Stephan Jaklitsch has been the sole architect for Marc Jacobs International. In the ten years since his firm opened, he’s built an impressive 100+ projects all over the world. He also recently published a monograph with ORO Editions which is receiving great reviews. Stephan’s work is modern yet warm. He is best known from the balanced yet unexpected mix of materials used in his work. http://sjaklitsch.com

When you started your company, what was the transition like from being an employee to being self employed?

In some ways it is not that different. I think everyone has this view of an architect as a single person deciding things. But it’s a team of people working together, working with the client, trying to solve problems.

When you start your own practice, there is also the issue of finding your own voice and taking the time to explore the issues that you yourself are interested in. In that sense, it is very interesting and, for me, it was a good challenge.

What were your early projects like?

My first solo project was for a hedge fund in Manhattan – designing their offices and trading floor. It was a great challenge. The project was located in a neo-gothic townhouse off of Madison Avenue, so the design was very much about respecting the spirit of the existing building.

Some of the other projects were apartment and town house renovations. One of my first fashion projects was a small showroom for Danilo Dolci, which is in my new book. The design had to adapt to three different brands simultaneously, which was a challenge. Shortly after, we were asked to work on our first Marc Jacobs store.

Oh, so right from the beginning of your career you have been involved with very high end designers like Marc Jacobs?

We started doing Robert Duffy’s apartment in June of 1999 and then by the fall of that year we began working on the San Francisco store.

And how did you get to this point? Were you with a team of people or was it just you as a sole proprietor?

In the beginning it was just me, working out of my studio apartment. Within a year, we grew to three people – all working out of my studio. We moved to our current office on 27th Street in February of 2000. I remember it being a very liberating thing to finally have that separation. We started out with just two little offices on the 9th floor. As the business grew, we started taking over more and more of the floor. About a year ago we took over the entire floor.

That’s great! Do you feel that there is a connection between your design work and that of Robert Duffy and Marc Jacobs? There has to be an interesting relationship between the architect and the client when the client is also a designer. I would imagine you have to be very in tune with their design sense, would you say that’s true?

Yes and no, it’s not really an easy, one-to-one thing. There are things about Marc Jacobs clothing that make them special – things that maybe only the person wearing the clothes would know. Like a simple thermal T-shirt made out of cashmere. They take ordinary things and transform them, using refined materials or tailoring to make them special.

Marc and Robert didn’t even have a sign on their offices, and the sign on their first few stores were only about two inches high – which is still true of New York’s Bleecker & Mercer Street stores and the San Francisco store. So, their aesthetic was very quiet, and subdued. I think, if you look at our work, you first see one broad stroke, and then as you look more and more into the details you begin to see the complexity in the work. And in that spirit there is definitely a connection.

And, why do you consider the details and texture to be so important to your work?

I think architecture has to work at the large scale, the medium scale, and the foreground. It has to work from across the city, as well as being up close. I think the closer you get, the more information you may begin to process. For each project, we always try to play with details and explore different materials and textures. But there is always a thematic core that runs through each of our projects, which connects the materials we choose.

Is there a specific approach that your firm takes to design?

Well, it’s one approach for a residential project and another for a commercial project. Though, there is a certain theatricality that links the two. For a commercial project, I ask the client what they want the customer to really experience as they cross the threshold. Do they want surprise? There’s a sort of psychological component to it. Do they want calm or do they want excitement? It changes for each brand and client. From that conversation, a certain mood that is set, and then we go onto manipulating lighting, scale, proportion and materiality to reflect what the client is looking for.

Speaking of scale, you have recently been expanding into product design as well as urban scaled projects. How is that going?

How IS that going? It is definitely a process! We are currently developing some houseware products. We are exploring a number of different themes; some of them are directly related to structures we find in nature. That’s really about all I can say about it right now, it is still very much in progress.

We’re always open to doing other things though. I was trained as an architect and there has always been this sort of dichotomy between interior architecture and architecture, which I view as false. I am sort of surprised by the profession actually, and how they view that division. But, being trained as an architect makes you believe that you should be able to design anything from a soup spoon to a city. It’s a natural sort of progression. Most architects get smaller projects early on and as they mature and gain more responsibility the clients become more willing to trust them.

There is always this problem, I think, with clients who think you can only do a project if you’ve done one before. We’ve worked with clients who have asked us to do things because they like to work with us and they respect our attitude, even though we may not have done that project type before. We actually just finished our first restaurant in Milan which is a new typology for us. I had never done a retail store before working with Marc Jacobs and I had never done a trading floor before working on the hedge fund’s office.

No better way to get experience than to dive right in!

Well, there is a passion that you should invest in what you’re doing. As long as you’re willing to learn and you’re willing to put a certain amount of energy into it, I think that a smart client recognizes that they are probably going to get a better project as a result of you putting in that extra effort.

What advice do you give to young architects today that are looking to dive in and start their own firm?

Well, it’s really not a bad time. Actually, a downturn can be a really great time to start, if your overhead is low and you’re willing to take risk. It can be a great time because you’ll grow as the market recovers. It takes time for people to know what you’re doing, where and how to seek you out, and help you realize a project. But, I think it’s also a matter of remaining true to what you really believe in. We take an academic approach and we treat design very seriously. We have never lost that. That’s what we do, and I don’t think that will ever change here.

See more at http://sjaklitsch.com

Where did the idea for EBOOST come from?

Really a void in the marketplace. There was no product out there that spoke to my or my partner’s needs. We’re on the go, working 15, 18 hour days. Out late, up early. Healthy, working out. We’d have to take a variety of supplements and vitamins to really operate at full capacity.

We also knew that those energy drinks and stimulants really irritate your adrenals. That temporary spike in energy is followed by a monster crash, which is your body becoming completely exhausted and depleted of all the important nutrients. So we thought, “There’s got to be a way to vitalize your body with nutrients and get healthy energy.”

That’s fantastic. I’m a huge fan of EBOOST – I got a sample at some event a while back and tried it. What I like is how it doesn’t cause you to crash the way a normal energy drink or coffee would. So once you realized there was this void in the market and you wanted to fill it, was it hard to go about making your own supplement?

Yeah, it took a minute. We originally started with a guy who just didn’t get it. I mean, he was in the business, but he didn’t understand what we were trying to create. So we wasted almost a year with him, and then we got hooked up with the biggest and the best in the industry. And he literally said, “I know exactly what you need. Come back in three weeks.”

We spent almost two years developing EBOOST. Taste was so important. Delivering on the promise was so important. We were our own toughest critics. Once it passed our standard, it was good enough for everybody.

Do you have a business background, or is this the first company that you’ve started?

I had my own marketing agency, prior to this, for 8 years. I worked with P. Diddy, Sean Combs, for 6 years doing all of his marketing.

So when you were launching your product, you definitely had the marketing part down.

That part was easy, but operating and building a company from scratch is not easy and not cheap. It always costs more money, takes longer than you want, and is harder than you think.

What was the hardest thing to learn?

We’re taking a non-traditional approach. We want to be at the cash register at a fashion place as opposed to on the vitamin supplement shelf at GNC. It’s more of a lifestyle approach. So there’s a lot of educating people, getting the product out there, so that people see this like a fashion statement with great health benefits. We’re trying to appeal to a little bit more discerning customer.

Where do you hope for your company to go? What are the plans?

