Watchlist Magazine

Dan Stiles is something of a tour-de-force in music circles, having worked with some of the best and brightest over the last 15 years; from Nike to The Arctic Monkeys, to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Perhaps there is something about the US West Coast – living up in Oregon – that gives him his edge. It’s not just that his clients are cool, or that his work has featured in so many trendy magazines – although this is all true. His design talent deserves special mention as a confluence of cool and clever; more than just pretty. The good news is that at 38 years old, there is no evidence that Dan is running out of steam, putting shame to the idea [myth] that originality and energy are somehow exclusive to the very young. There is much to learn from Dan’s story, not least from his tenacity. He is a bona-fide role-model, and a creative hero from which we can all gain more than a little encouragement.

Tell us about your background and how you got started in design…

I was always the kid in class who could draw… I used to sit in my room learning to draw from comics. Later this was replaced with punk album covers and skateboard decks. I never took art seriously though, so when I went to college I studied Sociology. I thought maybe I could figure the world out by studying its residents. It didn’t work, but I’m now very good at making grand sweeping generalizations about large groups of people.

While I was at the University of Oregon I lived in this big crazy house with 30 other people where someone saw my graffiti on the walls and asked if I wanted to do concert posters for the campus promoter. I had concert flyers hung three deep on my bedroom walls in high school, but it had never dawned on me to do posters myself. Having moved to the Pacific Northwest to be part of the music scene (this was 1990, the heyday of the Seattle sound) I jumped at the chance. I was paid $20, a free ticket to the show, and all the beer I could drink. I was immediately hooked. I couldn’t believe that someone would actually pay me to draw. Actually sometimes I still can’t. This was the pre-internet stone age so I had no idea there were other people out there doing posters. The only color work I knew were the 60′s classics (I had managed to track down a copy of The Art of Rock). Eventually I saw some posters by Kozik, Coop and Kleinsmith and I figured out I had to start doing color posters to really be in the game, which required teaching myself to screenprint in the craft center on campus. After graduating college I worked at several screenprinting shops as well service bureaus doing pre-press and other technical work while still doing illustration at night. After a few years of this I realized that I needed a formal design education if I really wanted to be a graphic designer.

I went to the California College of Arts in San Francisco, where I worked my ass off for 3 years. My existing skills and technical background kept getting me hired by my professors to work in their studios, and eventually I took a full time position as a senior designer with Michael Cronan. This was far better than any sort of schooling. We sat side by side for several years and I learned the ins and outs of graphic design from a true master. After leaving Cronan Design I started my own studio in 2001.

Tell us about an innovation/idea/product/service you have come across that you admire/got you thinking.

Adobe Illustrator and the Wacom tablet have allowed me to design prints in the same way they are made. By that I mean I can work with colors and layers and overprints while drawing at the same time. This more like the printmaking process than drawing a black line and adding your colors later. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but screenprinting allows for a color layering approach which is sometimes hard to take advantage of when you are simply coloring in a piece of line art. Several years ago I deliberately dropped the black line altogether. Now I work solely with color, form, and overprints, no line work at all.

Which lessons from your early years have stuck with you?

Have fun with your designs. If you aren’t having fun it shows in the final piece. I’ve often had greater success with goofy little things that I’ve whipped out in 5 minutes than stuff I labored over for days.  A recent example would be when I did the Bumbershoot Music Festival campaign we worked for months on the identity and collateral and such. Towards the end we needed some tiny spot illustrations to take up space here and there. I drew up this little squirrel in about 5 minutes that went on to sell something like 10,000 pieces of merchandise. It was fun and people gravitated to that. Not to say that having fun always means fast. But even if you are working something for a while, remember to keep playing.

