About
Nearly everything Ted Mininni creates begins with a sketch. For almost four decades, that approach has shaped a career creating for some of the world’s most recognized brands.
Philastrated is where the story gets personal.
Thinking on paper
Drawing has always been at the center of how Ted Mininni works. Long before a logo or package design comes together on screen, there's usually a pencil sketch somewhere behind it.
That became a defining part of his process as President and Creative Director of Design Force, Inc. Ted's concept sketches were unusually tight, sometimes resolving nearly every aspect of a design before it ever became digital. But they still looked like sketches. They had movement. You could see the hand in them. An idea could feel completely thought through without feeling finished or untouchable.
Clients responded to that. They could see where a design was going, react to it and make changes while it was still developing. At a time when more and more of the design process was moving directly to the computer, Ted never stopped drawing his way through a problem first.
He still hasn't.
A designer’s approach to illustration
Ted will tell you he's a designer first and an illustrator second. It's an important distinction.
Most illustrators become known for a particular style. Ted never really worked that way. Even in art school, he was more interested in changing the way he drew to suit the problem in front of him. What might seem like a strange instinct for an illustrator turned out to be a pretty useful one for a designer.
Running his own agency gave him plenty of opportunities to put that instinct to work. Package design, licensing style guides, typographic treatments, character-infused graphics, patterns, illustration. The assignments changed constantly, particularly in the toy and entertainment world, and so did the visual approach.
One pencil style took on a life of its own. Ted developed a loose, gestural illustration style for the Transformers: Dark of the Moon cinematic style guide for Hasbro, using visible construction and motion lines to give the artwork the energy of concept sketches. A contact at Lucas Licensing saw the work and asked whether he could take that approach in a different direction for Star Wars, closer to the conceptual character of Ralph McQuarrie's development art.
Then Nike saw the Transformers work.
This time the subject wasn't robots or a galaxy far, far away. It was NFL players wearing football-inspired street apparel. Nike commissioned Ted to bring that same gestural energy to a series of player illustrations, including one of DeSean Jackson.
That's probably the easiest way to understand Ted's relationship with style. He doesn't begin by asking what something should look like. He starts with what the idea needs, then figures out how he wants to make it.
Drawing what matters
When Ted draws for himself, there's no brief to answer and no client waiting for the work. There has to be another reason to make it.
Usually, that reason is personal.
A lifelong Eagles fan, Ted started drawing some of his favorite moments from Super Bowl LII after Philadelphia won its first Super Bowl. He wasn't interested in documenting every important play from the game. He chose the moments that stayed with him and, just as importantly, the ones that gave him something interesting to work with compositionally.
That distinction matters. Inspiration might provide the subject, but the drawing still has to work.
Years later, he started a portrait of Jalen Hurts on the day of Super Bowl LVII. After the Eagles' heartbreaking loss, he put it aside. For nearly a month, he couldn't bring himself to finish it. Eventually, what brought him back wasn't the outcome of the game. It was Hurts' performance and what Ted felt it deserved.
That's the difference between creating for a living and creating because something moves you. Both have been part of Ted's life for decades.
Home
Philadelphia is home. It’s where Ted grew up and, even after all these years, where he feels most like himself.
He was raised in South Philadelphia in a very large Italian family, surrounded by the neighborhoods, people and traditions that become part of you before you’re old enough to realize it. His mother is one of 17 children. His father was the youngest of nine. With 49 first cousins and more second cousins than anyone could reasonably keep track of, family was everywhere.
So was the city. The Italian Market. Neighborhood streets. Food. Sports. The particular attitude of the people who live there. Philadelphia changed over the years, but Ted’s connection to it didn’t. Going back still feels less like visiting and more like returning to where he belongs.
There’s an unexpected piece of that story today. Ted’s son, who grew up in South Jersey, found his own way to South Philadelphia. For a time, his bedroom window looked down on the same street where Ted lived from the ages of five to fifteen. The street where he played halfball as a kid. Where he met his first real friends. Where he had his first kiss.
The building wasn’t even a residence back then. It was just an old factory or warehouse.
Today, its rooftop sits four floors above the street where so much of Ted’s story began.
A different kind of business
After spending most of his career building a successful design agency, Ted began thinking seriously about creating a new business. This time, he wanted his own creative work to be the focus.
It took years for the concept to coalesce.
He explored a variety of possibilities over those years. What kept getting in the way was finding a concept that synthesized the things that mattered to him: drawing and design, the freedom to follow an idea simply because it interested him, his connection to Philadelphia, and the possibility of building something around his own point of view.
Philastrated finally brought those things together.
The first collection begins with three familiar pieces of Philadelphia: the cheesesteak, soft pretzel and water ice, interpreted in a graphic style that feels very different from the pencil work that has followed Ted throughout his career.
That difference is intentional. Philastrated isn’t built around a single illustration style. Some ideas may call for pencil. Others might become something graphic, painted or entirely unexpected. What connects the work isn’t a particular technique. It’s Ted’s point of view and the city that continues to inspire it.
There's freedom in that. No brief to answer. No client presentation or approval process. Ted can follow an idea because he finds it interesting, choose a subject because it means something to him, and decide for himself when the work feels finished.
And not everything he creates needs to become a product.
Some pieces exist simply because Ted wanted to make them.
His artwork of Saquon Barkley's reverse hurdle is one of them. The moment was impossible for him to ignore. But rather than return to the pencil style he'd used for earlier Eagles work, Ted approached it differently. The image was broken apart and rebuilt through blocks of color, texture and painted marks until the original moment became something more interpretive. He added a single word beneath it: FLY. It described what Saquon seemed to be doing in that impossible moment and, for an Eagles fan, carried another meaning all its own.
That experimentation helped shape a visual approach Ted wanted to keep exploring. You can see its influence in the first Philastrated collection, even though the subject matter has moved from the football field to the food and culture of Philadelphia.
In some ways, that's Philastrated at its simplest. One idea leads somewhere unexpected. One style gives way to another. The subject changes. The curiosity doesn't.
After nearly four decades of creating for some of the world's most recognizable brands, Ted now has another place to explore those ideas.
This one starts closer to home.
Back where it all started
That rooftop has become part of the Philastrated story, too.
It’s where the first photography for the brand took place, with the rowhomes of South Philadelphia stretching out below and the city skyline in the distance. Of all the places Philastrated could have begun to take physical form, it happens to be just four floors above the street where so much of Ted’s own story began.
He couldn't have planned that. And maybe that's what makes it mean something.
Philastrated was never conceived as a trip back through Ted's childhood. It isn't about recreating the Philadelphia he remembers or telling anyone else what the city is supposed to mean. It's a chance to keep looking at a place he's known all his life with the same curiosity that has always made him want to draw.
The subjects will change. So will the way he draws them. Some will come from memory. Others might be things he's walked past a hundred times before finally seeing them differently.
After nearly forty years spent turning ideas into images, Ted gets to follow those instincts wherever they lead. This time, the work carries his name, his point of view and a piece of the city that made him.
And, almost impossibly, it begins on the same block where he did.