Waterknot: For All Of Life's Adventures

Waterknot is about connection. We tie outstanding art and design to wholehearted messages. We’ve been creating and selecting images and words for over 15 years, designing cards and gifts that foster truly meaningful human connection.

Waterknot is about community. We want to help you celebrate the good times and support you when things get tough. We share your desire to connect to each other in an authentic way. Sending a greeting card is an affirmation that we are better together. Together we create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Together we are a force for good. Together we increase our positive impact by giving back to environmental and social-justice causes with every purchase.

Waterknot is about exploration, discovery and adventure. We honor the joy of surprise, delight and wonder. At home, in town or outside, the world overflows with amazements. Whether you are exploring your local forest, discovering your new favorite restaurant or happily lost in the grand adventure that is falling in love, Waterknot is here to celebrate and inspire.

Simply put, Waterknot connects people to each other and the wild places they love.

Waterknot is about making. I’m Josh Nusbaum, the founder, primary artist, designer and creative director behind Waterknot. I’ve been drawing, painting, printmaking and generally making things for nearly 50 years. I also make music and write songs, poetry and prose. I seem to be here to make marks.

Long before Waterknot existed, I studied Studio Art and Environmental Studies in college—a combination that, looking back, feels like a pretty direct line to the work I make today. My senior project took me into the Grand Canyon and Sierra Nevada to paint landscapes. In the years that followed, I continued working in traditional media, including oil painting and hand-carved block printing, and showed that work in solo gallery and restaurant exhibitions.

Then came Waterknot.

I started the company more than 15 years ago with a hundred-year-old letterpress that I rehabbed and operated by foot, printing our earliest cards myself, one at a time. When handset type proved creatively constraining and economically impractical, we moved to photopolymer plates, giving me considerably more freedom in what I could design and print.

As the business grew, so did my creative practice. Pencils, paint, carving tools and ink were joined by a scanner, Wacom tablet, Photoshop, an iPad and Apple Pencil. Today my studio practice is largely digital and continues to evolve as new image-making technologies emerge.

The tools have changed considerably over the years, but my role hasn’t: developing ideas, experimenting, making choices, directing, editing and refining the work until it feels unmistakably like Waterknot. That evolution now includes generative AI in my commercial visual work. When I use these technologies, I choose models trained on licensed and public-domain content rather than models built by scraping artists’ work from the web without permission. I take both the possibilities and the complicated questions surrounding these newer technologies seriously.

Every Waterknot design is conceived, directed and completed by me. I develop the concepts, determine the creative direction, handle the design and typography, and make all final decisions about what becomes a Waterknot piece. Most of the imagery is developed through my own creative process, while a smaller portion incorporates artwork licensed from other artists, who are credited on those individual designs.

More about how I make the work →

-------------------------------

What’s a waterknot, anyway?

A waterknot is used by climbers to tie two pieces of nylon webbing together. Its beauty lies in its strength and simplicity. It is practically fail-safe. The more force applied to pull it apart, the tighter it becomes. We love this as a metaphor for strong, clean design.