We met Craighton Berman at ICFF this year, as he was making notes for what later became the hilarious Booze Within Reach cartoon. On our recent trip to Chicago, we had a chance to learn more about his work, which includes a line of products he’s currently self-producing and cartoons under the moniker Fueled by Coffee.
Stimulation mug by Craighton Berman
What’s the design scene in Chicago like?
Everyone knows Chicago as a design and architecture city, but when I got out here I just didn’t feel it in the way I wanted. There didn’t seem to be much of an independent or conceptual design scene. What I really wanted to see was intelligent, provocative design, as well as design community. But I didn’t know what the right combination of them was. As a creative outlet, I started blogging at fueledbycoffee.com, where I wrote about design and other things that inspired me. I got active in IDSA- most recently I helped to organize an exhibition of conceptual design called Deceptive Design, that ran for 3 months downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center. That started to get the ball rolling for me.
But it wasn’t until I started teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), when things started to move in the direction I always imagined. SAIC recently started a graduate and undergraduate program, in what they call “designed objects.” People from that program have been getting really active and starting to build community- specifically the Object Design League, a recently formed design club. It’s a really exciting time to be here! The Museum at the Art Institute just opened the modern wing with a great new design collection. Big design-stars like Bruce Mau are setting up studios out here. Independent design in general is really starting to pick up. It’s an important time to be designing in Chicago.
Coil lamp: Working-class extension cord with upper-class aspirations.
When did you start developing products on your own?
For a long time I complained about not having that kind of scene here in Chicago. But what I didn’t understand is that you can make your own scene, just like anything else. Just do it. So I started making some stuff.
It became official, though, when Design Within Reach did their M+D+F show. “Modern + Design + Function” is what it stands for – they started the show here, and now they do them all over the US. So I entered a salt and pepper set I’d designed into that, and also a table I’d done with a friend. They both got in.
Working in consulting firms and being a designer over the years, my sketchbooks are full of ideas, but I’d never actually made any of them. Which is sort of the threshold, right? For the DWR show, when I actually had to make them or I would not get in the competition, I made them! So that was the beginning. Once I did that, I realized it’s not so hard to do self-production. Especially with the salt and pepper set, which was slipcast ceramic. I think that was actually the biggest insight – if you pick projects that are made out of materials that you can actually do yourself, prototype yourself, you can actually get going a lot quicker.
I think design education at a lot of schools makes you think that you always have to use injection-molded plastic. They make you think the only option is consumer products that are made in China. There should be more design education focusing on working with small manufacturers or artisans, developing products locally or independently.
Core-toon: Coffee Temperature Acceptability Index
Agreed. School also focuses so much on your craft in the shop – which is important because you have to develop an eye for quality, but you don’t necessarily have to achieve that craft yourself. There are other people who you can work with.
Totally. As long as you can create a really clear vision for the project and you can document how you want it to come out, you can work with someone who has more knowledge on how to actually do it. There is this myth of the designer who’s a “genius” working by themselves for 9 months and when the thing comes out it’s perfect and finished and done. Things don’t work like that. The more you can collaborate with others, the stronger the work will be.
How did you discover design?
As a little kid I was always inventing crazy stuff and drawing. I loved doing that. My parents said, “You could be an engineer, because you like to invent things!” I went to a really great engineering school and was completely miserable for a year and a half. One day I was in class, doodling instead of paying attention, and the professor told me, “You’re great at drawing – that’s rare for an engineer. Most of the time industrial designers do that.”
I discovered the industrial design department, saw people making stuff, and I thought, “Alright, this is it.” I switched into industrial design and, yeah, that was it.
My interests have always been really diverse, though. Right now I’m working at Gravity Tank, a design strategy/consulting firm. I’ve also got a serious interest in conceptual independent design, idea-driven stuff, and I’ve got a serious interest in illustration. Recently I’ve been doing cartoons for Core77, kind of whimsical stuff. I’ve always suffered from being in a billion different spots at once. So I’m kind of hard to pigeonhole.
Core-toon: The Computar
I’d say that’s a good thing – everyone wants to pigeonhole you, as a designer, but I think the longer you can hold out, the more valuable you are.
Right. Although it’s challenging to work a full time job that’s really demanding, and teach, and work on my own projects, it’s also fulfilling. You’re always doing something new. You’re just really busy. I have way more ideas than I have time to make them happen.
Have you always drawn cartoons? You definitely seem like a natural.
Yeah. That was way before design. Cartoons have been happening since like, age 3. I’m really comfortable communicating that way. It’s a great way to just get ideas out there, which is kind of what I’ve been doing with the Core-toons. The Core-toons project started because my friend Tony and I got together for the housewares show and did a series of cartoons riffing on it. The response has been really positive. One of the cartoons got on Digg or one of those things recently, and I got 10,000 hits to my site in a day.
Where do you hope for all your projects to head?
I think the eventual goal is to have my own studio. It would be nice to find a mix of doing all the different things I want to do, and have my own autonomy. My dad has had his own company for 40 years, and that’s always been really inspiring to me. My ideal business model would be to have a line of products that I’m working on, some sort of design-thinking consulting work, and some illustration kind of work. It’s just so multi-faceted it’s ridiculous. But it’s working so far!