Frank Chimero interview

2. When and how did you come to be interested in graphic design?
I’ll skip all the stuff everyone says about how they’ve always drawn and wanted a creative career where they could support themselves. I think I got in to this just like a lot of other designers my age: in high school, I had friends in bands and they needed stuff. Posters, album designs, t-shirts, stickers. After talking to folks, it’s interesting how many designers get their interest and start in design out of a love for music. Anyway, that need and love transitioned into making designs, since I don’t really have any musical talent of my own. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but that was the fun of it.

3. Did you attend a traditional design school? Where, or why not?
I thought design was something I needed to get serious about because I enjoyed it so much. I went to school for it at Missouri State University, where I now teach. I studied illustration and design. I was fortunate enough to have a bit of experience and focus from the get-go, so a lot of my efforts in school weren’t about how to do things (although there was a healthy dose of that), but mostly why to do certain things. Thankfully, the school is fantastic and was well equipped to teach me those things. The funny thing about the school is that it’s nestled in the corner of Missouri, but you walk in to class and you’re being taught by award-winning designers and illustrators from eastern European countries like Bosnia, Russia, and Poland.

4. What was your first design job?
I’m still on it. When I graduated from school, people were telling me I had tons of options of where I could go and what I could do. It scared me to death. Lots of options are typically presented as a good thing, but I find it paralyzing. I didn’t want to make a decision about where to move or where to work. It might have been the wrong one.

So, I decided to stick around in Missouri for a summer and freelance. It’d buy some time for me to make up my mind. Freelancing grew, the clients got further away and work starting paying more than the bills. I just decided to ride out the wave.

I’m still on that same wave, it seems. Each year I survive on my own I consider to be a small miracle.

I think that I feel like I’m only doing the work that’s worth doing. That’s what makes me so happy at the end of the day. But I still have issues turning down projects. My goal for this year is to say no more frequently and yes more strategically. I have a tendency to overbook myself.

One of the biggest things I miss out on by working alone is design community and feedback. One of the best decisions I’ve made is to move in to a shared office space with a couple of friends who run their own creative businesses (photography and videography). It’s valuable to know that even though I’m by myself in this “business venture,” I’m not by myself in this creative journey. I love getting their feedback, and I’m lucky enough to have a tight network of design and illustrator friends online that I tap for kinship and insight.

But still, it’s nice having real people in the room. It’s not the same playing hookie on a week day by yourself.

But Fletcher was different. His work is about curiosity and happiness, wit and innocence. It’s amazing. Through his work, I got a slight glimpse of what I wanted to do with this design thingie, even though I don’t think I fully understood it at the time. I wanted to be curious and let as many things and experiences in me as I could. Then, let them become a vital part of me and share the results of that with everyone else. I knew that’d make me happy, and on a hunch, I hoped (and still hope) it makes other people happy.

No one looked more alive on the page than Fletcher, and I think I’m shooting for that myself. I’m no where close yet, but I still have to try. There are other influences (Rand, Bass, Lustig, Flora, etc.), but they’re stylistic influences. Fletcher for me is aesthetics and content.

For contemporaries, there’s a whole slew of them, many of which I’m fortunate enough to consider friends. A quick role-call would include Don Clark at Invisible Creature (who I consider my illustrative comrade), Kate Bingaman-Burt, Ben Barry, Jez Burrows, Meg Hunt, Olimpia Zagnoli, and the boys at BBDK.

Actually, all of my work days look like this: teach in the mornings (I start at 8am), each lunch while responding to emails, then spend the afternoon on “real work.” I’ve been trying to disconnect a little bit more lately to give myself large blocks of uninterrupted time, and that’s proven valuable, so I may go dark for a few hours during the day to get things done.

1. So, the first thing is to just choose a state. I’m working with Florida. I always like to take the outline and just put them 6 or 8 up on a page for sketching. I print out 5 or 6 sheets. No big deal if the sketch isn’t good, I can just move on to the next outline. If I run out of paper, I can print more. It’s a nice workflow. Mistakes don’t burn as much.

I typically don’t come in to the process with a predetermined idea. I like to “unearth” the idea during the process. The longer I work on this project, the more I realize that this project isn’t about form or style, like I initially thought. It’s about recognizing potential and running with it. I love that.

Sometimes the process of coming up with the idea is quick. (Florida happened in about 30 minutes of sketching.) Sometimes it’s not. (Texas took 3 weeks.) My first step is just “feeling” the shape. I draw lines to make implied paths. What sorts of shapes compose this main shape? How does the shape flow? What wants to be inside of it?