We’re going to put a huge emphasis on trying to scale the business up in New York, and then roll it out to LA and to other markets from there. Trying to really get concentric and dominate in the market as opposed to being a lot of little places.

Have you had the same strategy from the beginning, or has that changed?

No. To be honest, we threw a lot of stuff against the wall the first two years, just to get feedback and proof of concept. We saw what worked and what didn’t work. We realized that as small as we are, and as undercapitalized, we have to really focus on an area and put all of our resources into it.

What’s been your happiest moment along the way?

Maybe seeing the very first sale online come through? Or the very first PO from the W Hotels – that was exciting. Or just hearing people’s feedback, saying that they love the product. When you hear people talk about it on their own, that’s exciting.

Now that you’ve gone through a lot of the work, what’s your advice for entrepreneurs that just have an idea or are just getting started?

I think it’s important to work with experts. Listen to them, and invest in them, because ultimately it will save you time and money. We’ve stumbled along the way because we’ve been under-resourced or spread thin, and not paid attention to some of the details that we probably should have, from an operational standpoint. Operations are the most critical piece. You have to have all that in place so that when you do grow, you’ve got a solid foundation.

Visit the EBOOST site and check out all of their products.

What gave you the idea for Make Love Not Porn?

What I’ll do guys, is I will give you my 3-minute TED talk. I’ve realized that it’s really needed to contextualize where Make Love Not Porn came from and what it’s all about.

I must admit, I submitted the idea as an application for one of the audience 3-minute slots at TED almost as a joke. I had thought, “I’d love to see Chris Anderson’s face when he sees this.” And to give him his due, he got straight back to me and said, “I think this is a very serious issue, and I’d love to do it. We just need to kind of talk about it first.” He was extremely supportive, and gave me a fantastic slot on the opening day of TED, which is traditionally the best attended.

Bill Gates spoke at the end of the first session, and then I came on in the second session right behind Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. And I must admit I was very nervous before I gave this talk. I had no idea how the concept would be received. Chris and the TED team knew what I was going to talk about, but nobody else did. When Chris introduced me, he just said, “This is Cindy Gallop, she’s been on the TED stage before, please welcome her back.”

So I walked out on stage and I said,

“Those of you who saw my previous lecture at TED University know that I date younger men. Predominantly men in their twenties. When I date younger men, I have sex with younger men. And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.

Now, as a confident, mature, experienced older woman, when I encounter this personally, I have no problem accepting that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation, and reorientation needs to take place. I have no problem responding, as I’ve had to on a number of occasions, “Actually, no thanks, I’d much rather if you did not, in fact, come on my face.” My concern is not for me, it’s for the young guy who believes, because hardcore porn has taught him, that all women love having men come on their faces. And it’s particularly for the young girl, whose boyfriend wants to come on her face. She does not want him to come on her face, but hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women’s faces, therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it.”

As one twitterer said, it was probably the first time the words “come on my face” have ever been used six times consecutively on the TED stage! And I went on,

“So, I’m launching at TED today a website called makelovenotporn.com. And what this site does is it take the myths of hardcore porn and it balance them with the reality. Two very important things about this site – the first is that Make Love Not Porn is in no way whatsoever about judgment. This is not about ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad.’ Because sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of activities. Secondly, Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn. I’m a big fan of hardcore porn; I watch it regularly myself. But hardcore porn as an industry is predominantly funded by men, managed by men, driven by men, directed by men and targeted at men. And so hardcore porn tends to have one worldview. Hardcore porn goes, ‘This is the way sex is.’ And I just want to say, ‘Not necessarily.’

I’m asking the audience to be aware this is an issue, because I would never have thought about it had I not encountered it myself. Check out the website. Forward it to anyone you think might be interested. All I want to do with this is help stimulate and inspire an open, healthy discussion about sex, in the interest of encouraging more open, healthy, and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships. Thank you very much.”

Brought the house down. Totally.

That’s awesome. So you launched the site, and then what?

Make Love Not Porn was massively well received. For the next 3 days of TED, everybody came up to me and said, “That was fantastic.” A lot of people said that they particularly liked it because, while TED talks a lot about big ideas and art and science, it touches much less often on human emotions and behavior. They found it very interesting in that context. And it absolutely exploded all over the blogosphere. What really pleased me was that, if you look at the comments, it did what I wanted it to do – it got to young people in the mainstream.

The site is very basic at the moment. You can only do 3 things. You can leave comments, you can send in your own porn world/real world ideas (and I have a shitload, by the way) and you can write to info [at] makelovenotporn.com. Now, I’m not promoting it in any way at the moment. Nevertheless, It’s getting 900 hits a day. Obviously it has the word “porn” in the title, that helps. But any way that they come at it, that’s fine by me.

One of the most recent emails that I got was from a young guy in Morocco. He wrote to say, “Thank you so much. Young people in Morocco are just like young people in the US. They are heavily influenced by porn. Now, at last, I can tell my friends how to make love to a girl, thanks to your wonderful website.” I love getting emails like that.

Do you have intentions to grow the site?

I’m looking for funding, at the moment, because I want to build makelovenotporn.com out into a broader interactive community and discussion platform. The need is absolutely there. I’ve been looking in two areas for funding. On the one hand, I’ve been looking for commercial brand partners. Whenever I say that, people’s minds always go to the obvious. They go, “Oh, condoms. KY jelly.” I’m actually interested in the not-obvious. I’m interested in, for example, youth-targeted brands, who want guaranteed youth attention, interest, and an engagement platform. It obviously requires a very brave brand. BBH, my ex-agency, loved this, and thought it would be great for Axe. They talked to Unilever, who felt it was a bit of a bridge too far. Which I understand. The corporate world is a little nervous about this.

The other place that I would love to get funding from is the porn industry. This could be the porn industry’s version of corporate social responsibility.

Which would be amazing.

In the same way the big tobacco makers fund anti-smoking campaigns, this could be the porn industry going, “We know what we do is fantasy.” The site would be a way to balance it out with the real-world picture.

I started Make Love Not Porn effectively as a public service announcement. I would like to embed a business model in it. And I see a very interesting business model in the other URL that I own, which is makelovenotporn.tv. I won’t say anything more about that at the moment, but I’m looking for far-sighted and broad-minded investors who are interested in something that has the potential to do something very, very different versus the porn category. That’s all I’ll say about that at this point in time!

Want more? Watch Cindy’s entire TED talk here:

Thanks so much for meeting with us – you’re a true guru on the topic of creating your own path as a designer and entrepreneur.

It’s something that I talk about a lot. In 2006, I did the keynote at SXSW Interactive. I spoke about firing your clients and making your own clients. In the past 5 years, we’ve seen a lot more small-to-medium size creative studios trying to find their own way and take greater control over the work they do, as opposed to just selling it to somebody on a work-for-hire basis.

With all the tools from the internet at your disposal, you’re enabled to do so much with just a few people.

Yeah, definitely. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, customer contact – all of that is supremely manageable by a very small team. In the traditional model, you have this big corporation where the creative department is in the back, and they’re those wacky people with the Tabasco ties and chattering teeth in their cubicle, and everybody is a little afraid of them because they’re so “wild.” The rest of the company is the marketing, production, distribution, all of that. Well, our idea was that the little creative team could do everything.

Coudal really does seem to do everything. You have the ad model, you have physical products, you have a consultancy… I’m curious, what came first?

