It’s easy to enjoy Andrew Neyer’s screenprints and product designs—they’re often inflected with punny humor. His Combdelabra, for instance, is shaped like a giant wide-tooth comb with candles for teeth. It’s a playful approach to design that Neyer developed through interactive art exhibitions he helped organize in his native Cincinnati, Ohio.

Neyer cofounded YES, a combination gallery, studio, and shop, with two other artists in 2010, after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and returning to Ohio. “It was the think tank for all my current stuff,” Neyer says of the venture. For its 2011 exhibition Color Me _____, co-created with artist Andy J. Miller, visitors were invited to use enormous markers to color in cartoonish objects blown up and printed on the gallery wall. The simple premise was a hit, and the exhibit traveled to multiple cities. “There’s a childish joy to a lot of the work I make,” Neyer says. “It’s like taking this pretentiousness away from the art to make it more approachable.”

Neyer’s forthcoming home collection, Stuff by Andrew Neyer, will include objects in a similar vein, like a fork, scaled to six feet tall, that serves as a coatrack. Like his art, these designs come from identifying a problem and distilling its solution. “I’m not designing to make something super ornate or just beautiful,” Neyer says.

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Up-and-Coming Cincinnati Designer Andrew Neyer Adds Color and Whimsy to Everyday Objects