DJG Design

-Interview by: Pete Dulin / Present Magazine / Kansas City, MO.

You can also read this article with visuals online.

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1.) How long have you been designing posters and CD packaging/artwork?

If I were to say I’ve been designing this stuff since Mom gave birth, well you might think me to be pompus, new agey and bit queer. However, in the past few years I’ve come to the conclusion that everything I’ve experienced has brought me to this point. Information has been at a constant and consistently carried in the backpack(s). Though, it’s more the matter of channeling that. I’ve always been making things.

To put things into a more professional, or “text book” answer, I’m in the sixth year developing a bad back of my own accord. And tack on another four and a half of formal training before that. In which two of those I was making things for people on the side. So, really about 7 or 8 years in a design sense, but only offically five under my DJG belt. So, I’m still a youngster. But, I feel design years add up like dog years.

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2.) How would you describe your approach or design aesthetic?

With certain I have my influences and I’ve had formal training. However, the majority of the time is spent not thinking, rather just doing. And I’m not trying to push athletic shoes. Each day my head gets up different. I am always hungry and eat food the same way. I always put my pants on the same way. I lock the door the same way. I walk the same way. That stuff is all automatic. It’s my head that differs. As the mush upstairs is assembling for the day, my thinking and process(es) tends to come different, though it can all be intuitive to me at the same time. True, somedays I’m not in any shape to win the pennant, nor even give a care about art or design. Yes, I do crank out the work by just doing…and my portfolio is always eating. But, I still feel I’m the laziest guy in my woom, even on a good day.

I don’t really consider myself an artist or a designer. I just enjoy the act of making those things but there are moments I just don’t feel like it. When design isn’t doing “it” for me, I read or write or watch things. If I’m not doing anything, I have to be doing something. And I’ve quit the whole notion of actually being something other than just myself. And my self is not always in the mood for me.

And I don’t think about a design being good enough to measure-up or anything silly like that. It just has to feel right and true within me. I can tell when something feels forced and without life. For me, the work has to be breathing and has to say something. Now, whatever it conversates to the viewer/audience is all up in the air. It’s always a hoot to hear what others think.

Back on the subject of others’ talk of an aesthetic. This is one of the few times I truely think about how I’m doing things. I then start overthinking and that can be a dangerous place. People come to me all the time and say things like, “Oh, you are really great at this and are such a skillfull artisan of the such ‘n’ such…(more nonsense fluff ensues).” This is a complement I suppose, but I tend to take it as a way of them saying that it’s all coming to easy for me. I am my only competition so this is when I start to push myself a bit harder. I’ve got to stay ahead of myself. I like the silly idea of someone doing their best work every day. I don’t know how long I’ll be around, but I hope I’m always doing my best work from my perspective.

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3.) Historically, society has shifted from the Age of Mechanical Reproduction since the advent of the printing press to the Age of Digital Reproduction. Why is it still important to make a man-made mark on something seemingly short-lived as a band flyer or poster?

In taking foundation courses during my first year of formal education we did not use computers. Everything was very basic, hands-on cutting and pasting and drawing fundamentals of design. My friends were complaining about how they couldn’t wait to get on the computer. Personally, I was so naive and so in love with making things by hand (ever since I could remember working my fingertips as a child) that the idea of designing with a computer was not in my vocabulary. I stated to my friends how I was going to take the route of design that didn’t include the aid of computers. They simply laughed at my lunacy. Being that it was the late ‘90s, it was inevitable that we’d be using computers. What’s funny now is that for some odd reason I’ve been able to succeed a bit working with my hands and most of the people I went to school with tire of staring at their computer screen day jobs. I definately appreciate a computer and I use one. But, I think of it only as a tool. I use it as a way to ease production a bit and of course it can be a time saver for layout and print.

The problem with computers, the internet and desktop publishing gear is that anybody can be a designer. It’s definately eased things I suppose, but we’ve got people cranking out the most obtrusive visual clutter. I don’t aim to sound arrogant. It’s just that everybody thinks they know what they are doing. Everybody wants the cliche in high-gloss makeup, filled to the brim and in suffocation galore. Why not? We over-consume everything else. It’s just sad to me. I even see trained designers doing it. And most everything just feels so fake and soulless. When I first saw those early cave paintings in grade school text books, something about those expressions just delighted me and it felt right and true. And now when I see graffiti on the wall or a shopping list or letter I just think about the heart and energy behind it all.

