Sean Tejaratchi

Sean Tejaratchi (born October 1970) is an American graphic designer, art director and writer. He is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Tejaratchi is known for creating the clip art zine Crap Hound,

Career

Early years Two years out of high school and living in Eugene, Oregon, Tejaratchi designed his first posters in 1990 for a fictional rock band and posted them around Eugene. He was inspired by the many DIY posters for punk bands he saw posted around the cities of Eugene and Portland. His design got him hired to produce posters for the W.O.W. Hall, a performing arts venue in Eugene. Tejaratchi assisted with elements of the page layout, such as paste up and typesetting, but did not contribute any content to the zine.

Crap Hound Tejaratchi moved to Portland between the end of 1990 and the beginning of 1991. In 1994, Tejaratchi published his first edition of the graphic art zine Crap Hound. Tejaratchi mostly uses images taken from sources printed from the 1920s to the 1960s, such as vintage catalogs, rare books, medical textbooks, pornography and advertisements.

The inspiration for the zine came when Tejaratchi was working on a poster for a Portland-area rock band – he had a particular image of a devil in mind, but was unable to find the exact image. The humor in his work has been described as sardonic

From 1994 to 1998 Tejaratchi published five editions of Crap Hound; until he left for Los Angeles in 2001. Tejaratchi did not produce another edition of Crap Hound until 2005 when he was approached by Chloe Eudaly, the owner and operator of Reading Frenzy, an alternative bookstore and publishing house in Portland. Eudaly has raised money for each issue using the crowd funding website Kickstarter. The viral quote came from Banksy's 2004 book Cut It Out and while the book did credit Crap Hound, the attribution was left off when the text was retyped and disseminated online. Tejaratchi stated he had been moving a lot around the same time and never received the items. BoingBoing editor Cory Doctorow said that the title of his first published work, the short story Craphound, was inspired in part by Tejaratchi's zine. Doctorow also registered the domain craphound.com for his personal website. He is also a writer for the American variety radio show program Live From Here. He also designs book covers for the Seattle-based book publisher Feral House.