We were a pretty traditional design and advertising consultancy for a long time, 9 or 10 years. We did fairly visible work for a lot of cool clients. We redesigned the Houston Astros’ identity system and all of their uniforms. We worked for national restaurant groups and came up with brand names for restaurants. We also had this Coudal.com site, which was surprisingly popular.

After September 11th, the economy kind of took a dive, and through no fault of our own we lost a bunch of business. Some clients decided not to advertise, or took stuff in-house, or whatever. It wasn’t because we weren’t doing good work; it was circumstances beyond our control. At that point we had to make a decision about whether we were going to continue to chase client work, and ultimately do work we weren’t particularly proud of for people we didn’t really like, or find another way that we could go forward.

The SEED Conference put on by Coudal Partners [photo via flickr]

How did you start to find that other way forward?

We looked at our assets and our liabilities, and we said, “Well, we have this audience that comes to our Coudal.com site all the time, and they must be like us, if they read the things we put up. If we can find a way make, create, sell things that we need, then this audience might need it too.” That was the idea. In 18 months we wanted to have half of our revenue come from things that we owned, as opposed to work-for-hire.

And then nothing happened. It was easy to talk about, but we just went on and did brochures and identity systems for this and that. We also did a series of films with two guys called Slowtron. The films are short profiles of artists and designers, talking about their work. People really liked the videos. They were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. We got a call from a distributor in the UK, who said they might be interested in pursuing this idea as an episodic television show. And we thought “This is it! This is exactly what we wanted – we made stuff on our own, and now here’s this opportunity.”

We were putting together a DVD to send over to the UK, and did a beautiful design for what we wanted it to look like, when we realized that there was no interesting packaging available for CDs and DVDs. They were all crap, like the plastic boxes that you have at Blockbuster. Somebody here had a disc from a European stock photo agency that was in a really sweet case. We took all of the paper out of it, made our own paper, cut it out with an Exacto, put it together and sent it off to the UK. And that’s where that story ends.

Nothing happened?

Nothing happened. We don’t even know if they ever got it, because the guy we were in touch with got fired!

But we thought that it was so hard for us to find a nice case, maybe other people were having this problem. And we’re pretty crafty, so making customized paper inserts wasn’t that big of a deal, but wouldn’t it be nice if all the templates were set up properly and the paper was perforated ahead of time? One thing led to another. We found the company that made the cases, in the Netherlands, and we met with them and made a deal.

That was the beginning of Jewelboxing, this really sweet system for doing a short run of DVD or CD packaging. We launched it, and we made 13 sales on the first day. We thought, “Maybe we’re on to something!” All of a sudden Jewelboxing became the big business. We had a client that was different from all of our other clients – we owned it and could do anything we wanted with it.

Jewelboxing by Coudal Partners

You obviously didn’t stop there, though.

Well, then we wanted to get the word out about Jewelboxing. Not only to the core Coudal.com viewers, but to a larger community who we thought might be interested in it, like wedding photographers and architects and film students. So we started dabbling a little bit in doing online advertising.

It was a total clusterfuck. It was completely impossible to buy the markets that we were trying to buy at any sort of reasonable cost, and the paperwork and research and headaches involved were just a pain. You can see where this is going. We were like, “OK, screw this, we’re going to do it ourselves.”

We talked to Jason at 37signals and our friend Jeffrey Zeldman in New York who runs A List Apart and said, “Look, we’re going to build this little ad network, called The Deck.” It started with us 3, and now there’s 41 properties in The Deck. Last month we served up almost 50 million ads for advertisers like Adobe, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and all kinds of different people.

The Deck, Coudal’s ad network

And then you had two “clients” that were projects you owned and could do whatever you want with.

Right – and The Deck sort of came out of Jewelboxing. We also created a very successful company called The Show, in which we went on tour with bands like The Pixies and Dead Can Dance and recorded concerts. We mixed and matched them and sold specific concert performances from the bands. But as digital music was growing and CDs were waning, we decided that this was going to be a sunset business, so we wound it down.

Then we built Field Notes. Our friend Aaron Draplin in Portland had a goofy idea for this little notebook. We thought it was less than goofy, and we made a deal together and created the notebook. Now it’s in a hundred stores and we sell hundreds of orders every day online. The thing that’s cool about Field Notes is it appeals to a rifle-toting budweiser-drinking mammal killer, AND a coffee-swilling fedora-wearing pretentious Brooklyn hipster. It has a totally universal appeal.

Field Notes now come in limited-edition colors.

So do you only work on your own projects these days?

We still sort of do client work – we do once in a while take on a project if it’s particularly interesting or particularly lucrative.

We have this thing called Layer Tennis, which is a live design event on Fridays. We actually created it way back in 2001 as a total goof. We invited people to play from all over the world and it was a big success. But after a while, a lot of people were copying the concept, and we were doing other things, so we just sort of put it on the back burner.

Then we were dealing with Goodby out in San Francisco on some work for Adobe. They needed something to promote CS4. So we brought Layer Tennis back, and offered it as a sponsorship. In a way Adobe is our client, except rather than us selling our services to them, they’re sponsoring this thing we created.

You’re getting paid to do what you were already doing.

Right – except much bigger now. In the final match we had 40,000 people watching live. So it’s been very good for Adobe as well. We’ve done 2 seasons, and we’ll most likely do another. So now we own this ad network, we have some consumer products, and we do these sponsored web things.

Layer Tennis is a super fun design event by Coudal and Adobe

What’s next?

I don’t know what’s next! It’s kind of a joke, but we’re proudly “without business plan” in our 13th year. We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!

What was the hardest part of building your businesses?

At the point where we made a conscious decision to move away from the traditional work-for-hire model, things weren’t going very well. And nothing gets your attention faster than not having enough money in the bank to make payroll on Friday! But I think that, to a certain extent, you can overcome financial fear with hard work. So just work 12 hour days. So do the fucking brochure. And then get on to what you want to do.

Everything’s not all unicorns and rainbows, and sometimes it’s a little scary, but we are a lot happier than we were in 2001. And there’s something to be said for that.

What’s your advice for people who want to set out on this path?

You need to have the stomach for risk and you need to have good ideas. Let’s just assume that those are the givens, that without either one of those nothing else makes a difference.

I know a lot of people who are in our position, who used to work for The Man or whatever, and now are making records or making films or designing clothes or creating products or screening posters or any of a million other things. And all of them, without exception, all say exactly the same thing and they say it in exactly the same words: “I should have done it sooner.”

When you think to yourself, “In 18 months I’m going to start my crocheted beer coaster company,” the problem with that sentence is the 18 months. What you’re really saying is, “I’m afraid.” Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.

Scott Ballum of Sheepless Co.

We’ve found, with a lot of the people that we interview, that the companies they start fulfill many of their needs beyond the financial. Social needs, creative needs… Your job should fulfill all of those other needs. It’s your life’s work – it’s what you’re doing every day.

But most people don’t enjoy what they do every day. It’s surprising to me! Even when I was working for someone else, it was still at a design company. And a graphic design practice is still going to be more enjoyable than so many other jobs that are out there. I was still using this artistic skill that I wanted to use.

Since I’ve been working here at Green Spaces, and on a couple of other projects that I’ve done, I’ve met a lot of people who basically are finding ways to support themselves – but it’s around some issue, or some mission, that they feel really passionate about. Not just because, “I want to make money.” I find that really inspiring. I think a lot of people wish that they could do that, but they don’t think it’s possible.

