Peter Buchanan-Smith

Part of: Insights 2010 Design Lecture Series

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Location: Walker Cinema
Date: March 16, 2010
When: 7:00 PM
Genre: Architecture / Design
Type: Lecture
Duration: 1 hr 17 min 59 sec
People: Peter Buchanan-Smith

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Peter Buchanan-Smith is a New York–based designer, author, and entrepreneur whose career has included designing book jackets for Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; art direction of the New York Times Op-Ed page; creative direction for Paper magazine; and work for fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, musical legends David Byrne, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and the band Wilco. He is the author of several books, including The Wilco Book, and he has collaborated on many others, including Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style with illustrator Maira Kalman, and Muhammad Ali by Magnum Photographers. His first tome, Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things—which originated as a thesis project at the School of Visual Arts, where he also teaches—explores the fascinating lives of ordinary people and commonplace objects. This connection between people and objects is also at the heart of Buchanan-Smith’s latest venture, Best Made Co., a purveyor of bespoke axes that offers not only a finely crafted tool but an entrée into the symbolic world conjured by the object and summoned by its owner (adventure, hard work, balance, and so on).

0 sec: Andrew Blauvelt: Tonight, I'm pleased to introduce this evening's speaker, Peter Buchanan Smith.
4 sec: Peter is a Canadian born, but New York based designer, author, educator, and entrepreneur whose varied career has included designing book jackets for Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, art direction of the New York Times' Op-Ed page, and Creative Direction, a paper magazine from 2005 to 2008.
21 sec: He is the author of "SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things" which originated as a thesis project at the School of Visual Arts, where he also teaches, and is also editor of The Wilco Book, which provides an engaging portrait of the band's creative process.
37 sec: He has also designed Identity's packaging, collateral material for the fashion and music worlds, including fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, rock luminaries Brian Eno, David Burn, and legendary American composer Phillip Glass.
50 sec: Peter's latest venture, Best Made Company, purveyor of custom design and hand made axes, offers not only a finely crafted tool, but also an entre into the symbolic world conjured by this particular object.
1 min 3 sec: A past board member of the AIJ New York chapter, his work has been honored by ID Magazine, the AIGA, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which awarded him a Grammy for his design of Wilco's album "A Ghost is Born." Please help me welcome Peter Buchanan Smith.
1 min 19 sec: [applause] Peter Buchanan-Smith: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be here tonight, and thanks to Andrew and Lisa and the AIGA for inviting me, and flying me out here, and putting me up in such a nice hotel.
1 min 43 sec: I'm just going to start by putting things... Andrew touched on a lot of this, but I just want to put things in context first, before I start launching into the eye candy.
1 min 58 sec: I was born on a small farm in Canada about an hour west of Toronto, 15 hours east of Minneapolis. I lived in Canada until my mid-twenties, when I moved to New York City to work in publishing.
2 min 10 sec: I've lived in New York for the past 14 years. My design career started out as a junior production assistant at book publisher Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I left FSG to join Steve Heller's first class in the Masters of Design program at the School of Visual Arts, where I was lucky enough to have Maira Kalman as my thesis advisor on a project called SPECK, which eventually became a book that celebrated the uncommon beauty of common things.
2 min 40 sec: After SVA, I became the art director of the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, where I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to have been there to cover the 2000 Bush/Gore election and September 11th. Not long after September 11th, I was burning out of a very fast paced deadline, editor, and news driven job, and decided to take matters into my own hands.
3 min 4 sec: So, with a friend, I formed a book publishing and packaging company. Our first order of business was to publish a book about our favorite band, Wilco. The Wilco Book, as it was eventually titled, was a visual analog of the band's music containing work by photographer Michael Schmelling, artist Fred Thomaselli, and writers Henry Miller and Rick Moody.
3 min 27 sec: The Wilco Book was released in 2004, and it was met with great critical acclaim, and it quickly sold out. But, we had just spent the better part of two years slaving away on a project that had dwindling financial returns. So, my partner continued on in a different direction, and I left to become the design director of Paper Magazine. I was brought onto Paper to replace the previous art director who'd been there for about 15 years, which is really a golden opportunity. It was an opportunity for big change, and I was able to transform this venerable New York beacon of style and fashion into quite a substantial...
4 min 13 sec: Made quite substantial changes. The next four years were some of the most thrilling design years of my life. I had a chance to collaborate with some of the best photographers and stylists in the country, and shoot some of the biggest entertainment and style icons, like Penelope Cruz, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chloe Sevingy, and Chan Marshall, and Rhianna, among others.
4 min 33 sec: Halfway through my tenure paper, I started taking on smaller design projects on the side. I was eventually hired to be the design director for Isaac Mizrahi, and with that, my design business was fast eclipsing my job at Paper, and it was time to head out, once again, on my own.
4 min 49 sec: I spent my next five years designing a vast array of products for Isaac, from shoeboxes, to identities, to labels, to magazines, to look books. I'll never forget the very first project I designed for Isaac was a pooper scooper for his Target line.
5 min 7 sec: All the while, my small studio picked up a host of new clients: Phillip Glass, Maira Kalman, Brian Eno, and David Byrne among others. Then, in 2008, the economy burst, and my business had to change. So, I let go of my staff, and moved everything from my midtown Manhattan office out to New Jersey, where I was living at the time. The saddest part, of course, was just letting go of people that worked for me.
5 min 29 sec: But it was nice to come home, to regain those two hours of my life each day that were previously spent in a commute, and to spend time with my dog, nature, and some hands on projects.
5 min 40 sec: I soon learned the notion of coming home can be a complicated one. I need a drink before I get to this next part.
5 min 49 sec: In early 2009, my wife and I decided to separate, and I got a divorce. And so, the last year of my life... Sorry. And so, last year I had to sell my house, the house I was planning on living in for a very long time. I had to divide five years of marital possessions in a matter of weeks. All the wedding gifts, the furniture, the artwork, the photographs, the books, the linens, the music, and so on.
6 min 16 sec: I moved everything I could into a small 500 square foot apartment in downtown Manhattan, and for a few months, before the sale of our house, I would commute out to New Jersey to work and to sift through the remainder of life to be loaded into my Subaru Forester, destined to any number of repositories: My new apartment, friends places, Salvation Army, a storage locker, the local dump.
