Enter the World of Rainbow Happiness & Empowerment For Every Shade of Color and Gender with Space.Ram

Ramzy Masri is the unapologetic multicultural queer designer and activist to follow on Instagram ASAP

We’re back with another Member Spotlight, because our members are FRIGGIN’ AWESOME and always worth bragging about!

It was my great pleasure to interview Ramzy Masri, as I have been a big fan of his for a couple years. He is the owner of one of New Stand’s favorite Instagram accounts and just an overall great designer and human. A couple months ago, I saw him at Elsewhere in Bushwick, the week after I saw him again outside of The Rosemont in Williamsburg. I figured it was destiny, so I went up to talk to him and tell him how much I love his work. Surprisingly enough, he told me I was the first person to ever recognize him and say hi. I don’t know how, since his personal style definitely stands out from the crowd #swag. He said he loves when we share his work on our Instagram and he always listens to our playlists. Obviously, it was meant to be and it couldn’t make any more sense than to interview him.

If you don’t already know Ramzy, he is a senior designer at Nickelodeon and his Instagram account space.ram is an ongoing project where he basically makes the world into a a colorful happy rainbow. He’s now at almost 100K followers and growing, so we’re definitely not the only ones to love everything he does. In this insightful interview we talk Ramzy’s background, his interest in youth culture, the sociopolitical aspect of his work, creative advice, his fave spots in NY and much more…

We had draaanks at The Woodstock - a 1960s-inspired bar and pizza spot with original Dalí paintings and $10 cocktails - which opened in April in the Meatpacking District. Check out Ramzy’s review at the end of our conversation.

Can tell you us a little bit about yourself? What’s your story?

I’m from basically everywhere. I was born overseas in the Middle East, then we moved back to the States. My dad is Middle Eastern and my mom is from Oklahoma. I’ve lived in seven different states, so I moved around a lot. Now New York is home and I’m really proud to be a New Yorker. I don’t think I’m ever gonna leave [laughs].

I’m a graphic designer, photographer and artist. I try to make the world a more playful, exciting place through my work. It’s a lot about reclaiming the world as a queer space. Everything as it exists now is a space for breeders, I guess. I want to turn it into a fabulous gay pride parade / unicorn magical rainbow version of what it is. That’s what my Instagram is — an ongoing project of seeing things in the world and reimagining them as gay spaces and celebrating queer culture. Femme culture is a big part of my work too. It’s something that really gets cast in a negative way most of the time, especially in the gay community. Being masc or straight acting is a thing for some reason, and I think it’s bullsh*t. Being feminine is such a good and powerful thing and I’m definitely a feminist at heart. It’s really about celebrating all the shades and color of gender that exist in the world.

How is working at Nickelodeon?

The reason why I love working at Nickelodeon is because it keeps me connected to youth culture. I’m almost 30, so you know, getting up there [laughs]. It keeps me young at heart. The next generation of kids coming up in the world, Gen-Z, are really special. It’s easy to see this through movements like March for Our Lives and other points of activism within the community. They’re the most connected, intelligent and tech-native generation that’s ever come. There are a lot of really exciting things that are coming from them.

My aesthetic, attitude and spirit come from youth culture and celebrating that sense of optimism, joy and innocence in the world. I was really thankful to get the job at Nick and to still be there after 3 years. It’s been a really fun experience!

Was it always your plan to be a designer?

I knew that I was an artist from an early age, but I didn’t know how that fit into things. I’m a Virgo and I’m very organized. I’m a planner and I really like to sit down and diagram everything out, so design came pretty naturally to me. It’s a great way to take the complicated world around you and to make sense of it, versus art, which tends to be more for the specific sake of self- expression. I think it was a natural progression for me as a person who loved art but didn’t necessarily want to be an artist. The reason why I knew that I would be a designer is because art is for yourself and design is for other people. I knew that early on, because I was a very social kid. I cared a lot about helping my friends and I still do.

I think it’s really important to try to make something happen socially or politically with the work that you put into the world. That’s what I’m trying to do with my Instagram. My personal work is to celebrate queer culture, feminism and how wonderful it is to be a raging homosexual.

How did you come up with the brilliant idea to make a rainbow version of the world?