One of the best things that ever happened to me (with design) is when my computer crashed about five years back and I lost the ability to use 2,000 some fonts. When I had them, I tried to use them appropriately and sparingly. But, they were nothing but a crutch to me. Rarely do I use computer fonts now. If I do there better be a reason or a restraint in my time. I just found it important to really speak honestly with my work. Each day is different and so is my voice and thought. Hand scrawls, handmade type and thumbprints bring forth the idea of a human identity and feels like thought and life was put into the expression. True, if we had the ability to actually see people’s verbal speaking expression there are some voices that would be just plain dull and in the same ol’ font and face over and over. And I suppose at times that would be appropriate. But, just think about the endless images bouncing from each other if everybody’s words, language, expression, feelings and breath stuck around in a clear visual form and of their own signature. That would be incredible. But, I’m sure it would do more harm than good. But, it would definately be something else for people to complain about so then there would be even more imagery because of it! The great artist Saul Steinberg communicated language as marks of visual expression in this way in much of his work.

A poster to me is exciting because of the fact that it is short-lived, yet it can be very in-your-face and of the moment. A good poster to me is like a big zit. And a good one will pop and speak all over…let you know that it’s there. It boggles me when people don’t take advantage of this idea. It just seems like people push a duplicator button and paint with boringness and fluorescents over and over. It’s very zombie. (though, zombies could probably make more creative things). In this digital age of people getting information via the web and myspace and cell phones and music players and all that garbage, it’s even more important to get them to focus at things again. I’m all for the internet, but I feel hardly anybody under the age of 35 truely looks at anything in actual form anymore for more than 2 seconds. I am guilty of this too. And this possibly stems from perception of wanting everything bigger, better, faster and right now. These things that are supposed to make our lives easier, yet fill life to the brim and we’re still wondering where our time went.

So, it does mean a lot to me when people actually stop and look and think…maybe come back to it again. It’s warming to me when something measley like a concert poster can get somebody to stop their busy life and take notice in a notice. Maybe even get a tickle out of it and a smile in their heart to make their day…maybe even take it home for their own wall. That just means the world.

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4.) Do you have particular influences in art/design?

I used to think you had to have a little man with flash cards or answers written in undershorts for quick draws whenever approached with this question. Anymore I don’t care about impressing people. I touched before on my influence of just existing and growing. I don’t understand it when people find or ape a “style” and milk that into retirement (unless it’s a true and pure speciality like most folk artists, Edward Gorey or Jean-Michel Basquiat). Gosh, I would cut off my hands as opposed to making the same thing everyday until I die. But, I would also do the same to be able to draw or paint like some people. What it is that I do is not something I punch a time card for, nor pound a keyboard to compute my solutions. It is a way of life and life is always changing. Silly, but the only way to stop it from my body is to spill my skull. And then have the bums burn my thumb prints to keep warm at night.

I’m blessed to have been raised in a rural environment with a bit of old-fashioned and hands-on approach to things. I wanted so badly to get out of that environment when I was coming of high school age. Now, I really appreciate this aspect of my life. Don’t begin to ask me how I reached into the design grab bag and pulled out this funny-lookin’ rabbit i’m wiggling on. It just kind of happened. Most of it belongs to my always active imagination and having many acres to romp. There wasn’t really a drain plug on what I could do or absorb. Every day my siblings and I were into something new and building our own altered universe from the inspiration of television, movies, tractor pulls, rodeos, demolition dirbies, state fairs…you name it. A great aspect of all of this is that I never really shed any of it. If you could devise a way for me to go back into my time as an eleven-year-old, you bet I would. I feel so many shear that skin as they reach puberty and young adulthood. Even in my late teens when everybody was out dating and all that nonsense, I made myself go to my room and draw and make things. Shoot, I was still building tree houses and playing war (I still do at times). I am constantly fumbling back for it all. I’ve still got most of my childhood things all around me here in my basement club house. I don’t throw anything away. Everytime I go home another bag or two is brought back.

The older I get the more I believe my streak stems a lot from my Grandmother on my Dad’s side. I still have many of the things she’s made by hand: fridge magnets, cat head pillow, blankets, book bag. As well as carry the images of wearing bread bags on my feet to school, creating toys out of thread spools, baking and cooking all the time, building forts in the living room, making pretty ladies out of flowers and especially sporting my beloved dead animal backpack (denim with plastic lining for easy blood clean-up). These things sound strange to others, but my world is built from them. She was constantly making or doing (as most of her generation did). I’m a big fan. It’s sad to me as nobody really just makes things anymore for the heck of it. And it’s really sad as she sits and bides her time in the nursing home, limited in her making and doing. I hope my engine breaks from making and doing before I get put in that point. If not, take me to the back forty and shoot me rotten.