Graphic design for the Art Director’s Club

That’s definitely similar to what we’re trying to do on our site, which is promoting creative entrepreneurs who are creating their own path and making a living doing it.

I’m specifically interested in “activist entrepreneurs.” I want to show the relationship between really political street activists who band together and sell their posters online to make money, and, say, Seventh Generation. Which is a big cleaning products company, but they’re also based around social and environmental issues. i want to create this new way of thinking about business.

What I’m hoping to do is provide a voice, a way for those people who are doing it to branch out and tell others, “Yes, this kind of career is possible.” You can leave your horrible middle-management job, or whatever it is, and do something that you’re excited about.

It will start as an online magazine. I hope to, at least quarterly or bi-annually, do printed versions as well. I think there’s a place for that – people want it. You can hold it, you can take it places, you can show it to people. But it’s a lot easier, and faster, and cheaper, to build an audience online. As I’m sure you know!

Graphic design for the Art Director’s Club

Absolutely, the internet makes finding an audience so much easier. What is your background?

I’ve always wanted to be independent. When I came out of school, where I studied graphic design, I passed up a couple of jobs because they just seemed like they were too focused on one particular type of design. Or one particular industry. I wanted something that was broader. I ended up freelancing by default, because I kept turning down jobs!

Then I actually fell into a couple of jobs that were pretty fantastic. I worked in-house at Housing Works, and then I got a job with C&G partners. I would be working with design legends, and it was the kind of job you just don’t turn down when it’s offered. I liked, when I was there, that they had a very broad range of clients. I was taken in as senior personnel and I was able to run my own projects. But even then, I still had to report to someone else. There was still someone else who was deciding the direction of the company.

Also, I have a background in writing, and I was finding more and more venues to do that write. But I had to squeeze it into after-hours and weekends. I wanted to find a way to make that a really solid part of what I did. I decided to go out on my own and turn it into some sort of a business.

Graphic design for the Signature Theatre Company

How did you end up a part of Green Spaces?

I left the company I was working for in September. Great timing. I had projects all lined up, and I thought I was totally set. Well, the big projects all disappeared when the economy crashed. There were a few months of serious drought there. During that time, I was working in coffee shops.

I would tell myself that the people who worked in the coffee shop were my “co-workers” and if I was late they were going to know! I really had to convince myself of that – there had to be some way to get myself out of the apartment. I had to go somewhere else and say, “OK, this is work time.”

In February or March of this year, I started getting a few phone calls, and projects started coming up. Doing design work and writing in the coffee shop environment was a lot harder than sitting there looking for work. I started thinking I should find some other space – not having any idea yet how I would ever afford it. In that same coffee shop, people from this building had put up a flier with little take-away tabs with their phone number, saying, “Co-working office space.” I decided to just take a look.

Graphic design for Housing Works

Why not?

Exactly, why not? It sounded like fun, and I figured I’d meet some more people. When I got here, I loved the building. It’s so alive, and there are so many different people here doing so many different kinds of things. And yet we all have a very socially-conscious, environmentally-conscious mission to whatever we’re doing. We’re not competition – we’re all very supportive of each other. It seemed like a great thing to try, so I tried it, and I loved it.

As your own small company, you could just sit at home or in your little office and be really isolated. Places like Green Spaces let you be autonomous and let you do what it is that you want to do, and yet still share resources and share inspiration.

Could you tell us what your mission is at this point? What kind of projects are you doing?

For the design practice, I aim to work with small, socially-responsible businesses or non-profits – cultural organizations, things like that. I’m trying to work on projects that I can really get behind and support. It’s not easy, because that’s definitely not a niche where there’s a lot of money. It means that I have to take on more projects. But they’re much more rewarding. Even if I have to put in long nights, I’d rather do it for something I feel good about and am excited about.

How did your partnership start?

We both went to Carnegie Mellon for communication design. We lived together in the beginning of college, in a shitty old house with 4 other people. We started just discussing a lot of things and bouncing ideas off each other.

Could you talk us through a few of the different projects you’ve done?

The “Smoke Campaign” was a shoot we put together during our junior year at CMU. It was really our first attempt at putting together a shoot and handling everything ourselves. It gave us a taste of how to organize and approach these sorts of projects that we were always talking about.

We had the idea during a class critique. Paul was showing me these photos done by Miles Aldridge, while the professor was talking about the profit and marketing techniques of tobacco companies. And I’d been really into rhinestones. It all synthesized into one concept, and we started blinging out tons of cigars & cigarettes. We got really lucky with timing, and some great people went out of their way to help us out. The photo below is a portrait of Hollywood Classic, a local Pittsburgh rapper.

This next shoot was for musical artist Patty Crash. Back in the summer of ‘07, we were working with this guy trying to launch his music label. The schedule for this shoot was really nuts. We drove around Long Island in a rented van with this music artist, a couple of friends, and our equipment. We were scouting locations for the shoot on the fly, for probably 13 hours straight! As grueling as it was, we got some good material out of it, and overall was a great experience. For this specific image, the owner of the label spotted a car rental place that had these great old-school london cabs. One thing led to another, and before we knew it he was letting us shoot in his garage with his cars.

Last October we did a series of photos inspired from the colors, textures and themes surrounding American novelty ice-creams and popsicles. This particular image was inspired by a ‘creamsicle’ palette.

What brought you from Pittsburgh to NYC?

First, in the summer of 2007, we lived together in the lower east side. Don interned for Giovanni Bianco Studio 65 and Paul interned Artists & Creatives. After those internships we went back to school and worked on ideas we had as much as we could in our spare time.

That’s when we started really tossing around the idea of making The Supervisory happen. In the spring of ‘08 we got the job to shoot a campaign for NOOKA. We came out to New York and shot for them the same week as graduation. Then we really kicked it to full speed. We moved to New York, started working on our website, organizing our portfolio, and hammering down our philosophy and direction. We got started with graduation money and an $8,000 credit card!

I love the work you did for NOOKA. Could you tell me a little about that shoot?

Well, we got the project when we were still students. We flew out to New York on a Friday, did the shoot, and flew back to Pittsburgh on Monday and had to deal with finals and graduation prep. It was pretty crazy. The inspiration came from “retro-futuristic” movies like THX1138, 2001 Space Odyssey, and Blade Runner. The overall idea was to create a really desolate and other-wordly experience with the images. We did the creative direction of the campaign aesthetic, along with the photography and post production. We’re actually working with them right now on their next campaign. Be on the lookout!

When you graduated and decided to pursue The Supervisory, what were your next steps?

We incorporated in July of 08 and right about the same time signed with Artists & Creatives. It was beneficial to have the credibility of agency representation. But we started to find that since we’re still in the early stages of our company, we really wanted to start genuine relationships with our clients and collaborators rather than trying to land huge agency clients. We recently left them, in mid-Febuary, and have fully struck out on our own.

Where is your studio heading? Who would your ideal client be?

Well, we’re actually working on a project right now for Danger, who’s pretty much our idea client. He saw a video of ours that we just put together because we were listening to and were inspired by his music. And now we’re working with him on a video! We really just want to stay open and not pigeon-hole ourselves in a certain role or a certain style. Since we’re coming from a design-school background, rather than a fine art background, we approach photography and art direction as problem-solving.