I’ve always been interested in color. When I first moved to NY, I was using my Instagram as a diary of the places and things I did that were colorful, just so I could look back for my own personal work. It turned into more of a passion to use photography to capture the color that was already in the world, but I found that it was really difficult. I was running around the city all the time. I would hear about a new bar that had a lavender wall or something, or an art exhibit in The Upper East Side with rainbow tiles. I would be like “OMG, I have to go there”. I would spend my weekends and nights running around the city taking pictures and it got really tiring. At a certain point, I was like “this is stupid”.

As a graphic designer, I know how to change the color of pictures and I’m also really anal and OCD. I can spend a lot of time recoloring something and it’s really fun for me. So, I just started kind of lying. I would take pictures of stuff, and even if it wasn’t colorful, I would make it colorful.

I celebrated Pride 2015 on my Instagram by taking pictures of famous New York City landmarks and recoloring them with the colors of the rainbow. It was the first time that any of my posts had ever gone viral. I was averaging 200 likes or whatever, then those posts got 2,000 or 3,000. I thought people must really like this and I really enjoyed doing it, so I kept the project going and it’s been like 3 years now. It’s been a really fun way to use my love of photography and design to re-imagine how the world could be if it was brightly painted.

What’s the story behind your IG name?

Nobody’s ever asked me that before. It’s really stupid and silly. I worked at an ad agency in Colorado before I moved to NY and my Instagram was mostly landscape pictures of the mountains. I was doing a lot of hiking, that was kind of what my life was. I was smoking buddies with one of my co-workers and one time I mentioned that I wanted to change my Instagram name. It used to be @insta.ram. It was silly, but whatever. It’s like a pun, I love puns, but I was ready to change it. He was saying that I take pictures of wide open spaces. Then he asked what some of my favorite things were and at the time it reminded me of Space Jam, which is one of my favorite movies, as silly as it is. He was like it has to be @space.ram. So it’s a reference to Space Jam and outer space.

I wanted to rename it, around the time my Instagram started to pick up traction, because I thought it was silly. It’s hard to change it once you have 50,000 followers vs. when you have 7000. I just never did though and I kept putting it off. Now I can’t change it, but I like it. I wouldn’t have picked it for myself, but at the same time I feel like it’s fitting. And I love aliens, so that’s that.

What’s your fave IG profile?

OMG, there are so many. It’s really hard. I love lowcheeckbones. She makes fun of beauty culture, like Refinery29, Vogue and all that stuff. She did a nail tutorial with hot dogs. She just does really ridiculous sh*t. She’ll glue stuff to her face. She takes herself really seriously, but then everything is really goofy and silly.

I love combophoto. It used to be called something else, but he changed his name, which is good because that’s what it is. It’s a combination of two objects which create another object. It’s really fun to look at when you’re high because you can just scroll through it forever.

I also love animals. There’s an account called boopmynose, it’s literally just pictures of dogs’ or cats’ noses. When you double tap you hit their little nose and it makes me so happy every time. It comes up on my feed and I’m just like “boop” and the little heart appears. It’s really stupid, but it’s really cute.

What’s your fave project you ever worked on?

That’s hard, I’ve worked on a lot of really fun ones. This might be unexpected, but it’s a design project I did in college. It speaks to the social practice of my design ethos. I wrote a series of children’s books. They were about my experience growing up in America as a person who was both mixed race and queer and didn’t quite fit in anywhere. I designed a curriculum where the books would be read to children from children in elementary schools across the city of different backgrounds — in a Muslim school, a Catholic school, a low-income school and a wealthy school. The students all heard the same stories and afterwards were empowered to write their own. After they did, the stories were swapped with students from other schools, making unlikely friendships with students who were really different from each other.

It was a really fun project and I learned a lot about working with kids and how amazing they were. I think it was really the start of me wanting to work with youth and being interested in youth culture. But more than that, it was just inspiring to see the kids that wanted to connect and make friendships with each other. They swapped their Facebook information and it was really cute. I thought that this was an example of how design can make a difference in the world and it set me on the path of creating the work that I do now and the work I want to do in the future. Something that makes a difference in someone’s life and inspires them to think in a different way or connect with people they normally wouldn’t.

What’s your fave spot in NYC?

