD Red drives, acting as the nightly rsync backup target. Eventually, the Primary Unit moves offsite to a different city for genuine disaster recovery. Initial sync happens locally over the fast local network, then the unit ships to its remote location. After that, only daily changes sync — minimal bandwidth. A critical reminder: RAID is not a backup. The offsite Synology is the actual backup.
Key Lessons
The decade of Synology drive failures wasn't primarily a hardware problem — it was an environment problem. Stacked units in a hot room with poor airflow created correlated drive failures over years. Separating units side by side, lowering their placement, and improving airflow makes a dramatic difference. PC recyclers like RE-PC in Seattle are excellent sources for cases, PSUs, and fans at a fraction of new cost. Enterprise SAS drives from data center decommissions are better and cheaper than retail NAS drives. A Bambu 3D printer can produce drive bay adapters for free. And while Synology's SHR is proprietary in name, it's built on standard Linux MD RAID — data is recoverable on any Linux system with all drives present, using mdadm to reassemble the array.
Migrating a Decade of Photo Sessions into a Single Capture One Catalog
Check out the script on Github
Each one of my shoots lives in its own Capture One session folder on a NAS drive, complete with raw files, color grades, ratings, and crop adjustments stored in small sidecar files alongside the images. This works fine job by job, but browsing across hundreds of shoots on a server becomes impractical when everything is siloed.
The goal of this project was to consolidate roughly 500 sessions into a single Capture One catalog, preserving every edit and rating exactly as they were, and organized in a way that mirrors the file structure as it is on the server, so the path to get to shoots is the same, for example the path /Archive/Editorial/Client/ShootFolder is the same in finder and in the Capture One Catalog.
The storage architecture was designed with speed in mind. The catalog itself lives on a fast external SSD attached directly to the workstation, and all proxy preview files are stored there. This means browsing any shoot, even one from years ago, is instant. The full raw files stay on the NAS. When it comes time to deliver a high resolution file or a JPEG, Capture One reaches back to the NAS to read the original raw, applies all the saved adjustments, and renders the output to a selected folder. Day to day browsing stays fast because it never needs to touch the server.
The migration itself was handled by an AppleScript that crawls the archive, finds every session, and imports each one into the catalog automatically. The key insight was to import the image subfolders directly rather than the session root, which tricks Capture One into reading the files as plain images rather than trying to open them as a session. Capture One picks up all the sidecar adjustment files automatically in this mode. As a bonus, Capture One builds a Folders view in its Library panel that mirrors the original finder hierarchy perfectly, so every shoot is exactly where you would expect to find it.
The script runs unattended overnight, paces itself to avoid overwhelming the application, skips sessions it has already processed so it can be safely interrupted and resumed, and logs everything to a file for review. Around 300,000 images made it into the catalog with their edits intact.