BLOGGING

Did you actively promote your site, or did the traffic just grow organically?

No, I never actively promoted the site. I was always proud to say I never marketed it. I never did banner-swaps with anybody. I was fortunate enough to start the site when design blogs were few and far-between. There was Grace from Design*Sponge, Josh from Cool Hunting, myself, and only a few others.

The community used to be much tighter. We would call each other out on postings. Grace and I used to have “scoop wars.” If I posted something, she’d dig back and say, “You’re not reading my site, I posted this four months ago!” Or if we posted something on the same day, she’d say, “I got you by 3 hours!”

But today thousands of sites link to all our sites, and it’s a re-blog world. If someone writes about something I’ve written about, I’m not going to say anything anymore. Back then, there was actually a golden rule. Now that’s completely gone. It’s all about the pursuit of traffic, and post quantity.

joshspear.com

How does one pursue traffic? How often does a successful blogger need to post?

A few years ago I did an experiment. I went from posting about four times a day to posting 15 times a day. I did that for a while, and traffic jumped by a lot, obviously. But three years ago there wasn’t nearly as much to read. If I posted 15 times a day, you tuned in 15 times a day. Now people scroll through everything in Google Reader. I read all my blogs in Google Reader and I don’t usually know which blogs the posts come from. That’s what’s happening.

Do you get a lot of feedback from your readers?

We get a surprising amount of feedback. Especially from the core audience that’s been reading it since the beginning. Well, the “beginning.” Everyone has a different sense of the beginning. Anybody who has actually been reading the site since the beginning knows that it was never really about products. If you dig far enough back, it was a blog about “what the hell am I doing?” I wrote about politics, and things that I found inspiring, and leaving school. It was very personal.

But that growing community was always there. And when you hit some sort of milestone, you hear from them, “Congratulations!” Once in a while, we get people who are either genuinely moved by something we’ve written, or it has moved their supply in some way. I have a secret folder on my computer called “Magic” where I put stories like, “You posted my shirt and it sold out instantly.” Yes! I love that.

undercurrent.com

BRANDING

How did you get into the branding and marketing work that you’re doing at Undercurrent?

I got a random email on my blog, about six months after I started it, from the Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago. They asked me to come in and speak to them about the interwebs, and particularly about their client, McDonalds. I’ve never been in McDonalds, and I’ve never eaten McDonalds, so it was interesting. I gave them some pretty raw and authentic thoughts, and it turned out to be very helpful. Most of these brands are so insulated from what’s actually going on. They have to do a grand study to figure out what the kids are saying, and then someone has to translate that.

Did you come from a branding background? What got you interested in all this?

I came from a brand savvy, product savvy, never “settling” household. My dad is a designer. He’s a feng shui expert. When I grew up he was designing hotels and private residences, working with people like Karim Rashid. In grade school I always had Muji notepads and pencils that my dad brought me back from trips. There was always some thought put into a purchase, and what brands stood for, and what values they had. But it took a long time for me to realize how interested I was in brands. I just knew that I liked some of them.

Josh Spear’s lecture on branding, Brand Utopia

That’s an interesting transition.

One of the first and most important things I realized is that anyone who says they’re immune to brands is so unbelievably full of shit. I have long-since given in to my love for certain brands. I buy the things they release on day one, and I far overpay for something just to know that it came from those people. Even if it’s entirely irrational, I do it.

I still meet people who say they “aren’t really affected by brands.” OK, let’s have a test. Say you’re flying to London. What airline would you rather fly, British Airways or something you’ve never heard of, like Air Chumbawumba? And when you get out of the airport, would you rather get into a taxicab that looks like the ones you know, or something that looks like a boat on wheels?

That’s like when my family comes to visit and I try to put them in an unmarked Brooklyn gypsy cab. It’s a really hard sell!

Exactly! And yet your family would probably tell you that they’re not into brands. Another example: people come to New York City to go on vacation. They don’t go to Buffalo. Which do you think is the stronger brand, New York City or Buffalo? Nobody is immune; brands affect your decision making.

Image via the World Economic Forum’s Flickr set

WORLD CHANGING

You recently got back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. How did you get the chance to attend?

I spoke at a Google Zeitgeist conference, a year and change ago. There was a delegate from the World Economic Forum in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said, “I’d like to invite you to Davos.” I’ll never forget looking at his card and thinking, “What is this place?” I’d certainly heard about it, but I never thought I’d go in a million years. So I went for the first time last year, and I was one of the youngest people there.

I would not guess that a whole hell of a lot of people our age are at the World Economic Forum.

They invited a fair amount of younger people, though they were more internet/technology focused, rather than lifestyle/design/culture, or whatever category you want to put me in. They put me in the “Media” slot. I spoke about young people, and branding, and marketing to them.

I went again this year, and was nominated to the Global Agenda Council for marketing and branding. Councils have 4-10 people and are about planetary science, and the oceans, and national security, and Iran, and oil… All these wildly important things. The marketing and branding council is made up of bigwig agency owners and leaders. They put me on there partially, I think, because they wanted someone young to keep them honest. They’re trying to invigorate what they’re doing. We ended up collaborating with the council on climate change, to come up with better ideas to communicate climate change.

From Davos, I flew to LA to attend the TED conference. That was my third TED, and it’s the best week of the year, every time. Although this one was very subdued, having come from Davos where I met, you know, the Prime Minister of every country in the world.

It’s hard to come off that high.

Yeah, exactly. My first year at Davos, I was thinking, “Oh my god, look, it’s Robin Williams! It’s the Prime Minister of Turkey! It’s Jet Li!” And this year it was, eh, Jet Li. You get jaded really fast. Which is good; all of a sudden it becomes so much less about the people and so much more about the content.

It’s exciting to see someone our age at these conferences. What do you think our generation brings to the table, in terms of world-changing?

The first year I went to TED, you couldn’t actually download any videos. Can you imagine, you couldn’t watch TED Talks? That’s insane! So the fact that that’s broken open now means that we can all share some of the things that were spoken about there. And Davos, for the first time this year, is all HD, you can download it. 1 in 5 people in the world are under 24. If a pretty large portion of them can have access to the internet, they too can consume this knowledge.

There’s never going to be 500 24-year-olds at Davos, it’s just not going to happen. But there are more than 500 24-year-olds around the world that understand and care about those issues, and don’t need to be there. They won’t ever have the crazy experience but, nonetheless, will in some way get to shape the future. They can be much more knowledgeable, and make a much greater impact, than young people ever could before.

What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?

Live your life. It seems so cliche and obvious, but living your life is the only thing that allows you to discover things. Fearlessly go forwards and taste new things, whether they are countries, or people, or foods, or emotions. Put yourself out there and live a life that is tremendous. Whatever you invest in yourself will eventually pay dividends in your world.

Skills can be learned by anybody. We have schools; we have ways to take advantage of people who go to schools. We’re set up for that stuff. What we’re not set up for very well is the nourishment of the self. That’s your own responsibility. There’s a person right there in the mirror. Take a good look. Take the time to get to know that person. That will pay off in anything that you do, whatever you want to be.

This is not magic. There’s no mystery to this. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just presenting the way I see life. I’m curating it the way that I see it, and putting it out there. Now you tell me, by the virtue of the market economy, whether this has a future or not. And I will go on, or not. I don’t claim to know any better. I just claim to see what I see.