6 min 41 sec: Three days before our house closed, we hired 1-800-GOT-JUNK to dispose and distribute the hoarded matter we couldn't possibly contemplate. Stacks of old magazines, bags of clothes we knew we'd never wear again, random stray bits of furniture, gifts that were always meant to be re-gifted, but never found the unlucky takers, dusty sporting goods, and a laundry list of that disappeared in a little under three hours in the swift and merciless hands of the junk removers.
7 min 17 sec: All in all, they filled up two truckloads. Of what, I can't really imagine now. For the past ten years, I also hoarded all of my pocket change. As 1-800-GOT-JUNK were finishing up, I took the bags of coins to the bank, deposited them in successive fistfuls into the machine, and in the end, withdrew almost the exact sum of $1,000, all of which went to pay the guys who had just liquidated the material remains of my life.
7 min 44 sec: I spent the better part of last year dividing, discarding, pondering, loving, hating, hauling, lifting, boxing, selling, and moving objects. Not only my personal possessions, but for the first time I was manufacturing objects, and shipping them all over the world.
8 min: Sifting through the effects of my personal life, I could stumble on objects that would, upon very first glance, bring tremendous sorrow and grief, say a photograph or a love letter.
8 min 11 sec: And at the same time as being called upon by our new and excited customers to box up these sharp and colorful new instruments. Tools, that as it turned out, could evoke an amazing sensation of hope and promise, both for me and my customers.
8 min 27 sec: It was also last year that I finally realized that for a very long time, maybe since I was a kid, I'd always needed something tangible to hold onto, something tangible to create, something tangible to share. So, in the thick of last year, I started a company called Best Made with my oldest and best friend, Graham Cameron, and our first product was an axe.
8 min 50 sec: My plan was never to get divorced, nor was it to start selling axes. For the past ten years, I'd been a graphic designer working in pretty traditional and established context, but that was all starting to change. My desire to make a simple and quality driven product, my desire to build a small and inspiring place to make and shape those products, and ultimately, my desire to build a world in which to share those products, the inspiration and the culture had completely registered in my head.
9 min 23 sec: That's what I want to talk to you guys about tonight. How, through products, a workshop, and the worlds of my clients and my friends, and ultimately my own, I have been able to embark and sustain the most fulfilling and demanding chapter of my life.
9 min 42 sec: So, I'm going to start off... So I'm going to start off with the objects. This is my thesis project from the masters program SPECK. It was a book that involved a lot of collaborators and contributors and I sort of pulled them all together and creative directed it and curated it.
10 min 10 sec: The cover was inspired by a story that a friend of mine told me about a German artist who locked himself in a room in a gallery with a big box of BIC pens, and just over the course of a month or so covered the entire walls, just basically repainted the walls with BIC pens. And this is the title page of the book.
10 min 37 sec: The egg, as you'll see tonight, is a reoccurring motif in my work. And it was something that one of my instructors at School of Visual Art, Paola Antonelli, who's the curator of the design department at the Museum of Modern Art who had talked to us about the egg. And how the egg is sort of really the perfect design object. And I really believe that.
11 min 1 sec: It's quite an inspiring object itself. You think of how fragile an egg can be, how durable it can be, both at the same time.
11 min 12 sec: You think about the shape of it. I think about the uses of it, what can come out of an egg if it's incubated, and what can come out of an egg when it's cracked and put in a pan and then put on your plate.
11 min 30 sec: This is a piece that I commissioned a photographer to do, which was to take... Well, back up a bit. Whenever I went to museums, I'd always been interested not only in just the painting that was before me. And a lot of these paintings, especially in New York, I had seen, I had gotten used to seeing in studying art history and looking in enough books.
11 min 50 sec: So one of the first things that I would do is run up to the side of the painting and look down, especially a painting that didn't have any frame around it, and just start studying the edge where the canvas was stapled or the edge where the canvas overlapped, the stretcher.
12 min 6 sec: And noticing how great that part of the painting was, to see the finger prints and the part that was sort of more unconsciously decorated or covered with paint. And I decided to take that one step further and commission this photographer to photograph the backs of famous paintings. And this is, as you can see, Franz Kline.
12 min 31 sec: I also stumbled on this amazing body of work by an artist, Stacy Green, who photographed women's lipsticks completely untouched. She took these straight from women's purses, like friends and things, photographed them and blew them up into a big scale. And I thought they were just really beautiful objects and really say, having shown these to enough people, women are always telling me about how it's true. Like, it really says a lot about the character of a woman and how she shapes her lipstick. This is obviously a very OCD person.
13 min 15 sec: [laughter] And this is one of my favorite pieces in SPECK. Really I think this could be a whole book on its own. I sent out an email and it is sort of a book on its own. It's called...
13 min 29 sec: The middle of the book, there's about 40 pages called the Repository and it's all sort of black. It looks like this. And it's basically just profiles of people's collections. And I sent out an email to friends and colleagues saying, if you know of anyone who collects anything, preferably the weirder and the stranger, let me know.
13 min 48 sec: So I got an email from someone who said he knew of this guy in Philadelphia, a retired barber who had an amazing collection of earth, air and water. So I went to Philadelphia and I met with Eddie Simon, the barber, and he told me a story and it's a really fascinating one. He was a guy who had a one man operated barbershop near one of the universities in Philadelphia. And a friend came in one day it was just a bottle of sand.
14 min 26 sec: So he put it up on his shelf and then a professor or a student or someone who was going abroad saw this. And then when they were abroad, they came back with another specimen from wherever it was. And this collection ended up growing into hundreds and hundreds of things of earth, air and water. And the saddest part is that Eddie Simon, the barber, never really left the state of Pennsylvania. He didn't have that much money. And when I saw him, he was pretty much on his last legs.
14 min 57 sec: And he said, "You know, Peter, the one thing... My dream in life," and he's standing there with this huge rack of all these samples. He's like, "You know, I would do anything to be able to go back to all these places where these things came from and empty them." I thought that was really beautiful. And the great thing about it is that he kept.... The way he was able to preserve these specimens. There's no format to it except that they were all small and that he eventually typed out all these labels that sort of had their own character. They were just done on a typewriter and they were filled with typos.
15 min 50 sec: So this is a piece that I did at the op-ed page. By the way, I'm Angus McWilton. We had to have pseudonyms when you're at the op-ed page if you were to contribute something.
16 min 4 sec: They took themselves very seriously, you see. If I was to contribute something, it couldn't be a staff member, so you had to make up a name. And Angus McWilton was one of the first bulls on my family farm that I remember. Very intimidating creature.