If somebody were to ask me to place my work in some sort of design bracket…well, I suppose it lands somewhere in the land of Henryk Tomaszewski meets Saul Steinberg meets Lester Beall meets Saul Bass meets Push Pin meets Ray Johnson meets Art Chantry meets Jim Henson meets Folk Art meets garbage in the street…or something like that. It’s really hard to answer that question. Anyway, I get bored with the look of a lot of current design and fashions. Though, there are a few great designers my age coming out of the woods more and more…doing fresh things and in creative ways. I think it stems from growing up in a time of the media of television, film, video games, computers, animation, graphic novels and just the overall mass consumerism of culture and language. And all of these things shaking hands with the idea of pushing boudaries and smothered with a glaze of technology. But, then again every generation is a little bit more ahead of the last…I guess to some degree. I love and appreciate my upbringing and even my access to the culture now. Still, I do wish sometimes I could have lived and designed some fourty, fifty or sixty years back. Though, I’m sure I’d still be in some basement, garnering enjoyment making things the way I want to make them.

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5.) Does your work relate to the subject matter? For example, do you consciously try to create artwork that suits a band’s music or image?

I think some people in the music industry don’t know how to take my work. For one, I feel most of the so-called scene takes itself way too seriously. It’s funny to me, all this playing dress-up and rock star…and especially when it extends into the late twenties and thirties. But, I do suppose some people were just born to be stars. My work isn’t for every person. But, there are a few out there who for some odd reason “get” it and it’s all very flattering of their attraction. It’s even spreading across the country and into other parts of the world. I don’t aim for cool points. I take it serious only to the point of being non-serious. However, when designing it’s important to be held accountable with your client, city, audience, environment, venue, peers and yourself. And I have morals with the world design community, art and design history and with myself.

When it comes to marrying my work to a certain band’s music or image…well, what do I have to base on for an image? I have nothing but other designer’s interpretations of where to categorize the idea of what/how a sound or scene should register as. I have an appreciation for the past and present, but I really find it odd when somebody comes to a designer and says they want to play look-alike-dress-up to something already in existence. True, nothing is original anymore and I’m not saying that I’m anything special. Rather, I feel personality helps white wash things a bit and a lot of design these days lacks it (especially in the music industry). These days you can throw a rock and hit many kids making things (music and art). But a large chunk of it seems to be lacking proper development and form…and life. You can’t pick somebody else’s nose and expect to smear those boogers for yourself. You’ve got to earn them. You’ve got to get dirty along the way and find a way to bark, have fun, be yourself and just do things to do them…and then have Mom hose you off at the back door.

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6.) Pick one of your favorite creations. What do you like best about it’s elements?

First of all, my designs to me are like multiple babies to a mother. Yes, some may look more handsome and pretty and say all the right things and in the right way. Some may pay their own bills and some may be a pain in the rear. Each one is a favorite to me at the time of their creation and birth and in memory to the place that I was at the time of conception. You can point at every 300 and some poster I’ve made and it has a name, place and means something to me. If you said for me to create something for you like one I did back in 2001, well I couldn’t. It was in and of it’s place in my time. It won the race for that given moment. Shoot, sometimes I can’t even work within the same manner fifteen minutes ago.

One creation that comes to mind for this question is a package design and identity for The Elevator Division. It’s one that I can call a significant and critical moment in my design sensibility. It’s one that garnered lots of attention and even though I plan to always be making my best work, the “Whatever Makes You Happy” EP CD will always be in my all-time top ten.

I came up with the insane idea of cutting, spray painting imagery and making elaborate inserts for 250 packages (I vowed I’d never do it again, but funny how I work…and how I nearly exhausted my tank a month ago repeating this ridiculous process for another CD project). Anyway, so here I am the night before making all of these things and i end up changing my concept at the last minute. Thankfully, it still fit the real estate of the cardboard package, though It required spraying each cover three times as opposed to once. So, production time was tripled and time was not on my side but the design I felt was…and it worked and said a thousand time more than the original.

What I had was an attention grabbing image of a hand shooting one of it’s fingers guised as a missle. The idea of shooting off one’s options…or, whatever makes you happy. It worked. It popped. It spoke exactly what the title and the band were speaking of in the music with relationships and with the political climate of war and post-terrorism America . And it came to me the night before (Anyway, I’m boring you with all that designer yap). So, my excitement of the new imagery, fueled my creation of 250 packages in less than a 48 hour period (and let’s not forget to mention i was working a day job).

I was really smart and thought it was an awesome idea to spray paint in a basement with no ventilation. At the end of my final hour I erupted from the fumes and haze, with red, white and black paint caked to my hands and coming from my mouth and nose. I flung open the front door of the house as lightning crackled to find a hard rain falling. I was Noah and my boat was taking off…or landed, based on perspective of the event. In revival I jumped and slid head first down the steep grassy embankment and into the dirty, flooded street. I was washed clean.