Work hard. No matter what you are doing. Nothing comes easy. We live in the age of entitlement. I used to have employees for a couple of years, but I hated being a boss. I never got to design anything, I had to always find new work to feed the machine, and I had these fresh out of school employees who felt like it was their right to get paid 50 grand a year, get medical insurance and a cell phone and a laptop, whether they showed up or did anything at all. By comparison my first job after college was working for a dirty old screen-printer who lived in his shop, never took a shower, and had porn stashed all over the place. You would pull down a bucket of ink and a Blueboy magazine would come with it. I got paid minimum wage, something like $4 an hour, which was half of what I had been making in high school. But I kept the job long enough to build enough skills to get a better job. Everyone I know who is successful either worked hard to get there, or they come from family money. If you have time to watch TV every night, then you don’t have the right to bitch about your place in life, because you aren’t working hard enough to change it.

What were you like as a student, and how have you moved on?

I was relentless. Having already gone to college once I had done the party thing. When I got to design school I was borrowing $20,000 a year to get a top notch education. It was an all or nothing bet. If I didn’t succeed I would have been financially ruined. I worked one if not two jobs at a time, took freelance work, and maintained an “A” average. I was putting in 120 hours a week. When I worked for Cronan I stayed late every night, often until 2 or 3am to get the job done. When I started my own studio I worked 7 days a week, all day and all night. I remember when I started taking Saturdays off, it was a big deal for me. Even now, I still work almost every night. But I have other things going on as well. I have two daughters that I try and spend a bunch of time with everyday, I have a wife who I like to hang out with, an old house that I’m restoring, and I try and get to the gym 3 days a week. My days are as full as they always were but only 50 or 60 hours are going to design, the rest is going to “having a life” if you can call it that.

Talk us through your creative process… How much research goes into your music designs, and how much of your work is the product of unplanned exploration?

I have two approaches. One requires sitting down with a crummy little sketch of a concept and executing it. Sometimes the final looks like the sketch, other times the sketch is just a launching point. The other approach is sitting down and playing around. Sometimes the result is a finished piece, sometimes it’s just a thing that I file away and maybe do something with later, sometimes it’s just an educational experience. A lot of the pattern based stuff I do is the result of experiments. The more conceptual illustrations are the result of a solid idea.

What do you think sets apart a good designer from a great one?

It’s a tired adage, but having your own voice is important. Doing work that looks like everyone else’s won’t get you anywhere. The other part is having good ideas. The best design is conceptually driven. If you have a great idea and a great style you can make great design. A great designer also makes a lot of design. If only one on five pieces is great, then make 100 pieces and you’ll have twenty great ones. A great designer takes chances. Try something new, release something that makes you a little uncomfortable. Things that are safe will never be great. If they fail, so what!? Make something else.

Most importantly, 99% of clients don’t want great design, they only want good design. Great design scares them, it’s too risky. They need something that’s proven and safe. If you want to do great you need an avenue of expression that is free of the typical client designer relationship. This will allow you to take an idea as far as it can go without the client reeling it back in. Once you’ve done that enough times hopefully you’ll start getting clients that show up and pay you to “do your thing”. The Pushpin Graphic is an excellent example of this.

Tell us about some of the mistakes you have made.

I have very few regrets. Most of my failures have led to learning something very important so I wouldn’t go back and change them if I could. But if I had started lifting weights when I was 17 I would look like Henry Rollins by now.

What contribution have other people played in your success?

Without having met Michael Cronan and getting pulled up into the A leagues I would most likely still be laboring in some agency somewhere. There are also a great many designers whom I have never met that have contributed to my development. I consider myself a design-illustrator, I don’t see a rigid barrier between the disciplines as many do now. Most of the great design-illustrators are from other eras, somewhere between the 20′s and the 70′s. All of that work, and the mentality the drove it is a great inspiration to me. Pretty much every punk or alternative band between 1979 and 1993 are huge inspirations as well. Not only the art and the music, but the DIY ethic that drove it all. All my poster artist friends that I’ve met over the years at the Flatstock poster convention do what they can to help one another out as well. They are really the greatest group of people I’ve ever met. I suspect one of them might have even brought me to the attention of Watchlist.

What creative tools have you found most helpful recently?

