San Francisco street art legend Margaret Kilgallen, AKA Matokie Slaughter, melts my heart. I especially look to her work during weeks where I feel like I’ve been staring into a computer screen just a littttttle too long, obsessively nudging things a pixel this way or that. Master of lettering, Kilgallen saw the value in imperfection. Taking cues from American folk art and hand-painted signage, she painted cheeky wordplays and illustrations on both tiny scales (scraps of wood, boxes) and massive scales (gallery walls, railroad cars) until her death in 2001 at just 33 years old.

- Julie

I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don’t project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.