[the black apartment]

And you also take action. Many people have visions, but actually figuring out the logistics and getting it to people in a finished form is everything.

I hate to quote Yoda in anything, but as I learned in my youth, “Do or do not. There is no try.” That’s always been a huge thing for me, and it speaks to what you just said. Action is what makes anything valuable.

I used to call this the “bedroom Mozart” syndrome. You can be an extraordinary, extraordinary human being, but if you do not act one day to get it out of your bedroom, nobody will hear your symphonies. And that may be perfectly fine; that may be enough for some people. I, on the other hand, do not claim to have that kind of artistry. But I do want whatever I feel or imagine to be experienced by the largest possible number of people, so that it can have impact.

Woody Allen said, “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with somebody I love.” So I can’t knock masturbation. But you can have masturbation AND sex, you know? I don’t think one replaces the other!

So what does The Apartment do, other than masturbate?

We have blossomed into a full-fledged agency that looks at problems which have outdated solutions. I think there’s, to borrow your word, a glut of old ways of looking at things. Old ways to create meaning and old ways to create experiences. That’s where a company like ours comes in. We don’t have the rules ingrained in us. This allows us to take risks where others would never dare to.

Everest would never have been climbed if someone hadn’t said, “Fuck impossible.” You know? Someone said, “I’m doing it. I’m maybe going to die halfway through, but I’m still going to do it.” And I think that comes from a totally naive way of looking at life, which is wonderful. The Apartment has that fearlessness and takes on all kinds of projects, from the branding and marketing for a broadway show to creative-directing the planning of a small eco-city in the Ukraine. We tend to gravitate towards projects that make our lives more interesting, not ones that simply make our company more profitable.

[the black apartment]

Part of being a creative entrepreneur is that it’s not a “job.” It becomes your life. It has to fulfill more than just your bank account.

Precisely. And that kind of business changes in the same way that your life changes. I’m 39. and I’m no longer the person I was when I started The Apartment. I was 28 and idealistic. I started a store, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had never done retail before. I was a filmmaker at NYU, and Gina was a marketing consultant. We decided to do this together. We knew nothing about the rules of retail. We naively just went into it.

What was the concept behind the store?

I came up with the idea of creating a new, theatrical retail concept. Retail needed a new way to exist. Maybe it’s not just crap on shelves with price tags and you go to the cashier, anymore. Maybe there’s something else.

At that time, experiential retail didn’t exist. Prada was starting to think about it. A couple of people were starting to think about it. But nobody had really done it, especially in the design world. Design stores were all either the gadget market or the museum market. There was nothing in-between. We came in and said, “There is something missing. There’s a very large group of people for whom design is about usage, for whom design is about function. For whom design is something you live with, not something you admire.”

The Apartment was literally an apartment. Everything was for sale, but you could come and do whatever you wanted. You could eat. You could take a shower. Everything was there for you. You could stay all day if you wanted, watch TV, whatever. And we started to form a community of people, by the virtue of having a physical space which people came into.

How did that transition into your client work?

Most of what’s happened to us has been organic. There was never a business plan. Very quickly, 9-12 months after we opened the store, people started to come in and say, “Instead of buying individual pieces from your store, can you do this whole thing at my house?” And we thought, “Huh, maybe there’s a business here!” So we hired an interior designer and started doing people’s houses. Getting our first interiors clients was that simple.

And then somebody came and said, “We have a restaurant business. Could you do all the interior design? And since you seem to do your own branding pretty well, could you also do our branding and our marketing?” Hey, absolutely. We did it. Little by little, we saw how big that market was. People who not simply wanted design, but wanted consistent design that was integrated from department to department. From what the place is called to what you hear about it before you go. From what you expect it to feel, look, smell, sound like when you come in, to what you actually get, to how you remember it when you leave.

All of these things are usually taken care of by different people, usually freelancers. Providing continuity became a big thing for us. It became about storytelling. What we were doing, which wasn’t being done by “professionals” in the field, was thinking about life-impact. Thinking about stories, thinking about the things that make us tick on a daily basis: love, sex, entertainment, haircuts… all of the things that make our lives interesting. We saw a gigantic opportunity, so big that we needed to choose between that part of our business and the retail store.

[hello]

Why did you choose the agency?

We saw retail as only ever being able to grow from one store to a chain of stores. That wasn’t all that interesting to us. That was merely scalability. And so we turned into the agency, with no real agenda of what we wanted to do.

We stayed quite open as far a
s what kind of projects we wanted to take. Interior design was an easy first target, because people saw us as a furniture store. It was easy for people to think, they do furniture, they do interior design, that makes sense. People like to put you in a box. It was an OK box to be in for a while, but I grew quite impatient. I wanted to do stuff on the branding side, and the product side, and music, and movies. So we had to educate our clients as to who we are and what we do. It doesn’t always work. Half the time people don’t know what the fuck to make of us.

But I’m not willing to specialize just to be more “successful.” I am absolutely a generalist. I’m the conductor of a grand orchestra, and the orchestra changes up for every project. The Apartment and I will always be able to see life as a whole and design parts of it, whatever you need for your project. That’s what is interesting to me.

Where do you hope for all this to go?

When I’m designing an apartment or a product or a marketing plan, the number of people who it benefits is finite. So how can I create the environment which will be of the most value to the most people? I know there will never be an end to that quest, but I think it’s interesting to start it.

That’s one of the reasons we created Meet at the Apartment, up the street, with our friends at the Wooster Collective. It’s a way to go beyond theorizing about great ideas, and put them into action. We created that place because we didn’t want to just say we’re about community. We wanted to actually create a community. We made a place where we could meet, where big brands or big manufacturers could meet street designers or graffiti artists. I want to get people together who would otherwise never meet, and see what happens after a day.

Meet at the Apartment is the embodiment of a need to redefine success as something more than financial, something more than fame. What we want to do over there is make something like a sophisticated learning annex. It’s somewhere for us to gather the people that we’ve met on our journey over the past ten years. Whether it’s you guys, or Stefan Sagmeister, or Richard Meier. Take anybody in the world that we find interesting, put them in a room together, give them a subject, talk about it and bring people meaning. And see then how we can institutionalize this and make it valuable.

[meet at the apartment]

What makes New York a special place for that kind of community?

Well, I came from Paris when I was 18 years old. I came here specifically because in Europe, you are nothing if you’ve done nothing, and you are no one if you know no one. You’re completely disrespected because you have no experience. It’s unbelievable to me. Whereas this country, young by definition, can’t afford to disrespect its young. It was built upon the young. So when young people arrive here, as New York has proven again and again and again, we are not just welcomed but taken advantage of in the best possible way.

This country is so full of opportunity. Even today, when a lot of people are seeing dead-ends and desperation. For creative people, I think this recession is an absolute godsend. It’s an opportunity, for once in our lives, to think about subtracting rather than adding. Which is why we’re here today, actually! We got to meet because of this article in the New York Times, speaking of the positive aspects of subtraction. Which I think is extraordinary and shouldn’t be shied away from by anyone, least of all Murray.

It’s a very exciting time right now because everyone’s starting to reflect, as opposed to just going through their usual patterns. When the economy is great, you don’t have to think as much about what you’re doing. The possibilities for change, right now, are huge.

