Meet Trig
Nick “Trig” Tringale is an artist and graphic designer in the Greater Boston area. He is a full-time employee at a major digital media company.
I’ve always loved to draw. But the path leading to a career in art was not a straight one. I didn’t go to school for it. I never took classes or pursued it. I just always drew and wished I could do something with it. Besides some odds and ends commissions for friends and family, or some custom built and painted cornhole boards, art was just a hobby. Then in August of 2017, with bonus money from my sales job, I bought an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil and it changed my life.
As I listened to a Mickstape (RIP), I doodled a Fruity Pebbles box with Coley and Tyler instead of Fred and Barney. I tweeted it out, Coley loved it, retweeted it, and the next day KFC reached out about doing freelance stuff for KFC Radio. Just like that, I was getting paid to do art stuff for a blog I’d read since 2007.
After a year of freelancing, I was in NYC for an interview for another sales job (a job I thankfully declined when my then-employer matched the money) and Coley told me to come through. As a fanboy, walking into HQ2 and seeing the chaos was cool enough. But that little face-to-name association led to a more substantial freelancing arrangement. I was really in the mix now.
A couple weeks later, the Red Sox made the World Series and I was asked to take a day off from the sales gig and fly to NYC to help design championship tees. In peak irony, if I took that sales job I interviewed for, my first day would have been the day I was asked me to come in for Red Sox designs. I would have had to say no. Destiny.
When the Sox went on to beat the Dodgers, the tees crushed, and I got a Twitter DM from Erika Nardini saying they wanted me full-time. After a little negotiation, my lifelong dream of a career in art had come true. On January 21, 2019, I became a full-time graphic designer for my favorite website. It is not lost on me the amount of luck I needed for all this to fall as it did.
After almost two full years on the pirate ship, it felt like the right time to launch my own website. I’ve somehow built a loyal following on social — for all the shit they get, Stoolies truly are the most supportive, loyal fanbase there is — and there has been a consistent, growing buzz to sell prints. So here we are.
My work is still my priority, and can’t be sold here. Maybe there will be some collaboration in the future, but we’ll cross that bridge if we get there. This is my personal artwork that I will be releasing in small batch prints when I can. Perhaps I’ll even toss up some 1 of 1 sketchbook pages if I get crazy.
Thank you for reading, and more importantly, thank you for your support. This is all still surreal to me.
-Trig