16 min 19 sec: [laughter] It didn't really intimidate my editors, unfortunately. So one of my favorite parts of the op-ed page was to do these things called op-arts, which were these stand alone pieces that weren't usually whatever was in this space was there to illustrate whatever story it was. But occasionally we would come up with an idea that would just be a stand alone thing.
16 min 43 sec: And so it was in the middle of a heat wave and I came up with this idea of just photographing a melting ice cube on wherever it is -- Midtown Manhattan. And this is one of my favorite pieces that I did for the op-ed page. Catherine Graham, I don't know if any of you remember her. But she was the very famous publisher of the Washington Post. And she died and the day after she died the Times op-ed page did their little tribute to her, sort of an obituary.
17 min 13 sec: And I couldn't for the life of my figure out how to do this. I didn't want to, you know... It's something so interesting -- we're working on a newspaper and here we are doing an obituary on a legendary newspaper figure. So I could have commissioned a portrait or we could have taken some stock photo of her something and done something to it. But I walked into my editor's office and I saw the Washington Post was sitting there on her desk.
17 min 41 sec: And so I just said, can I grab that? Just for inspiration so I can read a bit more about her, whatever. And then it just dawned onto me. I was looking at the mast head and it was all there. There was no photoshopping to be done, there was nothing. I just cut out a crown and took a picture of it. And there you have it.
18 min 3 sec: So as we were working on the Wilco book, they were simultaneously working on their album, A Ghost Is Born, recording it. And that was one of the really interesting facets of the book for us. It was a chance to not only follow this band and see them in the context of their studio. They have this very famous sort of bat cave place called the Loft in Chicago where it's filled with hundreds of instruments and things. But I'll get to that in a minute.
18 min 32 sec: But they were also working on a new album. So we got to spend time immersing ourselves in what that whole process is, and it's fascinating. They really took us under their wing and we spent a lot of time in the recording studio with them, watching them and talking to them.
18 min 53 sec: Especially Jeff Tweedy, who by the way has just amazing insights into making books. And he's an avid, avid reader. And it was always one of the rare opportunities when you get to work with someone on a visual book like this. And the subject himself was really just such a wealth of knowledge about books. It was kind of intimidating.
19 min 24 sec: And so, as they were recording "A Ghost Is Born", they asked us if we would be interested in designing the packaging for it. And, of course, we were like, "Yes. Definitely." But, it was the first CD I'd ever... I'd never been asked to design a CD before in my life.
19 min 45 sec: It was just excruciating. I mean, it was really unhealthy. Like, you know, because we were so like, you know, we were deeply embedded. We just sent them everything and anything we could possibly design, even if it had nothing to do with "A Ghost Is Born." We would send it to them, because we loved them so much, and we just wanted to make this thing work.
20 min 6 sec: And so, I remember about three-quarters... It had to be done in about a three-month time period. And we just put everything aside and worked for three months solid on this thing.
20 min 16 sec: And about three-quarters of the way through that process, I just hit like a wall. And I was like, "I can't. This isn't working. They've rejected everything. What are we going to do?" So, in this moment of desperation, I just started flipping through some of my old work, which I tend do sometimes, just not necessarily to reassure myself of much, but just to at least get some kind of distraction.
20 min 40 sec: And so, I came across that title page of SPECK and, you know, "A Ghost Is Born" and it just seemed sort of perfect. So, we sent them about 50 egg variations. And this is what the ended up choosing. Well, actually, no. Sorry. They rejected this. And then, in their moment of desperation, came back to it, and were like, "This is what we want." And it really lends itself well to a sort of thorough packaging.
21 min 11 sec: The one thing that I wanted to emphasize about these objects that I'm showing you is that first and foremost, I see them -- really, now as I'm standing here -- as objects and not really pieces of graphic design. When I'm making something like this, I really, really like to think of people, whether they listen to this CD or not, whether they read one of my books or not, it doesn't matter. It's just having, you know, it's first and foremost the process of buying this, which is such a kind of a beautiful thing.
21 min 42 sec: Someone is going to take their money and buy something that I've designed. And then, it's just - This is something that's just going to sit in their house for probably, hopefully a long time. And in some cases, probably not in this case, it could actually be handed down and have many lifetimes, and be experienced by many generations of people. And we extended this one even further into the 12 inch design.
22 min 10 sec: Goddamn hand... And further into the sleeve of the 12 inch. And further, which is kind of hard to see, but it's more crinkled paper.
22 min 32 sec: So, in about 2000, almost the same time... Yeah, it was shortly after the Wilco stuff. Maira Kalman, who was my thesis advisor on SPECK, in the School of Visual Arts, asked if I would be interested in designing her new version of "The Elements of Style". And I grew up with this book. It's, you know, a bible to anyone who writes anything. And, I never really realized it until Maira pointed it out. But, this book is just - it's an amazing read. And it has a lot of valuable lessons to be learned, not necessarily just from the point of view of writers, but I think that even we as designers could take a lot from it. I'm just trying to think of one of them. It will come to me later. Oh, what is it? OK.
23 min 36 sec: And, there's also a lot to weird, like there's a quirkiness to their, you know, especially when they use... They used a lot of different examples to illustrate sentences that they would write to illustrate what every point it was that they were making. And they used some amazing -- they, themselves, had their own crazy sense of style.
23 min 55 sec: And the hard part about this book was to design something that was going to be in complete homage to Strunk and White and the tradition of "Elements of Style", but also to do something that was going to bring the Maira Kalman sensibility, and her quirkiness, and to make something that was going to be a real beautiful object. Never before, unless you maybe had a first edition of "Elements of Style", all the previous editions sense were just these sort of crappy paperbacks. So, we really wanted to make something that was substantial.
24 min 27 sec: So, this is the front. This is the back. I'm still trying to think of that. OK. After Wilco, I left that company and started working as the Design Director of Paper Magazine.
24 min 52 sec: And, this was the first cover that I did. I kind of feel like everything went down hill after this. It was sort of like the perfect storm of covers for me. And it was like, I created what I think could have been a template for future covers, with having like this border and things. But, it just didn't work. And, it never really - I don't think I every really topped this.
25 min 15 sec: And, it was also and incredible shoot, because it was the first real cover shoot I was on. And I was like terrified. Kelly Osborne was there; Ozzie Osborne, and Sharon Osborne.
25 min 28 sec: Kelly showed up and immediately locked herself in the bathroom for half an hour. And Ozzie Osborne of all people had to go in and talk her off the ledge. And so, she came out, and she was in a real mood. And so, she sat down basically as you see her here, but without that bow in her head.