They’re as endless as your imagination. It sounds Disney, but it’s true! It’s kicking us in the ass, but it’s also saying, “What are you actually made of?” It’s not a bad thing to be tested in that way. It’s testing my company as we speak. We are relying on our own power to reinvent ourselves. You need to go through the changes. It’s not enough to continue the line that life gives you. At some point you have to say, “No, even what I started two years ago may not apply to me today.” Maybe there’s something else that I should do, and I have to change. And then I have to change again and again and again.

Now I operate a lot like an octopus, reaching out to talented people all around the world. We have them partner with us on different things, as opposed to relying on people in-house, people who ultimately create unmanageable overhead. And for what? For not much. For an antiquated vision of success which was built by our parents in the ’50s, that the more people you employ, the bigger your office, the more successful you seem?…

When you start your own company, in a lot of ways you refuse the status quo. You refuse to play by the rules, even sometimes by your own rules. As an entrepreneur, you set up your own rules. And you think, “Well those are the best rules anybody can ever set up for me, because they’re mine.” But after a couple years, you look at it again, and you say, “No, that’s bullshit too. Because I’ve evolved.”

[yelo]

Because I was wrong.

Yeah, “I was wrong.” Those are such powerful words, you know? That’s something that I want to be able to say every day. In order to reconfigure. This company is a different company than it was six months ago, for the better.

Studio: swissmissstudio.com
Blog: swiss-miss.com

Tell me a bit about your background. You trained in graphic design – how did you move from that to new media?

Well, I trained in graphic design, we call it communication design. I studied one year in Geneva, Switzerland, and four years in Munich, Germany. The reason I got interested in web design was because I did an internship, a year before I graduated, at a web company in San Francisco. This was pretty early, in like ‘98, and the web was much further ahead here then in Europe. When I went back to Munich, I just told my professor – I’m going to do a project on web now, and he said ok. I basically did a web project with a complete analog professor.

I was lucky when I came here. I very naively thought I would find an internship just by walking into a company… But I found a web design job with the first boss I had – I became the web girl.

And when did you start your own design consultancy?

I always knew I wanted to be on my own eventually, but when I came here ten years ago I was dependent on a Visa – once I got my Green Card I came a little closer. I was working full time as a design director at Think Map – its a software company that did the Visual Thesaurus. When I got an email from MoMa saying, “We want you to do our intranet.” I thought I’d better reply to that one!

I met up with them and they wanted me three days a week, so I said, OK, well you can have two days. They were my first official client. I was pretty lucky, it literally fell into my lap. So I went back to my job, and I told them about this amazing oppurtunity and they agreed on cutting down my days to 3 a week. I really lucked out. This was leading up to having my daughter, I did both of those things. I knew once I had her, I was going to go off on my own completely, and now it’s been two and a half years.

How did MoMa find you as your first client?

Allegra Burnette – she’s the creative director of interactive design at MoMA. I think she just keeps folders of people’s portfolios she sees, and when the project came along, she thought I might be a good fit.

And after that how did you seek out clients? Or did they come to you?

So far I’m really lucky; it’s just been word of mouth.

When did you start your blog, and have the blog and consultancy fed each other?

March, three years ago. Starting my blog was the best thing I’ve ever done from a marketing perspective, and I had no idea. The reason I started my blog was because I was always obsessed with surfing and finding stuff, and I had all these bookmarked folders – I tried to be very Swiss and organized. My problem, though, was when I would try to remember what all the links were to. I would look at all these bookmarks and names, and have no idea. I needed a visual archive, so I started a blog. Then, after a few months, my friend asked if I checked my stats. When I did I realized “oooh” other people like what I’m finding. I really had no idea.

I invest a lot of time in blogging, but I get a lot out of it in terms of connections for potential clients. I’m meeting so many interesting people from all around the world; I’m being invited to conferences with press passes. Now I’m in my next step of merging my studio into my blog. I think once I do that people will be able to make the connection easier. I’ve been talking to a few of my clients, and asked them why they’ve emailed me, and they point to the blog. Its kind of this instant credibility.

How did you manage to get the traffic up?

I really should make a post about this. It’s basically a few components: good content, giving credit, and being consistent.

You have to create really good content that makes people want to come back.

You have to give credit to the source of information. Always linking back to people – I think that’s really key. There’s no decent blogging etiquette out there. If I find something on someone else’s blog, I give them credit. I think that people love to get credit. They send me submissions, and I get really good stuff, and they get a traffic boost. The thing I do as well is check my stats to see where traffic is coming from, and if I see these smaller sites that are feeding to mine, I’ll go to their sites and find content and link to them. I try to focus on the smaller blogs and push them. I use my stats as a tool to find them.

And you have be consistent. A lot of people tell me they come back because every day there is something new. You lose the readers quickly if you don’t keep the site regularly updated.

Where do you see it all going and growing? What’s the future of Swiss Miss?

Well, I’m kind of at the point where I have to decide whether to focus on building the studio or the blog. The blog is really part of my income at this point, in terms of ad revenue, so there is definitely the possibility to build it out more. But I never want to stop designing. Ideally, my dream would be able to live off my blog so I can pick and choose the design projects I want to work on.

How did you get started with advertising revenue?

People emailed me and asked if I did advertising on my blog. So I figured, OK, I could do that, and did the very Swiss thing: I put this nice press kit together, keeping track of my traffic, links and audience. I wrote a very personal email to four companies that I link to a lot. I told them I would give them a great rate and space, and all of them agreed right away.

Then I realized it’s a lot of work keeping track of who said how long, and how much, and then I was approached by The Deck. It’s a fantastic advertising network founded by Coudal. Now I have this rotating RSS feed on the top of the site, and it changes and updates audience appropriate ads for the site.

What’s your advice for someone who wants to start their own studio?

Have a financial cushion. I started out not having one, because I’d used all my savings for my maternity leave. Looking back, if I would do it over, it would be with some savings. Just for ease of mind.

I think what you have to do is be extremely open minded and network a lot. I know it sounds so cheezy, but it’s so important. The whole meeting people thing isn’t something that you can say, “Hey, that paid off.” You never know what’s going to come out of it, but something always does.

That’s one of the reasons I started CreativeMornings, a monthly gathering of creative people, from 8:30 to 10:00. There’s breakfast, coffee, and a ten minute lecture. It’s good because if you ask someone for a ten-minute lecture they’re not scared. Usually they talk about something they’re passionate about, and then there are twenty minutes of questions and answers. The feedback I’m getting on it is just great, people are making connections, networking, and finding jobs.

If you want to start your own studio you ha
ve to be very outgoing, or hire someone who is. I sometimes wonder how certain people come to this city and start a business, unless they have a big network already. Doing business is kind of like real life – how you pick your friends. If a project lands in my lap, I look through my roster of people and think who I would want to work with on a project. You better like the people you work with, because they’re going to be in your office all day long – thats a lot of time together.

How do you think the internet has changed the way that designers break in?

Business aside – I couldn’t live without the internet! I think the possibilities these days, of running a business, and making a living, are unbelievable. You could live in the woods and still create a business as long as you can plug in. It’s amazing.

How did Pomp & Clout start?

It started because my friend Aaron Vinton and I wanted to do a collective site, showing both of our work. Shortly after, another friend, Sam Hyde joined as well. Then at some point along the way we all kind of took divergent paths. I guess you could say I do more “commercial” work. Aaron has moved towards experimental art/audio. Sam’s using his twisted humor and motion graphics skill to work more on comedy skits and animations… I held onto Pomp&Clout and began using it as my portfolio site.

