About keaggy.com 

Bill Keaggy (born 1971) is a designer, artist, writer, and collector of the overlooked whose work spans visual communication, publishing, photography, and personal projects, which almost always try to transform the ordinary into something worth noticing.

He is a partner and co-founder of Tremendousness, a strategic visual communications firm that helps organizations explain complexity through stories and visuals, and was a founding partner at XPLANE, one of the earliest information design studios.

Keaggy has been described as an “archaeologist of the everyday,” making art and meaning out of things most people ignore. Since the late 1980s, when he started his underground, photocopied ‘zine ACC (Atomic Circle of Chaos), he has been publishing projects that straddle the lines between humor, design, and documentary. That ‘zine — which combined BMX and skateboarding culture, underground music, and DIY publishing — ran for 14 issues, reached an international audience, and is now part of the library collection at the BMX Hall of Fame.

After graduating from Ohio University with a degree in Visual Communications and a minor in Journalism, Keaggy moved to St. Louis in 1995. He designed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday magazine before shifting to web design, then joined XPLANE in 1996. There, through the collaboration and mentorship of founder Dave Gray, he helped pioneer the use of infographics and visual storytelling in business, working on projects that combined journalism, illustration, and strategy.

In 1999, Keaggy started xBlog, one of the earliest business blogs. It was part of XPLANE’s pioneering approach to sharing ideas about information design, visual thinking, and strategy online. xBlog grew into a well-regarded example of early content marketing, cited in multiple books and referenced in discussions around how blogs began to reshape communication between companies, practitioners, and their audiences.

Parallel to his professional career, Keaggy has pursued a prolific body of personal work. Starting in the late 80s and continuing into the 21st century, these projects placed him at the intersection of design, publishing, and internet culture at a formative moment for online media.

First and foremost, Keaggy launched The Grocery List Collection at grocerylists.org — a collection of found grocery lists and one of the internet’s earliest folk documentation projects, in 1999 as well. It later became the book Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found (2007), part of the early “blog-to-book” phenomenon and widely covered in media including The New York Times Magazine, NPR, and WIRED. The collection quickly became a cult project — with contributions from people all over the world — a strangely addictive and notable case of early internet folk archiving. Keaggy still collects discarded shopping lists and presents them as potentially fascinating artifacts of everyday life.

Another popular project is 50 Sad Chairs (2008), a photography book published by Blue Q that documents discarded furniture as quiet urban sculpture; 100 Pieces of Paper and the Stories Behind Them (a personal archive of ephemera paired with stories); The Periodic Table of Periodic Tables (a meta-visual project covered by WIRED); and 20th Century Anonymous (a collection of one vernacular photograph from every year of the 1900s). His work is often about collecting, cataloging, and reinterpreting ordinary things in ways that reveal hidden stories.

Keaggy’s projects have been featured in The NYT Magazine, The Guardian, WIRED, NPR, CBC, Design Observer, Boing Boing, Core77, Kottke.org, Lifehacker, and more than two dozen books. Designer Jessica Helfand has cited his work in her teaching at Yale School of Art. He has presented atevents by TEDxVienna, the Society for News Design, NICAR, Pecha-Kucha St. Louis, and others.

He has taught photography-related classes at COCA (Center of Creative Arts) in St. Louis for both children and adults, and has exhibited work at COCA and internationally. His photo projects, many archived on Flickr under the username “bk,” often explore the theme of “collecting with photography,” and have drawn comparisons to the work of artists such as Austin Kleon and Barry Rosenthal.

He has also appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Kelly Clarkson Show to discuss his projects. He is happily married, has two wonderful grown children, and has lived in St. Louis since 1995. His uncle is guitarist Phil Keaggy, celebrated for his virtuosity in progressive rock and acoustic music.

Bill Keaggy’s work continues to explore how noticing, documenting, and reframing the overlooked can spark mindfulness, reflection, humor, and empathy in a noisy world.

Here’s my original about page, first posted in 2002. Although it’s no longer updated, here’s what it said:

This web site is a collection of visual indiscretions. It serves no purpose and despite what you may think, it does not waste a lot of my time — just yours. Here’s a full site index (update: you can use the home page to access everything now).

I like photography, design, music, adventure, the WWW, bowling, books, bikes, and collecting things. It could be argued that I am only good at bikes and collecting things, but the others are a lot of fun too.

That still is, in fact, accurate. I like to get mail. If you want to say hi, please feel free. I may attempt to write back, and I just might be successful.

Sorry.