25 min 55 sec: We were planning on shooting her with this bow, so the stylist put it on her head and she was like, "No. I'm not going to wear that." And the photographer, Danielle Levitt, who can make like anyone do anything, said, "Look, Kelly, just one shot. That's all we want - just one shot." And she was like, "OK, one shot." So, we shot her, and then, that was it. To Ozzie's credit, he was there for like the next 10 hours trying every other variation on all sorts of other different looks. And the first one is the one that stuck.
26 min 26 sec: And these are more of the mastheads from Paper. For me, it was really important that these sort of become collectible. And that's why I'm showing you this slide. It's like to sort of have each mastheads, at least, be this own little kind of playful little box that, you know, no matter who was on the cover, at least we were always like sort of changing that. And, it could be something that, even that in itself, was a special little moment.
26 min 58 sec: So, there's this album called "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts" that was recorded in the early '80s by David Byrne and Brian Eno. They were the first people to sample sounds. This was before they started doing it in rap. So, this album, I hadn't heard of this album until I was approached to repackage it. The original cover was designed by Peter Saville. And, it was basically just a Polaroid that David Byrne had took of a television screen.
27 min 33 sec: So, I wanted to do something that was not totally new, because I wanted to hearken back to that original spirit, or at least, the feeling of that original cover. But yet, at the same time, I didn't want to just sort of ape anything that had been done in the past. So, once again, in the moment of desperation, I just - which is another thing that I do sometimes - is just to start taking something, and playing with it in Photoshop. And, as you can see, I rarely ever, ever use any kind of Photoshop techniques or filters, or anything.
28 min 7 sec: But, they can be really fun. And, I just took the original album and started playing, applying all these filters on it.
28 min 17 sec: And eventually, this is one that just really started to speak to me. And so, I presented it. And they were like, "Yes. That's it." And it's nice because, this is actually a sleeve that covers the jewel case, so when you pull it off, it has that sort of motion.
28 min 36 sec: It also exaggerates the motion of like taking the sleeve off. [cough] Sorry. That's the original cover right there underneath it.
28 min 47 sec: This is a look book that I designed for Isaac Mizrahi. That's a bellyband that wraps around it. I hated this book. Henry Petroski's a great writer, but I got like 10 pages in. I'm like if anyone's going to read a book about toothpicks, it would be me.
29 min 23 sec: [laughter] But I really hated it. Almost to spite the book, I was like, "Fuck it. Just put a toothpick on the cover and that's it." [laughter] And that's what ended up working as you can see, and I was so happy. I kind of didn't care if they ended up firing me and gave the job to someone else because I really didn't like the book that much. So I was like, "This is exactly what I would want. If I'm going to buy a book about the history of the toothpick, there should just be a toothpick on the cover." This is the softcover. Chip Kidd designed the hardcover jacket. It's a toothpick, but it has like an olive and all sort of frills and things on it, which I didn't really like.
30 min 18 sec: So I'd had a long-time fascination with Marlene Dietrich and dots, and women of this era and these sirens. And at the same time I'd worked on a few book projects about outer space, and something came to me at one point. I was like, "I really want to try and combine all of these things into something, and no one's going to hire me to do it." So I took it upon myself to say, "OK I'm just going to do this for myself and see where it leads." So I started printing out dot patterns in my spare time on little tiny pieces. This is a piece of paper that's probably only like an inch by an inch. I just printed them out on a black and white laser printer, and then I would sort of shape them with my fingers to give them some sort of depth.
31 min 24 sec: Then I just put them on my scanner, and I scanned them. And these things really started to take on some beautiful qualities. You know, when you scan anything that small and enlarge it, it's always almost automatically going to be beautiful.
31 min 41 sec: I did one project in the past. This was like five years before this which was to scan the last periods of famous books and magnify them to 5000%, which I guess that's probably also an extension of this.
32 min 1 sec: So that ended up becoming "Constellations" which was a very elaborate and expensive self-promotional thing. I was like, "OK. I've just got to do this, and I'm going to print 2,000 of these.
32 min 14 sec: And I'm going to mail them out, and I don't care how much it's going to cost. And in the end it cost a lot more than I was expecting.
32 min 22 sec: [laughter] And I have some copies somewhere over there to hand out later. I'm still giving them away.
32 min 28 sec: [laughs] I can't get rid of them. But it was so gratifying to finally do this, and I ended up creating within the edges of this poster. At least to me it was this little world, this little celebration of dots. If I was to describe this project to anyone, they would be like, "You're crazy. That's just so trivial." But once you actually go through the motions and you actually just say to yourself, "I'm going to make a poster, and I'm going to make a real living, breathing object. And then I'm going to have to send this thing out. I'm not just going to have 2,000 copies sitting around my office. I'm going to have to bring them to Minnesota and give them away to people." [laughter] So it was originally out of the obsession with dots that the ax fell. And I realized then the language of, say, a polka dot pattern or a stripe pattern spoke immense volumes to me. And if it was done the right way and applied to the right thing, it could be really, really powerful at least for me.
33 min 50 sec: So Andy Spade of Kate Spade duo and Jack Spade opened up a gallery called "Partners in Spade" in New York. And he started commissioning all these great designers -- some of them were friends of mine -- to do these really beautiful kind of one-off art/design pieces for him.
34 min 17 sec: And I went in there and I was like, "Andy, I've got to do something for you. I've got to do something. Is it OK?" "It's yours. Do it. Just send me some ideas." So I had been obsessing over axes for some time. I had grown up with them. I had gone to camp with them.
34 min 34 sec: I moved to the city, and I'd sort of forgotten about them until I moved out to New Jersey. And one of my best friends, Graham Cameron who I mentioned earlier, came down to visit me for his birthday in the middle of January. And we decided that we were going to celebrate the birthday by buying two of the most expensive steaks known to mankind, these Wagyu Japanese-bred steaks. They were $100 each.
35 min: And the only way to cook them was not going to be on a gas grill. Keep in mind this is in the middle of January. Freezing cold. We had to do it on a hot wood-burning fire. So we had plenty of firewood, but we didn't have any ax to chop it up and to get it into kindling.
35 min 15 sec: So we went to Home Depot and bought a really cheap plastic-handled yellow-handled ax, which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with.
