I’m Justin Lee Gilman — an artist, musician, and designer who lives in the space between structure and chaos.

By day, I build clear, consistent design systems that help brands communicate with confidence.

After hours, I trade pixels for fur and foam, crafting puppets, masks, and monsters that bring strange, joyful stories to life.

Design

I’ve been designing since 2004, starting with MySpace hacks and MS Paint flyers for my high school emo band. What began as pure DIY survival turned into a lifelong obsession with visual storytelling and eventually led me to earn my design degree from MICA in Baltimore.

Since then, I’ve worked across a wide range of creative environments, from global agencies like Leo Burnett to independent studios like Firebelly, before opening and running my own studio for over a decade. Along the way, I learned to move fluidly between design, code, illustration, and animation, choosing the medium that best serves the idea rather than the other way around.

What I love most is being part of the full creative arc, shaping how a brand looks, feels, sounds, and moves in the world.

Monsters

I started Gilly Goons during the Covid-19 lockdown, building handmade monster puppets and making strange, joyful videos to bring them to life. What began as a small product experiment slowly shifted into something more personal. Less about selling objects. More about exploring monsters as art through performance, video, and installation.

My background in music introduced me to a tight-knit community of artists I still collaborate with today. I’ve been lucky to call bands like Angel Du$t and Four Year Strong friends for years, and somewhere along the way I became known as the “monster puppet guy” in our circle.

Now my fabrication work centers on building expressive characters and performing with them. I blend character design, sewing, sculpting, music, and storytelling into living, breathing creatures that feel playful, a little strange, and fully alive.