What made you want to move in a more commercial direction?

I enjoy working on stuff that solves a problem or has a specific function. I still, of course, appreciate art and I think the stuff that Aaron & Sam are doing is amazing. But what I really enjoy working on are projects that go beyond the purely visual.

Could you give me an example?

A great ongoing project has been gwap.com. Gwap stands for “games with a purpose.” It was initiated by a guy in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He won a MacArthur Foundation grant, also called the Genius grant, to create this site. His idea was to use the human mind to solve problems that computers can’t easily solve. The basic premise is, let’s have people play this game, and then let’s get useful functionality from that.

Let’s take the ESP Game for example. You and a partner see the same image and are asked to type in a tag for it. When you agree on a tag, you move on and are awarded points. After just a minute of play, you’ve agreed on six or seven tags. We record those six or seven tags and associate them with the images. Now a search engine will have a better idea of what’s in those images. [gwap.com]

I think it’s a really cool idea. I’ve become the art director and designer, dealing with everything visual and interactive on the site. It’s very function-driven. These guys are straight-up engineers. They’re good at coding. It’s interesting to bring something different to the team. And they treat what I do as the end-all be-all of how it’s going to look.

How do you find most of your clients?

The majority of it is word of mouth. Various people I know have recommended me to their friends who are in need of design. I got started by doing logos. Now the projects are mostly web-related, like with Gwap. I work with engineers who are in need of designers.

Lately I’ve also been getting into a lot of music-related stuff. It started with these “video flyers” I made for promoting the Lovelife parties. People have seen them and hired me to do similar stuff. While the website work mainly comes from tech people who need a designer, the music/graphics work comes from people seeing something I’ve done and thinking it’s cool and contacting me about their project.

Could you explain the video flyers a little more?

I started throwing these dance parties in Providence almost a year ago, with three DJ/Producer friends. I came in to do the projections. It was something I’d dabbled in before that, sitting at the computer and throwing imagery up that I’d made or that I’d sampled.

I’d seen promotional videos that were done for these parties, which were kind of exciting but they were always just photos from previous parties. I wanted to try my hand at it, and try something different, something with a mini-narrative.

The first one I did was based on a thought I had at the club on the first night. The parties are in the basement. It’s kind of a weird space, but we tried to turn it into a positive deal. The slogan was, “In our basement, we will be together forever.” I remember being at the club and thinking that it felt like this sequence in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco walk into a club through the back entrance. So I sampled that video sequence and laid in all this motion tracking and spent way more time on it that I probably should have, putting together this thing.

In the end, though, a lot of people responded to it. I heard, “This is really cool, it fits the venue, it builds up anticipation for the party.” Which was exactly the idea, to get people excited about coming out. So I kept making them. They’re really fun, because they’re somewhere between a music video and a commercial. It’s obviously music-driven, because it’s an ad for a dance party.

Do you see your work moving more in that direction?

Currently, doing web design and identity design brings in the money. But I’d love to get more into doing music videos in the future. I’ve started getting inquiries from people who want me to do music videos or other promo videos. The music stuff is really fun and also really challenging.

That whole culture is very discriminating and expects everything to be incredibly fresh. You can’t fall back on old methods. But there’s a lot of room for experimentation. I once sampled this deep-sea documentary footage of fish swimming around. I thought it was really cool, so I came up with a way to use it. I can throw in all kinds of random stuff.

Video flyers aren’t very common, are they?

No, it’s new. It’s kind of sprung up with peer-to-peer video-sharing sites like Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook. Those sites have made it incredible easy to just throw something up and pass it around. If the video is cool, people will pass around the link, and a bunch of people see it who might not have otherwise heard about the event.

I do print flyers for the shows too, and I’m trying to make a cohesive set for each party, where the print flyer references the video flyer and vice-versa. We’re creating both a visual and a musical identity. We’ve also started a Lovelife blog, lovelifewith.us. That’s really fun. It’s the four of us, the three DJs and I, putting up links to things that we’re into and we think other people would be into.

Did you always know that you wanted to go off on your own and work for yourself?

I’ve always been interested in doing stuff online, and collaborating with other people. I freelanced all throughout college. In high school I ran a small shareware company called Melonsoft. I did the development, the design, the marketing… It was really exciting.

The internet makes it so easy for anyone to get themselves out there. What was Melonsoft about?

I started it in early high school, shortly after the first iMac came out. That’s how I keep track of time. The initial iMac, aqua one, the one that killed the whole “beige” thing.

I tau
ght myself how to write software. I made an mp3 player, a drum-machine program, a piano program… It was all kind of music-related, actually. I’d figure out how to do something and quickly hack together a program that kind of worked and looked cool.

And it was all shareware?

It was all shareware. Anyone could download it, and if you paid you could register it. I had a serial number system worked out. It wasn’t much of a system. It was essentially a specific four-character string followed by any fifteen characters. I was kind of cutting corners. I actually found stuff on hacker databases, saying how to hack my serial numbers. So that sucked.

But other than that, it was cool. The software ranged from $5-$50. I was in high school and I was making decent money. It gave me the balls to just pay the overhead of a domain name and web hosting, put stuff online, and turn it into a business.

Do you have any advice on becoming an entrepreneur?

I would say that the most difficult part for me is handling all the business stuff. Not that I really have that much business stuff to handle. But make sure you have some sort of system in place, whatever it may be, to keep track of who’s paid you and who hasn’t paid you. I had a recent situation with a non-paying client… It turned into an altercation, over email, in which I was essentially threatened…

So yeah, keep on top of things, make sure you get paid on time. If you’re doing freelance web work, especially if it’s a new client, try to get paid half up-front. That ensures they’ve given you money and they know the situation and they know you’re not just working for free.

That’s one of the most difficult things, to actually get people to pay you and to realize the value of your services.

Exactly. And as far as the value of your services, when pricing a project, always try to overshoot. The client may negotiate you down. I think a lot of people coming out of school, especially coming from design or art backgrounds, don’t really hear much about how to price projects.

There have been times when I way undersold myself and afterwards thought, “What the hell am I doing?” And then at times I’ve charged way too much, and people just laugh in your face and walk away. So it’s kind of been an intuitive process and a lot of trial-and-error to figure it out.

It seems like a lot of people in our generation are looking for freedom in their work schedule, rather than the 9-to-5 thing.

If I went full-time freelance or started a one man studio, I wouldn’t feel the need to work anywhere but my apartment. I think that’s the beauty of this new web-entrepreneur culture, or whatever you want to call it. You can just work at home, do what you want, take days off. That’s ultimately what I’d like to get to.

Even at my current job, a lot of the work I do can be done from home. I can connect to the servers, or email stuff. It’s really unnecessary to physically be at your place of work. I think that’s the future. People can be wherever they want to be. I’ve thought about the possibility of trying to get an RV at some point, and just have a 3G card, and travel around and do freelance.

That’s awesome. Travel, work, make money.

Yeah. As long as you have internet access, obviously. That’s the big necessity. But you could even be in a remote location, do a ton of work, and then drive to a cafe and shoot it off. So someday, maybe that will happen. Right now I’m kind of riding both worlds, the freelance world and the office world.