35 min 23 sec: And a lot of people, since I've been involved with axes, extol the virtues of those things, but they suck. They are horrible. The only thing people say about them is that they're going to last a lot longer than a wooden ax, and that's true. I won't argue with that.
35 min 38 sec: But if you ever try using one of those, it's painful. It's painful. They don't sharpen very well. They hurt your hands, and it's plastic. Who wants to be going out into the wilderness chopping wood with plastic? So I wanted an ax. I had this plastic one and wanted a real one. So I asked my mom, as anyone would do, for a real ax for Christmas.
36 min 1 sec: [laughter] My parents are very close friends with Graham's parents. So she consulted Graham's father who's a great outdoorsman and woodsman and ax man. I had wanted one of these really fancy Swedish axes. And when she told him that, he was like, "Oh, no. Peter lives in New Jersey.
36 min 25 sec: He needs one of these things. I'll look after it. Don't worry." So he got a yellow plastic-handled ax for them...
36 min 32 sec: [laughter] ...and that's what was waiting under the tree.
36 min 34 sec: [laughter] So again I was like, "OK, this is ridiculous." I was so motivated at this point to get this ax, so I just started buying them like crazy on eBay -- old used ones. It didn't matter how beat up they were. In fact, the more beat up the better. They just had more character.
36 min 55 sec: And I had these sitting around my office for some time. Because they were old, this was I guess probably before they started painting those little yellow or red flashes on the ends of them, and I'd always remembered my dad's ax growing up. It had that yellow little handle on the end.
37 min 15 sec: So I just put two and two together. And I was like, "Andy, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to paint axes. I'm going to do 10 axes. And you guys can take them and you can sell them, and good luck." I sent them over to them, and he took them and they just sold. And not only did they sell, but he saw them and he was like, "These are going in the window." And at that point I knew I had a live one on my hands. So I'm just going to go through these quickly. I was originally going to just show you a couple of them. I felt like it's hard for me to pick any favorites, and everyone always has their own favorites. So here we go. These are all the axes that we've done so far with Best Made.
38 min 30 sec: [silence] Peter: Named after Cate Blanchett.
38 min 59 sec: [laughter] [silence] Peter: And I'm sorry for... Any hockey fans out there? I'm sorry for this last one. Oops, sorry, the next one. This one.
39 min 48 sec: [laughter] This was done to celebrate the amazing overtime victory of Canada.
39 min 57 sec: [laughter] And it's numbered 02 28 10, which was the date of the game. 67 40, which was the time of that last goal. And 87, which is Sydney Crosby's number, who's the...
40 min 11 sec: [laughter] And these just went... We just launched these last week. And it's the first time that we've done an axe in a limited edition and it's selling like... Someone here better buy one because they're going very quick. They're not cheap, though.
40 min 38 sec: So this is the second part of my talk, which is the workshop. And I realized when I moved out to New Jersey just how important a workshop is. And this was before I realized I was going to start doing axes.
40 min 55 sec: But I needed something other than a computer and a desk and a printer. I needed some space that didn't have any of those things in them that I could go into and make a mess. It could be dusty, I could nail things into the walls. And shortly after I realized that I was sort of in a way... I think I'd been inspired by a lot of my clients and people that I'd worked for in the past. And also some of my other design heroes. So I wanted to show you some of their spaces. So this is Jeff Tweedy's desk, if you could imagine. And it was a desk that he would definitely come in in the morning and report to.
41 min 42 sec: I mean, he would sit down, check his email, have a coffee and get up and then start working from. And the loft itself is sort of like the workshop of all of Wilco and it was such an amazing and inspiring place to be in. We actually ended up sleeping in there for close to a week. And just to be surrounded by all of these tools, you know, these things, their tools for creating music was so exhilarating. Just to see and it's the thing I love about tools so much. And I guess the workshop is the home for them and it embodies this notion of a tool sitting there, like these guitars sitting there have so much potential.
42 min 33 sec: And especially when you think that the man behind who usually sits behind that desk, Jeff Tweedy, has God knows, what has he written with those? What notes has he strum? What songs have they been used in? What context have they been seen? Where have they played live? And you start thinking about this and for me these tools started to really take...
42 min 55 sec: These guitars really started to take on a life of their own. And you can just see looking at this picture, you can count... I mean, there's just so much going on in there. So many, not necessarily musical tools. But there's like a football, there's a globe, there's like paintings.
43 min 11 sec: There's so much that they would go in there to derive inspiration for themselves. And it was always one of my favorite spots in the world and I swore to myself, having spent enough time there, that some day that this is what I would want. This is something that I would have to have in order to get me to where I wanted to be.
43 min 34 sec: This is your hometown hero, Isaac Mizrahi, in his workshop in... I guess former hometown hero. In his studio in Manhattan. And, as I said before, I did two magazines with him called the Isaac Style Book. And really the best parts of the magazine were capturing this world that he was working out of and everything that goes on in there. And we kind of did the same thing with the Wilco book in that sense.
44 min 11 sec: I never worked with this guy. He was dead before I got to his workshop. But his name is H. C. Westermann. I don't know if too many of you know him. If you don't, you should definitely look him up. One of my favorite American artists and an amazing sculptor and drawer. And he built this house and workshop in Connecticut all by himself basically. And I don't think he even really used nails or anything. I mean, the whole place is just the work of an absolute master craftsman.
44 min 51 sec: And when I was working on this journal that we used to publish called the Ganzfeld, we got an invitation to go up there by the guy who currently owns it. And, to their credit, they basically left it untouched. So we walked in there and this is exactly how it would have looked when H. C. Westermann was working in there. H. C. Westermann reminds me a lot of this guy Dick Proenekke, who, again, another name you should look up. You may have seen one of his movies on like late night public television called Alone in the Wilderness.
45 min 31 sec: And like Westermann, he was a retired Navy guy. And Westermann was actually an acrobat in the Navy. And Dick Proenekke just became this survivalist. He moved up to Alaska, built himself a cabin thinking that he was only going to be there for like one season and ended up spending like the next 32, 33 years of his life there. And he was, if you ever see this film, he was yet another just completely amazing...
46 min 3 sec: You know, it's like these guys who were trained to be so good at what they did in the context of like the Navy. And you can assume that they left and what were they going to do with themselves? Apparently that's how the Hell's Angels sort of came out of that. It was like these guys who were in the Army, in the Navy fixing things, using their hands all the time.
46 min 24 sec: And then they left and they had nowhere to actually apply them, so they started a motorcycle gang.
