erik jonsson is a very talented designer living in brooklyn, ny right now. another one of the young guns that i like to feature here at live from bklyn. but enough yakkin’ from me, below is a great interview that erik was kind enough to give. very thoughtful and intelligent answers.
dc: hyper island and more specifically creatives unlimited looks pretty awesome. elaborate on those two things for us.
ej: hyper island, the school that i went to, has a tradition since 13 years that requires every class to collectively produce a website marketing themselves prior to getting internships. its quite a spectacle as it usually involves 50-60 people just a few months into the school program, which creates a strange blend of over and under achievers, a huge sense of must-do’s and do-rights, and above all the urge to make a better site than the previous class.
i had the role as art director but found myself being more the creative director of the whole process. so rather than doing particular design decisions other than brief sketches and guidelines i held motivational speeches and tried to keep a creative grip on the whole production. it involved a ton of papervision production in flash, printed posters, flyers etc. and a 3-part viral documentary.
so to conclude the site, creatives unlimited, was made during a 2 month cycle and ended with a launch party in london. great experience for most of us. also worth mentioning about this project is that when we started to concept the interactive website 3D globes and planets had not yet exploded onto the scene. but when we launched 3-4 months after the ideation process these sites where already everywhere.
dc: that watercolor style that you have (as evidenced in “brasil cine”) is nice. is that digital or do you use traditional media to achieve that?
ej: it’s a style i’ve developed and elaborated with over a few years highly inspired by artists like scott hansen, fatone, barral fabien & shepard fairey. blending digital and analog medias i usually start with gathering assets like watercolor splashes, spraypaint, photography fitting for making stencils etc. draw and scan paint on paper.put into photoshop the most important factor of this is matching blend modes and multiplying brushes. the whole way of doing this, applying hundreds of layers, blending and color filtering to get a vintage and grunge feel to it probably consumes more time that is actually warranted but i love the general look of it.
dc: well-paying job / highly creative work. a lot of designers believe that generally you must choose one or the other, that there are exceptions, but that’s pretty much the rule. do you agree or disagree? give us the rationale for your position.
ej: depending on your personal definition of highly creative work, i’d say combining both is possible but usually comes with a ton of struggle attached. as a freelancer you probably see yourself doing creative work very much attuned to your personal ambitions and ideas, concepts and art is usually free of the burdens demanding commissioners or directors. but at the same time its very hard to challenge yourself in thinking and developing which is how our brain works. we are curious by nature but subconsciously we also strive for security and self affirmation which in my opinion often kills personal progression.
to exemplify my friend working at R/GA is in a team involved with nike. This puts him in long project cycles, often with more idea work and behind the scenes sketching than whats actually publicly seen. so he might not have as great an output of actual work in terms of amount of graphical manifestations in his portfolio as someone in a more unrestrained and free position of work has. But the rewards of being involved in a highly developed conceptual project and cutting edge technical platform a nike project provides, probably beats that of pushing out a constant stream jpgs as a freelancer.
i guess the best way of combining the two, if you have the skills, is to find a reasonably small studio with a high profile which brings both good money and great personal responsibility and involvement. not an easy task and if you don’t have a great education backing you, it might be close to impossible to get a good foothold. thus requiring a huge amount of talent and unique profiling work up in your portfolio.
but to be rational here in all this rambling, i’d say striving to combine high pay with highly creational work is what drives us to do what we do. we move between desks and we try to better ourselves to make a larger imprint on those around us graphically.
dc: what the devil is up with my header going all whacky but only in firefox on a mac and only when viewing a single post as opposed to the mainpage? i know i used a table there and that’s bad web design anymore, but it was laziness. still shouldn’t go all funny like that. it’s really starting to drive me crazy.
ej: cross browsing problem solving is the modern plague. i try not to get close =)
dc: for a few minutes i thought you were younger than me and that really made me angry because your portfolio is rather advanced and i couldn’t stand the thought of being upstaged (i’m looking at you, sam gerdt). turns out we’re the exact same age. notwithstanding, your portfolio is still very robust. What is the recipe for that kind of proliferation of quality design?
ej: i could never look at my own work and say that i really like it or feel that it’s sufficient. i think that is part of it maybe. i struggle a lot with quality and scrap a ton of my work. a result of a lot of working from home without good, spontaneous external input.
it’s a damage i’ve done to myself and I have a hard time laying it off. when i started drawing on computers in 95 there was no internet like we know it now. you could not find millions of 300dpi photos 3 clicks away and all fonts you could get your hands on sucked. so the progression to where i am today is way longer than those coming into the scene after 2000 or even a couple of years ago. so i myself look upon those many years younger than me and yet years ahead in quality =). and i can’t really do anything about it than force myself to work harder and be even more wary of what i publish.
dc: ok, so i am gonna give you one question that was the same as marco’s; what’s one lesson that you’ve had to learn the hard way as a designer? how would you do it differently the next time?
ej: don’t hesitate to follow trends and embrace criticism and input. some are for sure but most of us are not islands. if i could start over i would definitely look up on graphic design more openly than i did the first time over.
dc: being creative and creating; what steps do you take to make sure that you are actually producing instead of just thinking up pie-in-sky ideas all day?
ej: i usually take time out away from the computer to do the more conceptual parts of my work. when i’m commuting, standing in line, jogging or whatever i try to think about ways around my problems, new scopes or ideas which i later can imprint on paper or on the screen. something i have come to learn over the years is that it’s close to impossible to start with a white canvas in photoshop and expect good ideas to come instantly. you need inspiration and time away from the screen to think about stuff as much as you need inspiration from other sources. and more practically, i’m usually overproducing stuff, trying to manifest all ideas i get at least as a rough sketch. this usually leaves me with a lot of produced material. not always fit for public eyes but still leaves me generally satisfied. design is almost as good an outlet for ideas as music so i try to make good use of it =)
dc: when you’re not designing, what are you doing?
ej: tough question. i’ve found myself doing less and less things apart from photoshop these days. i read a lot of books from time to time. and especially literature that keeps me on the edge and brings more great visions to what i work with. stuff like gibson’s cyberpunk novels usually. but also a lot of late 1800 early 1900 authors like joseph conrad and rudyard kipling. and of course living in NYC in general and brooklyn in particular rarely leaves you without some place to go and something to see =).
dc: what is your favorite north american bird?
ej: i think the mallard. modest and humble bird =)
dc: if you could get in the face of every designer world wide and just yell at the top of your lungs one thing that they really, really needed to remember, what would that one thing be?
ej: i think a quote from someone in fFutura back in the early 2000 would fit nicely.
“stop milking styles, you are killing it” or perhaps ian anderson from TDR who spat out “destroy minimalism” at some point.