Did I Do That?
Learning from my mistakes
When Sean Schumacher invited me to join his excellent podcast at dididothat.design, he asked me to bring in three mistakes to talk about. There have been so many, I have to say it was difficult to choose just three!
We talk about a lot of early Plazm days predating the publication of the first issue of the magazine in 1991. Inevitably mistakes will happen when you don’t really know what you are doing. Like, not knowing anything about publishing a magazine. It turns out, not knowing what you are doing is actually one of the best ways to make creative discoveries.
Listen at dididothat.design, or wherever you find podcasts.
Since it’s an audio broadcast and there are no visuals posted, I thought I’d share some of the images that we discuss, most of which haven’t ever been shown publicly.
One of the mistakes I shared is that the logo in my ad on the back cover of the first issue of Plazm is printed incorrectly.
In the beginning we didn’t know we were making a magazine. We were a group of artist, writers, and designers looking for avenues of expression. Once we decided to make a magazine, we had to name it. I talk about that as well as the first (and only) flyer for Drug magazine.
Some of the folks who helped get the magazine off the ground took ads. Reuben Nisenfeld, one of the founders, said I should take a half page. Someone decided to put my ad on the back cover. If I’d known that, I would’ve designed a full page! But that’s not the error. My logo didn’t print properly for some reason. I have no idea why or how this happened.
I was a year or two out of design school. One of my final projects, typical of many design programs, was to create my own brand. You can see some of my early naming ideas here ranging from the conservative (Joshua Berger & Associates) to the silly (Mr. New Potato Design). I ended up settling on Formal Chaos Design.
The world is chaotic. I saw, and still see in many ways, design as an effort to bring a sense of structure into our lives.
The time that I was in design school in the late 80s was on the cusp of the digital age. We had to learn all manner of traditional things such as specifying type and drawing mechanical art with a rapidograph pen. There was also a computer lab with Mac SEs that had applications like Pagemaker and Photoshop 1.0. In these sketches you can see many things drawn by hand as well as a bitmapped version of a piece of scanned art I made for my logo.
In this same folder I found many typewritten letters on my printed stationery in this pre-email time. There’s a draft with notes following up on a meeting with Roger Bently.
One of the other things I brought was a bound book from a Nike campaign I worked on at Wieden+Kennedy leading up to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. I talk in the podcast about trying to get work from W+K coming out of school and my recollection about the “come pick it up” call I got after dropping off my portfolio.
Fast forward a few years and I have gotten involved with a group of people who formed Plazm magazine. My role with Plazm after Issue №1 became that of Art Director. My approach was to have many different designers work on each issue. There were no design guidelines around type and margins or that sort of thing. There were the physical parameters of what we could afford (one color), the physical page size (11 x 17" in the beginning), and the idea that design should interpret and elevate the content it was displaying. A mutual friend connected me with John Boiler, an Art Director at W+K. He had picked up issues 1 and 2 on the newsstand and first started designing spread for Plazm in issue 3. I was in W+K one day meeting with John about some layouts and he asked if I could help out in the studio. Which I proceeded to do for the next four years or so.
I also talk about my Certificate of Failure at the end of the podcast. Niko and I figured we knew enough about failure that we could offer workshops about how to do that. We had our first at the Bend Design Conference in Bend, Oregon. We gave out Certificates of Failure at the end of the workshop — people came up when we announced their names, we congratulated them on the failure and presented them a certificate. Little did I know that when we were signing these (in the wrong place), Niko had slipped one in with my name on it. I failed to notice it, so I now have a certificate!