46 min 32 sec: And this is Ray Eames' studio. There's a film, one of my favorite, favorite design films. Maybe even one of my favorite documentary films ever is called... I should know the name of it. But it's like 901, whatever the address was of their studio that they were in for like 25 or 30 years in Venice, California. And this documentary is so sad. They made it right after Ray died and it's about the dismantling of the Charles and Ray Eames studio.
47 min 12 sec: And now here's little old me. Our workshop is in Tribeca, in like downtown Manhattan. And it could not be, like I don't think I could be in a better spot in the world, probably.
47 min 27 sec: I'm just at the epicenter of not only everything that goes on in Manhattan and everything. Let's forget about that. It's just that one block from me, I have like one of the best hardware stores I've ever been to. Two blocks from me, I have a rubber store, a plastic store, a lighting store. All the way down Canal Street has so much industry around there.
47 min 52 sec: And one of the best illustrations of that is this company, Lockwoods. A friend of mine from Canada, he's a great carpenter. I was asking him about stains and where to get good stains. And I thought he was going to stay, you know, somewhere in Germany or something.
48 min 8 sec: And he was like, no there's this American company called Lockwood. You should check them out. So I Google them and get their website up, look at the address. They were literally one block from me.
48 min 17 sec: [laughter] And this is the company that we use to... We hand mix all of our own stains, but they make the powders and stuff for them.
48 min 29 sec: I've lately become obsessed with flagging tape, which comes in like every color of the rainbow in pattern.
48 min 39 sec: [silence] It's always so interesting when you walk into someone else's workshop. That's why I'm kind of curious to show these to you, just because... To see what varnish does someone use, or how do they store something, or the way that elastic band is holding those brushes in place.
49 min 20 sec: [silence] So, the last part, the world, which is what everyone sees, really, and I don't think I would never be concerning myself with all of this previous stuff that I've talked about tonight if it weren't... If I didn't have some kind of vehicle, some kind of place to actually put this out there, to sell it, to speak to people, to create this community, or this culture that is... For us, it's slowly building momentum, but for other companies, like Wilco or Isaac Mizrahi who have been around a lot longer than us, they've really been able to build these worlds that are so powerful, and have given me such inspiration throughout the course of working with them.
50 min 32 sec: And in a case like Wilco, especially, it's like a world that we loved so much, we had to be a part of it, like so many fans. But luckily, we had some skill that we could bring to the table, and some idea, which was this book.
50 min 50 sec: One of my first worlds that I was born into was camp. I went to this incredible camp up in Algonquin Park up in Northern Ontario called Camp Ahmek. I'm sure, probably a lot of you, being... If you've grown up around these parts went to some good camps. And, our camp would actually run canoe trips to Quantico, which isn't that far from here.
51 min 20 sec: This place, it wasn't like an outdoor survivalist thing. It wasn't about conquering nature in any way. It was about having fun, and being in awe of nature. One of the primary tool for navigating those waters was an axe. The axe was something that was iconic, and something you didn't mess with. It was taken very, very seriously. From the lore of the axe, to the maintenance of it, and everything in between.
52 min: There were a few guys who worked at the camp who themselves are legendary Canadian outdoorsmen who have been true inspirations to us, one of which is this guy Dave Cocker, who we always talk about in the context of best man.
52 min 23 sec: A few years ago, I went back to camp for the first time since I had left. I was going up to stay somewhere else near there, so I drove in, and I took this picture, which was the first thing that you see when you come back. I just love this. This sign to me, especially now in what we're doing, says so much.
52 min 44 sec: This is an artist who's been an integral part of our world, and the creation of it. His name is Tom Thompson. I'd be surprised of any of you have heard of him. If there's any Canadians here, I'd be really upset if you hadn't. He was sort of tagged on to this group of painters in Canada, although there were a couple Americans, called the Group of Seven.
53 min 9 sec: They painted nature in the turn of the last century. Tom Thompson started life as a graphic designer, actually, in Toronto, and then he moved up north, into Algonquin Park, and spent most of his... He died young, which I'll get to in a minute, but he spent basically all of his life up there painting and fishing and living. He died on the same lake that Graham and I went to camp at Camp Ahmek, very mysteriously.
53 min 43 sec: There's still, to this day, film crews and things who will, with underwater submarines and whatever that will go up there trying to get to the bottom of his -- he's sort of like a Loch Ness figure -- trying to get to the bottom of his death.
54 min 2 sec: This happened right on our lake where we went on to camp, and it was always, obviously, a great source of ghost stories and things. But him, this notion of Tom Thompson, and the mythology that surrounded this guy, always stuck very deeply with us.
54 min 26 sec: This is one of his paintings. I love this picture. This is Roger Troy Peterson, who is, I think... I have a great argument, which I'll give to you if... He basically was the first guy to really popularize nature. And because of that, he has done such immense things, great things, positive things for nature itself. He was the first person to write a popular field guide to the birds. There were field guides before him, but they weren't very accessible. They weren't very good pieces of graphic design. They're bad information design.
55 min 10 sec: He came up with a system, one of many systems that he came up with, was to just show the black silhouettes of birds. And, in the end, the US Air Force stole this method and used it to train their to attack enemy airplanes and things, which is sort of ironic. So, he has also been a big part of the motivation behind this world that we're creating.
55 min 43 sec: And then there's the axes themselves. And as I go further down this road with the axes, I just realize what an insane depth of history there is to the axe, especially the axe in North America. I'm not going to get that deep into it, but I'll just say at one point, 40 years ago or so. Wait, let's see. 40 or 50 years ago, there were over 300 axe companies in North America, and now there are probably about five.
56 min 20 sec: And because of that, you can imagine how competitive it was. There were some companies that would produce 300 different types of axes. That would be in their catalogue. 300 different axes, each one for it's own name and it's own weird way, and beautiful way. Each one that had it's own very specific purpose and function.
56 min 46 sec: Because it was such a competitive market, they went to great lengths to market them. This, what you're seeing here, are all these labels that they would use on the actual axes to distinguish them. There's a lot of bravado and showmanship involved in this. As you can see from the design of these beautifully designed labels, a lot of work went into it. From the naming, to the design, and the romance of it, too.
57 min 19 sec: I truly believe the axe is...The axe is the oldest tool known to mankind, there's no question. There's some arguments about it actually being the first form of art, because they were used...
