Dark Horse
Cleaning Company
Positioning, identity, website, customer-facing documents, sales materials, and operating tools developed as one connected system.
StrategyIdentityWebPrintOperations
Pittsburgh, PAStart a project
Selected work / evolving archive
Work across
business, image,
and material.
This is a curated view of a wider practice. Commercial work comes first; personal and experimental work follows as evidence of the same habits of observation, organization, and transformation.
Return to the studio01 / Business & identity
Systems people
can see and use.
Dark Horse
Drawn
Places
Custom thank-you cards turn meaningful homes into architectural keepsakes. Each drawing is shaped around the building's character, then prepared as a finished object for print and gifting.
IllustrationPrint designPersonalized giftsSmall-run production
02 / Visual archives
Attention becomes
a body of work.
Cars, older signs, storefronts, architecture, transit, and overlooked places recur because they hold evidence of how people lived and what a place once valued.
index:
Johnstown
@indexjohnstown
An independent visual journal following the clues a city leaves behind—its people, buildings, streets, signs, systems, memories, and missing places.
Issue 01, Evidence of a City, introduces the project's hypothesis and method through observation, fieldwork, photography, archival research, public records, oral history, maps, writing, and design. Future issues will follow individual questions and overlooked stories in greater depth—including how the 1977 flood affected working-class and minority communities.
Oral historyPhotographyArchival researchWritingEditorial design
Visit indexjohnstown.com 
A closed roller rink becomes a marker of shared memory and neighborhood life.
Zoning, terrain, and faded signage reveal how daily commerce once fit the hill.
A surviving Ford Festiva shows how vehicles can date a scene and describe its people.
The daily train to Pittsburgh frames movement, access, and the possibility of leaving.
A familiar material makes one church distinct within the city's dense religious landscape.
Historic architecture and highway infrastructure hold two eras of city-making in one frame.
Illustration / Personal history
A Life in Cars
Automotive illustration used to organize memory and tell family stories.03 / Creative practice
Making something
from what is there.
Personal work is where available material, repeated forms, memory, and digital experimentation can lead without needing to begin as a business deliverable.
What I Had
Without conventional art supplies, discarded household packaging became hundreds of individually folded geometric units. Repetition brings structure to competing colors, typography, and fragments of ordinary consumption.
Approximately 30 × 30 inches · folded paperboard on recycled foam board
In Transit
A still selected from an ordinary moving-day video was isolated, stripped of its background, and transformed through adjusted color separation. The result makes relocation, the body, and the history of a traveling painting visible at once.
Video still · background removal · color manipulation
Jackstown
2025
An invented city assembled from services, institutions, signs, jokes, and roadside visual culture encountered across the United States. Winding roads connect dozens of embedded references, making the map both a fictional place and an indirect self-portrait.
Digital drawing · world-building · hand lettering · designed for repeated viewing
Bed Things
Objects found scattered across a bed become a personal inventory: Jae's hair pick, lip balm, a dime, an old Giant Eagle card, and a dual photograph of the artist's late mother from April 1971.
Digital drawing · observational linework · domestic memory
Road Opener
A still life of ritual objects connected to a transitional period between Chicago and Pittsburgh.
Dancing Woman
An intuitive drawing made during a difficult week, where repeated lines gradually resolved into a moving figure.
04 / Archive in progress
This page is selective
by design.
Additional painting, Pittsburgh transit, signage, photography, and experimental-image projects are being documented now. They will be added as complete bodies of work rather than as isolated uploads.
Return to Jack West Studio