I don’t know if I can only say one, because there are so many good things about New York. I’m going to say two. The first one is really cheesy and silly. It’s the Top of the Rock in Midtown. I just love being up there. One: for the people watching, because it’s amazing. Two: because it’s so beautiful. I did that my first weekend here when I moved to NYC — I was just up there crying. This was back when Taylor Swift wasn’t horrible, I was listening to “Welcome to New York” with my ear pods and I was like “I finally made it”. It’s just really special. I’ve been back up there a bunch of times since. I know it’s really cheesy, but whatever.

And the second one is McCarren Park in Williamsburg, I go there like 2 or 3 times a week. I love it, because it’s like my church and my Cheers. I feel like I know more than 75% of the patrons there. Every time I go, it’s like a family reunion. I think one of the best things about queer culture is that we make our own family, and it’s a chosen one. We’re there for each other and encourage each other. Every time I go there, I get updates on my friends’ lives and hear about the exciting things that they’re doing. It’s just a really great way to be connected to my community. A lot of people come out of school and they’re told they need to find a job. I always say to students or people who are fresh out school that it’s just as important to find a job as it is to find a community. Those are the people who are going to be there for you through thick and thin, through five or six different jobs. They are the ones who are going to inspire the work that you make.

What makes your day?

So many things. I work in Times Square and I actually really love it. It’s full of the weirdest, best, most bizarre people ever like German tourists and angry Midwesterners. There are so many couple fights I witness every day. It’s really hilarious and amazing. I love working there, which is maybe the first time a New Yorker has said that but it’s fine.

I also love food and trying all kinds of different things. I live in LES and there’s lots of really amazing restaurants in my neighborhood, so I like to eat my way through the city. If I have a really good meal then I feel like “OK, I can go to bed happy now.”

I also really love drag, so every time I get to see a drag performance I’m really happy.

And lastly, I just love kids, toys and really cute adorable things. I love to spend time with children, go to a toy store, or go to a museum and see kids playing. I definitely want to have kids one day, but that’s in the future. Whenever I get to spend time with them, it makes my day.

What’s your favorite restaurant in NYC?

Right now, it’s Cervo’s in LES. It’s a Portuguese restaurant. Their menu changes all the time. It’s never been the same each time I’ve been in there. Portuguese food is a lot of seafood and kind of tapas style. It’s very flavorful. It’s really small. Their food is really delicious and rich. I don’t like dessert, it’s not for me, but their dessert menu is insane. My boyfriend loves dessert so he always gets it and he was like, “OMG, you have to try this!”. They made a flowerless olive oil chocolate cake and it was sweet, savory and fluffy. I’m not a cake person. Even for my birthday I’m like, “Don’t get me cake, it’s disgusting”, but that one is mind blowing. I want to be submerged in a bath of it and roll around in cake. It was amazing, so definitely go there!

Who’s the most underrated artist or designer in your opinion?

There are a couple of artists I love that I feel are still really well known, but maybe just among other artists or designers, I’m not sure. One of them is Josef Albers. I was always really inspired by him as a person who is interested in color and color theory. He’s best known for his work using simultaneous contrast, where he’d pair colors together to show the differences between them. For example, color harmonies or colors that vibrated weirdly against each other, like a lime chartreuse with a hot coral, so it would create an optical illusion. He was one of the first ones to really explore color psychology and color theory. I don’t think he’s underrated, because a lot of people know of him and appreciate him, but I really like him.

Another artist is Daniel Johnston. I think people are interested in him as an artist now, but I don’t think they were when he first started. I’m inspired by him because his work is really naive. When he was in the thick of his career in the 90s, he was kind of a Bob Dylan type of character, who was really weird and out there. His music is kind of hard to listen to, it’s really experimental and different. There’s a great documentary about him called The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It’s incredible just seeing the trajectory of his career. The thing I appreciate most about him is that he was making work that nobody really understood. It was bizarre and seemingly unskilled looking. He had this strong urge to make work, regardless of what he thought of other people, or what people thought about him. That’s really admirable and it’s something I try to do with my work. It’s hard when people are constantly evaluating you. You fall victim to counting the likes that a photo gets or whatever. It’s inspiring just to think that it’s important to make anything it is you want to make, regardless of what other people think about it, and he’s a great example of that.

Fun/Random fact about you?