Sadly the design was so effective that it sold-out within a couple of shows and I had to do it all over again. But, the next round was adapted to a standard jewel case.

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7.) What’s essential on a poster or flyer to grab a viewer’s attention in mere seconds? How does form and function come into play?

I’ve touched upong this a wee bit in an earlier question. People tend to have short attention spans and walk with their heads down…and/or simply don’t look at things. Because of this a design has really got to pop, have immediacy and definately needs to say something. It’s funny because people have told me things like, “That is probably your worst poster.” It’s rare for people to be so honest in this way, but I love it when they are so passionate about it (and I love it when they say probably because that means they’ve really put some thought into it and have had discussions with themselves about it in comparable reason with my past efforts and wasted time wrestling with it). But, for some reason that poster really must have spoken to them to have so much feel for it. Normally these are the posters that end up being published and placed in traveling exhibitions. It’s really funny to me. At the time of creation I’m not trying to piss on anybody nor try to make something groundbreaking or award-winning. I just feel like doing things the way I do them in that moment and I feel I make them work.

Form and function is an important application for design. Here is another thing I’ve already mentioned…I feel so many kids see something cool and just start cranking out these cool-lookin’ forms…hand-picking the way their things will look. There is a major lack of growth in most art-music these days…even outside of these areas…even just in someone’s persona. I’m not saying you can’t have influences, everybody’s got them and everything’s been done before and done better. I just long for things that speak of their own island. It’s like on “Jurassic Park”. You can’t go in and recreate the notion of copying dinosaurs for yourself. You can only get away with that for so long.

Anyway, I also spoke about designs grabbing attention by way of having human elements and a definate soul behind them. I’ve come to compare a poster to a pop song. Sure they’ve been done a thousand times before…but, you can tell the ones that have a true sense of personality and heart to them. There is so much dead-beat fluff out there that can’t even be compared to something that’s alive…something that knows the rules but takes them and reassembles them to their own architecture. It’s very evident in music especially. For instance two bands can play on separate late night talk shows within minutes of each other. Both write pop songs. One speaks freshness and purity, even looks sincere, despite being just a pop band with another pop song. The other feels like actors assembled to play a song somebody else penned for an instant “fat wallet”. It just feels too perfect and calculated…and lifeless. Not everybody cares about this or sees this. It is subjective to a certain degree, but there is a true difference.

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8.) In your opinion, are flyers and posters a low-brow form of art?

People have really started holding posters in higher regard the past five or more years. Poster making is hotter than ever and it really hit a certain peak a couple years ago. The work is spreading farther than just within its respected cities. The artists are becoming just as popular as their art.A poster these days is living beyond it’s short life on the street, on a corkboard or at the venue. People are excited about it. Exhibitions, magazines, websites, books and design annuals celebrate the scene. Collectors and fans of art and music are snatching them up. True, the art of the poster has been around for a long time (and I’ll just reflect on it from my vantage point at the moment). But, I feel that it’s now (band posters in particular) really being taking seriously in the art world. At one time (and in some cases and by some people, still are) posters and flyers were being seen as litter and visual clutter.

We can’t help but owe a lot of the commotion to modern pioneers like Art Chantry. He basically single-handily changed the way of the poster back in the ‘70s and ‘80s with experiments, lavish production methods and design aesthetics. He is considered a master artist to the trade and even in the arts in general. Shoot, seeing him lecture in college six years ago helped me decide to take that leap onto the starving artist limb-limbo, doing my own thing as opposed to working for another man. I spoke briefly to him after that lecture and told about my interest in independent music design. He was honest and said, “Expect to starve…several times over.” And I have. I still need to tell him that…and tell him thank you.

Though, many poster artists these days no longer have to starve. It’s being taken so seriously and the quality of art is held so high that some can do it for full-time income…and do it rather successfully. A lot of them have full-fledged design studios and cranking out more than just posters. And there are a lot of guys like me with day jobs and coming home to moonlight out of basements and back bedrooms. For myself, I kind of hit the scene at the right time when it was really starting to explode..even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, other than just “doing”. I feel it definately takes a certain mindset and you’ve got to make some sacrifices. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but with poster art, anyone can do it…it’s easy to do and with limited resources. And then you’ve got the excitement of people bringing back almost deceased production techniques like the letter press.

My only rant right now with poster art is that though the quality of work looks great, I feel there is a definate cohesive “look” and style to a lot of it right now. There are a few doing their own thing, but a lot of it is starting to look the same and almost becoming too easy and formulated for some. This is where I give my two cents of brain fart. What’s great about a poster is it’s actual short-lived life on the street. It makes all the more reason to try new things and really push the art form and most importantly gives reasoin to just be yourself. If it fails it will be gone or in the gutter within weeks and another will take it’s place.

-djg