Flashback: 2016 DSVC Rough Interview
In January 2016 I was the featured speaker for the Dallas Society for Visual Communicators. I was speaking on the topic of Design for Good, highlighting the work my team did for a number of our purpose-driven clients, including the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and the Modern South project we recently completed for Studio360, the National Public Radio syndicated program by WNYC.
In the week following my talk, I sat down for an interview with DSVC board member, Bryan Grudowski. Our conversation covered my roots in Minnesota, early inspirations and reflections on starting and running a design business. Here’s an excerpt:
Tell me a little about yourself and the journey that lead you to your career today.
I was born in Chicago, Illinois, but I grew up in Minnesota. My mother is a former art teacher, and my father is a lawyer and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. I think that speaks a lot to how I'm wired. I started off just drawing as a kid and was always encouraged with that. I spent most of elementary and middle school thinking art was going to be my career. I never really considered design as a path until college.
I thought for a while about becoming a comic book artist. That was a really big deal to me. I had a lot of success on the comic book convention circuit back in the late eighties, early nineties in winning contests and things. There was a mentor program through my high school that I was able to work with commercial artists, and I was able to spend time with this guy named Dan Jurgens. This was an award from winning an art contest at a comic book convention, he was the writer and pencil artist for Superman around, I think, probably 1990. I won an opportunity to go his home and learn more about that. That was going to be my path, but there aren't college courses for comic book art.
I went to Savannah College of Art and Design to study illustration for part of the summer between my junior and senior year. That was when I was first exposed to design, but even then us illustrators were looking down our nose at the designers. This was pre-computer and it looked like they were just putting types on top of pictures and I'm like, "No, we're the real artists. We're training and inventing things." I considered getting into production design for Disney my freshman year. That path forward had shifted [me] towards commercial illustration. . . I took a design course because I knew freshman illustrators have to work with designers. I knew I needed to know what their world is going to be like.
I started noticing that success as an illustrator was going to be dependent on style and fashion. I asked if my aesthetic [was] going to be profitable at the time. I just wasn't comfortable about having my career being that much up in the air based on the interest of magazine art directors. That combination of things led to me being really open to the world of design when I was introduced to it. It really just blew me away. I started learning about designers that were also illustrators and I was like, "Oh, I don't have to abandon my passion here." It was because of people like Milton Glaser and Paul Rand that were very much art centric in their approach to design. I think most strong designers in the space have that at their core.
Also in those early days I started reading books about Pentagram. I think the first book, The Pentagram Compendium, I got my sophomore year in college. [They were] a firm of five partners where one of them was a product designer, another was an architect and the others were graphic designers. The idea of being able to work in a collaborative environment across different disciplines like made me think, "Yeah, I want to do that someday. I want to open my own agency someday."
Check out the rest of the interview at the DSVC’s Rough website.