57 min 32 sec: People would trade them not necessarily for an intended use. You think that, for all the history of mankind, there have been axes. And then the chainsaw came along, and it basically wiped that out, and now there's... You go into a Home Depot, and all you can get is a pathetic yellow handle axe.
57 min 58 sec: That's where we are right now, and that's sort of fine in one way. I'm not asking for a throwback or anything. I don't feel like Best Made is about nostalgia, but I think that the axe is, and this may sound kind of crazy, but think that the axe is embedded in our DNA.
58 min 19 sec: Most of us, you know, who are in this room, it's only a matter of one, or two, or three generations ago, where the axe would have been a very significant tool, in your great grandfather, grandfather's household, and every grandfather before that, would have had an ax.
58 min 39 sec: And these things became, and especially once you start getting into the whole, the lore of the lumberjack, and everything, it's like these guys would, you know, these lumberjacks would sleep with their axes. You couldn't touch another man's axe. You literally couldn't touch it. They were sacred, sacred tools. And Best Made is founded on this notion of the axe, and that the axe represents any number of things to any number of different people, some of which can actually be kind of negative. And that's fine.
59 min 18 sec: It's a powerful instrument. And with anything that's that powerful, you always run that risk of going the other way. But, Graham and I really see it in a lot of people that have come on board with us, really see it as such a positive, especially in these times when you have so many tools at your disposal. And so many of them, even the best ones like my iPhone, I hate. It's like it doesn't work half the time. And if I had to make a list of like the 10 things that I need in my life right now, the iPhone probably won't be there.
59 min 59 sec: It started to give me a real comfort to have an axe sitting in my New York apartment after I had sold half of my possessions, or after I had sold my house and divided all my possessions.
1 hr 14 sec: I moved into this place, where its like everything that went in there had to have some purpose. It had to be important. And that was a really cathartic experience for me.
1 hr 24 sec: And, I brought the axe with me. And it sits there. One of our axes, it sits there. And I look at it everyday when I walk in, and I admire it. Not because of what I've done to it -- that's kind of meaningless at this point in the conversation. It's just that it's an axe. And the axe is for me this window, a really beautiful window into a world that I usually would rather be, than like sitting in my, you know, small cramped apartment, I would rather be up in Algonquin Park, paddling the waters like Tom Thompson did.
1 hr 1 min 3 sec: So this is us -- Best Made. And the thing - I also wanted to touch on, as I did a little bit before, about the community of it. And, that's a really important part. This is a poster that we did that we sent out to people who, anyone who would join our mailing list, really. And, it's gotten a great response.
1 hr 1 min 24 sec: And the packaging of what we do is very important, especially speaking to a room of designers. We wanted this to be an event. When someone opens up their ax, it would be like Christmas all over again. Nick Zdon, who's sitting here in the audience, was really helpful in helping us develop, especially at the beginning.
1 hr 1 min 57 sec: And Nick will tell you, because his ax didn't come looking like this, I was just so overwhelmed. You know, we came up with this idea. We started selling. We literally built our website in a weekend. And axes started flying out the door. And, I didn't even have time to think about what I would normally be hired to think about which was the packaging, and the identity, and all of that sort of stuff. So, Nick brought it to my attention. He was like, "Look, dude.
1 hr 2 min 21 sec: You got to get your shit together here." And, he started sending me some ideas. And we went back and forth.
1 hr 2 min 30 sec: And this is basically, when you order an axe, this is what you get. This is a deluxe box. But all of our axes come shipped in a crate. Whether you buy the box or not, they are going to come in a crate, packed in this really beautiful wood wool that's used for stuffing taxidermy animals. And, you get a badge and there's this hand signed and dated sticker.
1 hr 3 min 6 sec: And so, we were just crushed under the weight of all of these orders that came in throughout all of last year. And, we never had time to think of much except just keeping up with it. And that was OK. I mean, we started the company without any business plan without any direction except to make these axes, and to get them out there to as many people as possible.
1 hr 3 min 29 sec: We always equated it to like starting a rock band, like, "We're just going to do it. And then, once we get to a point, we'll know when that point comes. We're going to have to sit down and like come up with a real business plan or something." And that point has come.
1 hr 3 min 42 sec: But, before that, it was just all axes all the time. I think at this point, we're basically keeping our manufacturer in business. They can't keep up with us. And so, right after Christmas, we decided that we were going to do our first non-axe product, which is The Red Cap of Courage. And for me this had -- I had bought a red cashmere cap at this little shop in Manhattan. And, I'd been wearing it constantly for throughout the latter part of my divorce, and the moving and everything. It was just constantly on my head.
1 hr 4 min 26 sec: And, I can't think of a better term. I can't think of a better way to describe it, but it was almost like a safety blanket. Like, to have this thing on my head gave me great comfort. And, it dawned on me that, "Wait. Wait. This is like another axe. Like to have this thing, to have like this could be a powerful tool for someone, this could be a powerful object. If I could feel this way, maybe I could convince other people that just a simple little red hat could give you a since of courage. Why not?" And so, we produced the red cap of courage.
1 hr 5 min 6 sec: And now, we're working on tons of new products. We're a boot strap company. So, everything has to... We enjoy it this way. Everything has to go very, very slowly. We're plodding along. But, it means that we're always, you know, generally we're making like the right decisions because if we came upon like too much money, I think that we probably won't know what to do with it. And I think things might progress kind of weird.
1 hr 5 min 42 sec: But, we've kept our day jobs. And so, I'm still - Graham and I are still doing what we did before. And, I'm still incredibility happy working with Isaac Mizrahi. And, I've just started a new book project with Maira Kalman, her sequel to "The Principles of Uncertainty", and a slew of other design projects.
1 hr 6 min 8 sec: The last thing I'll leave you with tonight is that, for me at least, if nothing becomes of Best Made, which is not going to happen, but let's just say nothing becomes of it, this has been such a valuable process for me as a graphic designer. To be able to...
1 hr 6 min 29 sec: You know, sometimes in the thick of it, between, you know, what was going on in my personal life to like having to fulfill all of these orders, and the logistics of all of that, and then running a design studio, I thought like, "OK. The first thing that's going to give here is the design studio." Because at times, I felt like, "OK. This is what I've done for the last 10 years. I don't need to be doing this anymore." But, in fact, the axes and Best Made really has helped inspire and to sort of like motivate me. And the reason is because it's empowering. I'm not dependent on a client anymore, or a boss, or whatever. It's like I've got this thing, even though I'm probably losing money on it, right now at least. But, it's going to be something some day. And, it may take a while. But, that's fine. And that's it.
