Rick Valicenti was born in Pittsburgh on 20 November 1951. He studied at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, graduating in 1973, then at the University of Iowa, where he earned an MA and MFA in Photography in 1975. The photography training mattered: it gave him a way of working with image as a bearer of fact rather than decoration, and that approach stayed with him through thirty years of graphic design.
After a period at Bruce Beck Design in Chicago, Valicenti opened R. Valicenti Design in 1981. The studio took corporate clients and did the work, but by the late 1980s that was no longer enough. In 1988 he founded Thirst — later also written 3st after a typographic accident that stuck — a name that made the position explicit: design made from appetite rather than obligation.
Thirst ran for just over thirty years from Chicago, closing on 31 December 2019. At its peak it employed roughly a dozen people and worked with more than a hundred collaborators. Clients ranged from Gilbert Paper — Thirst’s most sustained patron, for whom Valicenti eventually negotiated complete creative control over promotional materials — to Herman Miller, Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes, Wired, and Absolut Vodka.
Alongside the studio, Valicenti founded Thirstype in the early 1990s to give formal shape to the type work the studio had been making for its own use. The foundry released faces including Bronzo, Apex New, Cyberotica, Truth, and Rheostat before merging with Village foundry into the Constellation collective in 2011.