I do a lot of social media but I’m actually really shy. I’m good one on one, but in group settings or if I go out to a bar with people that I don’t know, I’m really reserved and quiet. I’ve always been that way and I’ve always wanted to change that about myself. The older I get, I’m just like “This is who I am and that’s fine”. I’m kind of a wallflower.

Do you have any advice for somebody who is trying to make a career in the creative field?

I think the most important thing is just to make stuff. I used to fall victim to this and my boyfriend is currently in this situation too. You think about making something for a long time or you talk about it. You’re like “I really should start my own clothing line or design a new set of emojis”. You get into the trap of just talking about it. Even just a new job, because you’re bored with your current one. You’re like “I need a new job” and it’s the topic of conversation with your friends every time you see them. It just keeps coming up but you never do anything. Early in my career, that was something that I really struggled with. I had all these ideas, but I never really did anything. It’s because I’m a perfectionist. If I do something, I want it to be really good and perfect. I was too afraid to be vulnerable creatively, put myself out there and try something that I wasn’t an expert at. I think that that’s really the most important thing. Instead of talking or thinking about trying something new, just do it. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true. Spend more time making than talking.

A lot of people think that these ideas/things that make people famous — whether it’s a successful fashion show, a body of work in a painting or a book of poetry or whatever it is — just magically appear from somebody’s imagination. Like they just write them down and they’re done. But it’s actually a very long grueling process of making something and thinking, “This isn’t good enough”, and throwing it away and starting over again. That’s another cliché but it’s really true.

I forget the quote, but somebody said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. You learn through making. You put an idea out there and you see it and evaluate it and you think “OK, maybe that’s not working, this could be better”. The more that you make and put things into the world, produce your ideas and your thoughts, the more that they exist and you can respond to them. That puts things onto a trajectory, where you’re making and responding and getting better, versus if you’re just thinking about stuff for a really long time and not actually making anything. Then you don’t have the opportunity to refine your work or think about it effectively.

That’s the biggest thing I’ve learned. Just make sh*t. As long as you really commit to it. That’s probably the best way to use Instagram. It’s a way to keep yourself accountable. As soon as I started using Instagram as a tool to share my artwork, it forced me to make things regularly, be accountable for that and see how people reacted to it. When I talk with my friends or make something that I really love and think will do really well, it ends up tanking and it’s horrible versus when I’m making something and I’m like “This is so dumb, I don’t even want to post this” and then I post it and it goes off and it’s like 12,000 likes. That’s always the case. I don’t even know what’s good for me or what I want to make. The more you can externalize everything and just put it out there, and let other people react to it and direct the trajectory or your career, the better. The internet is a weird place and it helps you to grow in that way.

Anything new and exciting coming up?

Yes, a lot of fun things. I’m working with Vans to create custom prints that will go on their shoes. It will showcase the customization tool, which is really exciting.

My boyfriend is a fashion designer and we’re working on a line together. Basically, we’re taking my Instagram aesthetic and translating it into clothing. He’s getting initial sketches of that and we’re figuring out how to produce it. It’s all kind of a sh*t show. We’re going to do pre-orders first and based on how many we get, we’re gonna figure it out. It’s not going to be profitable. It’s mostly going to be so both of us can have a really fun joint project together. I’m really excited about it.

I’m also working on a magazine with my friend Warren about being mixed race in America, which will be a digital zine and potentially a podcast too. I’m going to be art directing it, so it will be colorful, queer and fun. I think that’s everything I’m allowed to tell you at the moment.

How would you rate Woodstock from 1 to 10?

I would give it a 7.5. I really like it. I think the drinks are good. I love that there’s pool in here. You don’t really see a nice restaurant/bar that has a pool table in it, unless you’re in Colorado or a western place, so for NY I think that’s cool. I haven’t tried the pizza, so I can’t speak for that, but I like that it’s an option. I think it just suffers from that new vibe, when a place hasn’t quite figured out what it is yet. You know, like when a sitcom starts, the first season is a little awkward because the actors are like, “I don’t know what this is yet”, and then the second season hits and you think, “I like it”. I feel like once everything starts to gel it’s going to be really awesome, but for now it’s a 7.5/8.

For more colorful great vibes to improve your day, follow his Instagram, Facebook & website.

If you think what you’re doing is pretty darn cool and want to feature in your own Member Spotlight, reach out to us at hello@newstand.com.