1 hr 7 min 23 sec: [applause] Andrew Blauvelt: Do you have some time for some questions, because there're some people at the microphones [inaudible 1:07:48] who might have some questions.
1 hr 7 min 47 sec: Man 2: How as it working with Phillip Glass? Peter: Oh, I never had a chance to work - Everything that I did for him was done in the course of one summer. And he spends his summers up in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, actually. So I didn't work directly with him, but I had been a long-time fan of Philip Glass and his management and everything were great. Just that body of work was enough to inspire me.
1 hr 8 min 22 sec: Yeah. Oh yeah. WoAndrew Blauvelt: OK, thank you. So how often do you use your axes? Do you go camping and use them? Are you able to use them? Peter: Since I started it I haven't had time.
1 hr 8 min 50 sec: Graham uses them. My partner Graham, I don't know if I mentioned this, he lives in Toronto and he has a beautiful plot of land about three hours north of Toronto that we call base camp, which is like our outdoor playground or workshop. He goes up there all the time.
1 hr 9 min 11 sec: Before we release anything it goes to him and he'll play with it. If you come up later you can see Nick's axe, Nick's famous red hair, has been well use. Our customers vary.
1 hr 9 min 26 sec: Some people use them, some people don't. It's totally fine. Whatever. I have some axes that I never intend to use.
1 hr 9 min 35 sec: Man 3: I have two questions. One, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the history or tradition of a person marking their tools. I'm lucky enough and honored enough to have several of my grandfather's tools that are all marked with a bright orange stripe around them so that if he was using them communally or using them at a job site he always at the end of the day knew which ones were his. The way that Best Made axes are marked remind me a little bit of that. I'm wondering if you can speak to that a little bit. And I'm also wondering if you have any plans to make hatchets.
1 hr 10 min 13 sec: Peter: OK. That's a question that's often asked, but the first question, really, really good question. I don't know too much, and I've been investigating it, that history.
1 hr 10 min 27 sec: My personal history, again, started at camp. We would all paint our paddles and you could pain anything on them. They were usually a rock band or whatever weird graphic you put on it. But, again, it was purely to mark them and be creative and have fun. I've heard stories about the Voyagers, who were the first sort of canoe traveling fur traders in Canada, would mark a lot of their equipment.
1 hr 11 min 9 sec: That's a good question. I don't know too much else about it. Man 3: I guess I had assumed that that was maybe the inspiration for painting Best Made axes.
1 hr 11 min 21 sec: Peter: Well, for me, you know, I would say I was more inspired by fashion designers. Not necessarily for the functional purpose of marking a tool so that if you lose it amongst the other tools you'll be able to find it or whatever, but just to be able to adorn something and to adorn it beautifully.
1 hr 11 min 50 sec: So, the hatchets. We're going to be coming out in the spring with a pocket axe, which is smaller than a hatchet. Hatchets are incredibly dangerous. The reason is, OK, big axe if you swing it and miss it's probably going to land in your ankle. A hatchet will land in your femur. It can hit much bigger arteries. It's also something that you kind of take for granted because it's smaller and less a risk to take. They're always prone to having more accidents from the use of a hatchet.
1 hr 12 min 33 sec: But the pocket ax is going to be really special. It's about the size of a hammer. Fits perfectly in a woman's purse. They're going to be painted. They're going to have their own little world around them. There's a lot of people that we've discovered love our axes, but they're intimidated by them because they're big. I mean, you can see, and if you want to hold this one later you'll see they're heavy. They can be intimidating. But wait until you get the double bit.
1 hr 13 min: Yeah, there's a question up there. Oh, just wait for the mike. Sorry. Man 4: What was your favorite moment from camp as a kid? Peter: My favorite what? Man 4: Your favorite moment from camp as a kid.
1 hr 13 min 23 sec: Peter: Oh. Oh my God. Smoking "bamwatos". OK, I'll tell you what that is first. Don't do this at home. You take pine leaves, pine needles, roll it in toilet paper, and smoke them. They literally will peel the back off of everything from here down.
1 hr 13 min 54 sec: OK, my favorite moment was tripping and going on canoe trips. The camp was legendary for having these really, serious, extended trips to Quetico to Biscotasing. The camp had an outpost we would trip to. Some of these trips, you're talking 13, 14 year old kids going on a 42 day canoe trip where food had to be air dropped by helicopter to them.
1 hr 14 min 29 sec: Really, really serious. Just paddling and learning how to paddle a canoe properly. It's a total art-form. I know that in Minnesota a lot of you can probably appreciate that.
1 hr 14 min 42 sec: There's a really great tradition of that here. Any other questions? Man 5: Yes. It's very refreshing to hear your ten year itch to write and looking for new ways. Very honest and I appreciate that very much. It seems to me that the axe is almost a metaphoric tool that you have in order to chop all those things in the past into little pieces so you can actually figure it out. So the question is, do you have any inspiration with your book design with Tibor? Andrew Blauvelt: OK, So Tibor taught one class in his life and I was in that class. It was when I was at the school of Visual Art doing my master's program. It was an amazing, amazing class. He died halfway through the class. But the first class we walked in and he put up a slide on the wall of his apartment. It was a picture of probably some African tribesman in a pair of shoes, the picture is in his book "T. BOR.", a pair of shoes he had made out of cardboard.
1 hr 16 min: He put this picture up and we literally sat there for two hours in complete silence staring at this picture. No one said anything, people were so intimated by him. Then he's like, "OK you've looked at this long enough. What I want you to do is come into class next week with an image that will compliment this image that you've been looking at for the last two hours." This is what happened every week. So we'd come in and put our image next to his image and then it started to grow exponentially. By the end we had 100 images that all stemmed from this first image.
1 hr 16 min 40 sec: Maira really carries the mantle so beautifully from Tibor. I never worked with M&Co company, but from everything I've heard she's such an integral, sort of a silent partner, of that company and was really a force behind it and behind Tibor. I definitely see it, having worked with her enough and spent time working directly with her on so many different projects now.
1 hr 17 min 21 sec: Everyone looks up to Maira, even Isaac. Isaac, I don't know if he would admit it, Isaac lives in the same building that they do and they're like best friends and when you see them together it's wonderful. Maira a is such a powerful force. Anything else? Great. Thanks. Thank you.

The Walker Channel

Peter Buchanan-Smith

Part of: Insights 2010 Design Lecture Series

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