2. Now the hard part. What’s it look like? I typically try multiple ideas. To get my mind going, I look at the shape upside down. Through the paper so it’s flipped. At an angle. Whatever I can do to have me look at this as a shape, and not as Florida. I look kind of dumb while I do this. I’ve learned that I should do it when I’m by myself.

Here, I’m trying out a few ideas. Something long and curling? An alligator? A fish? A manatee? Nah. That manatee doesn’t look like one. It’s too skinny. Not cowish enough. Doesn’t work well with the shape. The alligator is nice, but too predictable? His legs don’t integrate in very nicely into the shape. A train? Oh. Wow. That’s nice. Maybe we can use the smoke to trail off to the left to fill that difficult space. Ok. Bingo!

3. So, the idea is intact in sketch form. Lots of clarity, but not so much I can’t fudge things a bit while working on it. So, I start with the basic silhouette of the state.

4. Next, I block in the basic shapes inside of the general silhouette. Nothing fancy to look at here. Just your general “underdrawing.” I’m using radical colors so I can focus on the shapes themselves.

5. Once I’m pretty happy with the shapes, I start to figure out a palette. Various shades of different colors, etc. Just to get a feeling for what the overall character of the illustration will be.

6. Ok, so I decided to completely change the color scheme here. I wanted a nice warm/cool contrast, and besides, you can’t put an orange on the train if the whole train is orange. I’m starting to add the little details in as well. The lines, the dots, the seams, etc. This is my favorite part of the process. These are the “spice” to what I’m cooking: they’re the little pieces that take the idea and make it seem special.

7. More refinement. The illustration is nearing completion. The base of the illustration itself is finished, so it’s time for even further polish work. I enjoy flat shapes, but I think on their lonesome, they look dull on the page. So, I focus on two things. Edge and texture.

8. Here we have the vector drawing with only the flat shapes. Looks computerish, right? I don’t like that. The idea didn’t come from a computer. We need to get some hands in to this. So, I’m going to pull a bit of texture into the illustration, and then muck up the edges so they aren’t so precise.

9. This is what that same area looks like after I’m done texturing and messing with the edges. The textures come from scans of different surfaces, photocopies and paper I’ve collected. The edges get distorted by tracing over them with a real marker and paper. (I use a fine-tipped Sharpie on cheap copy paper, so it bleeds a little bit.) I then take the lines that I’ve drawn, scan them, and live trace them in Illustrator. The end result is what you see here.

10. And finito! This is what the final piece looks like once all of the polish work is finished:

Also, my students do so much to inspire. They work. Hard. Work ethic is contagious for me, so it’s great to be around 40 hard-working individuals every week. Also, it’s such a thrill to see them get excited and figure things out. It reminds me of when that was happening for me while I was in school, and gets me excited to think that those “Aha” moments don’t stop after you finish school.

The style is stripped back and it does one thing, so it becomes crucial to figure out what that one thing needs to be. Also, if I’m combining two things that used to be separate in to a new hybrid to bring in new meaning, it helps to refer to common ground and the things with which we’re familiar. That way, everyone can plainly understand to what I’m referring.

The best common ground I’ve been able to find thus far are everyday objects. There’s this great quote from Robert Rauschenberg where he says he feels sorry for people who think the every day objects in our lives our ugly, because those objects surround us. The whole situation must make them miserable. I find objects like Coke bottles, pencils and coffee cups really appealing because people understand them. They have intimate experiences with them, and hopefully it makes my work more intimate as well. It’s like my work and all of us exist in the same world. No need to construct new ones: this one is plenty beautiful and good.

13. You seem to be a master of the “visual wink,” as you put it. It’s that place where delight and inform meet, and the aspect that makes design work memorable and unique. Plus it’s easy to be too heavy-handed and overshoot. Can you talk about how you get to that place?
Master? I’m not sure I would say that. But I think that the delight someone gets from looking at the work is a reflection of the delight the creator had while making it. Those winks come from me trying to be light-hearted about my work and what I’m trying to say. If I want the work to be playful, I have to play while I’m making it. It is very easy to be heavy-handed with this sort of stuff, but I think the judgment call comes from intuition and experience. It’s like knowing the best way to tell a joke, and then deciding if you can even tell it based on the company that you’re keeping that moment. You can’t really dictate those sorts of rules to paper, you just have to listen to your gut.

I think I can safely say it’s been the best year of my life thus far. All of these things are outstanding, and from 2008.

1. Finishing my first state, California. It was the first time I totally felt like I “owned” my work, and it taught me how to be visually genuine.

3. Working on the Jailbirds video for Good Magazine. I don’t know why, but the project really resonated with me. Not necessarily because of the content, but rather realizing the potential of adding narrative to my work.