I’m still using a 8 year old wacom tablet with a crack in it and a mac. Nothing fancy at all. I bought a new Wacom and returned it, it felt wrong. The most helpful tool I’ve found in the last 15 years has been the internet. It allows me to work from a home studio with clients all over the world. I can sell posters directly to anyone who wants one. People can see my work where ever they might live. Blogs can pick me up without my even knowing it. My entire way of life would not exist without the internet.

Another thing I did was I stopped entering design competitions a few years back and spent that money on better printing equipment. Producing good work has done far more for my career than the pay to play world of design annuals. This last year was the first time in a while that I entered again, at the urging of my friends over at Modern Dog in Seattle. I got in a few of the annuals, we’ll see if I get anything from it. A slap on the back from some other designers doesn’t mean much, I want paying clients or it’s not worth the money and effort.

Has living in Portland helped your creative work?

Moving from San Francisco to Portland allowed me to dedicate more focus to my own work and less to working with traditional corporate design clients. San Francisco is so crammed full of people already doing creative work, and the cost of living is so high that it’s really difficult to get anything going of your own. Moving to Portland allowed me to buy a house 5 times the size of my old apartment so I could set up an office and a studio (my wife has her own office and studio here as well). Integrating myself into the art scene here was a lot easier as well. A lot of people move to Portland from bigger cities to execute their dreams, like opening a boutique or starting a restaurant. As a result we have way too many graphic designers and restaurants, but since my clients are from all over the country the competition doesn’t matter much to me, and I get to eat good food.

If you were to guest edit Watchlist, which 3 people would you profile and why?

Design thinking is too often overlooked. We focus instead on design porn. All these cool sexy images. But really, creative problem solving is the name of the game. I’m deeply inspired by people who set out to solve real problems, like Joshua Silver, who made a pair of cheap eyeglasses that can have the prescription adjusted on the fly by small dials on the side. The impact something like that will have on the third world is tremendous. It makes what I do look superfluous by comparison. In the fields of art and design so many enormous talents get so much press already. Does anyone need to read more about Paul Rand, the Eames’, Brian Eno or Jim Flora? I suppose if given the chance I might profile some artists that may be a little lower on the radar.

Siggi Eggertson – I’ve been working at pattern based illustration for a few years now. Then I discovered his work and he does the pattern thing so well. I thought I was on to something unique, but no, Siggi totally kicks ass at it. Not that he needs more press than he’s already getting, but he’s great. The Little Friends of Printmaking – Profiling them would just be an excuse to pick their brains about their process. Their work is awesome and their prints are exquisite. I heard a rumor they are moving to Portland, maybe they’ll open a restaurant.

Luke Drozd – His artwork makes children cry. Sadly he was crushed by a strut, but on the upside my collection of his poofy tshirts is now worth a fortune. I would profile him and the entire piece would be a 17 page drunken rant about arms control. Luke rules.

Where do you like to visit online for inspiration and to keep your work sharp?

I do my best to draw inspiration from obscure sources. I love sites like grainedit.com and ffffound.com, but the way I see it is 100 million other designers are looking at that exact same stuff at the same moment you are. It’s better to go find some odd collection of vintage tea cozies or whatever.

Tell us something everyone should know, but probably doesn’t.

The world doesn’t owe you anything. If you want it, you have to go get it. But I think I already covered that in my old man rant about “the kids these days.”

Have you had any great confrontation as a designer – perhaps a nemesis?

Sorry, I don’t have any good design dirt for you. A long time ago I was caught in a room while Neville Brody and David Carson went at it over some ridiculous designer bullshit. Brody wanted to save the world with typography or something and Carson was drunk and just wanted to get laid. That clash of the super egos impressed upon me that most superstar designers are arrogant pricks, and most of what they care about is pointless in the grand scheme of things. That said, I did piss off Art Chantry a few weeks ago, we were on a panel together and had a disagreement and now he thinks I’m a total dick. Which sucks, because I love his work. But I wouldn’t say I’ve had any great confrontations or made an arch-nemesis over the course of my career. I’m sort of a live and let live person. Unless someone comes at me directly I don’t really have time for drama, and people who take graphic design too seriously I try and avoid. It’s just ink on paper, get over yourself.

See more at: danstiles.com & gigposters.com