Brett MacFadden–one half of the San Francisco based graphic design studio MacFadden & Thorpe–is the kind of guy that, upon meeting him, one would assume is very serious man… But while you’re thinking that, he’s probably already messing with you. Brett seems to have an unusual knack for combining the straight-laced with the outrageous. Infusing professionalism with quirkiness is serious business for this Cranbrook graduate. (2D 2000). After having been responsible for literally mountains of books at publishing house Chronicle books, he recently struck out on his own with partner Scott Thorpe. In addition to print, identity and environment design projects he maintains an autonomous practice in which he explores custom type design.

AN: 1. You didn’t start out with a focus on graphic design, what did you study first, and what piqued your interest in the field?

BM: It took me some time to become a designer: almost 30 years. I grew up in a town (Acton, MA) where it seemed everyone’s parents—including my own—were business professionals of one sort or another, and I really had no tangible exposure to fields beyond human resources, engineering, sales, and the like. In college I initially studied business, like all my close friends, and when it became clear that it wasn’t my strength, I did some soul searching and eventually transferred to the journalism school at Ohio University. Journalism was better, because like design, it’s a form of focused expression, but it wasn’t the right fit either. It did have the side effect, however, of giving me my first exposure to designers. I worked at the school daily paper, and they were the guys who stayed up all night flowing everything in. It seemed like a lousy gig.

AN: 2. Was your experience at the Cooper-Hewitt design museum in any way instrumental to how you found your way to Cranbrook? Was there an overlap or link between the two institutions, in terms of how they see the role that design plays in our society?

BM: I graduated into a terrible economy—like now—and since full-time job prospects were poor, I applied to a number of internship programs, including the Smithsonian’s. It was unusual in that you didn’t apply to a specific opening or museum, but rather wrote an essay about your interests and qualifications, and they would send your application where it seemed most relevant. I decided to write mine on the Reach toothbrush, and how it’s subtle shift in ergonomics—a bend in the handle—and subsequent commercial success, led to a explosion of new toothbrush designs. So my application got forwarded to Ellen Lupton, then the new Curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper-Hewitt, and that led to my internship there.

Ellen was then collecting work for a show called Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture—and the simple duties of my internship, basically cataloging acquisitions and entering them into a database—gave me first-hand exposure to a rich and varied world of graphic design that I hadn’t previously been aware of.

BM: Also at one point Ellen noted that Cranbrook had recently donated an archive to the museum. I actually never saw any of it during my time there, but it was the first time I heard of this mysterious-sounding place. For several years after, I was involved in design more as a aficionado, but when I finally felt I could be a practitioner, Cranbrook was one of the first places I sent for an application.

AN: 3. During your studies at Cranbrook you explored the blend of performance art with graphic design. Taking weight lifting and body-building as a metaphor to explore the importance of the designer’s identity. What did you learn from this process and what did this project teach you?

BM: Since I never studied graphic design as an under grad, I saw my graduate education as a kind of building of a new self, and the idea of a physical, as well as vocational, transformation fit into that. I was also spurned by two other factors—Scott Makela’s death at the end of my first year, and learning (at Lounge) that my roommate Michael Stewart was a former competitive power lifter. Scott was interested in body mechanics—as opposed to body politics—and naturally I had been thinking about him a lot that summer. So this was a way to channel something of Scott’s memory into my work. Mike provided the expertise, coaching, and discipline.

As I worked to grow creatively as a designer, I also did strive to grow physically. Part of the project’s pleasure was it’s absurdity—I was (and remain) your classic weakling. The performance work you mention played off that. In the most successful piece, I read an essay about the dead lift, while Mike deadlifted (and then dramatically crushed) 400-pounds of cinder blocks. Then I, in turn, dead lifted 160-pounds of Mike. But the project also taught me sincere lessons about how my body’s mechanics that I still use today. As a student, it gave me a history of physical culture to learn about, imagery to use, and an aesthetic to build design around.

AN: 4. Also during your time there, you established your relationship with Chronicle books, the company you would join for 5 years after graduating Cranbrook. Can you talk about how formative this period was for you as a designer?

BM: I found Chronicle through Anne Galperin (2D ‘97), who had been a designer there, and Annabelle Gould (2D ‘99), who encouraged me to intern there between my first and second years at school. I was hired full-time in 2002, and in many ways it provided the undergraduate design education I never had. It’s there I learned the technical and formal rules of design, printing, and about professionalism in general. Chronicle’s an interesting place because doesn’t strive for a consistent design aesthetic, but rather a consistent design level. So there is a lot of room to try out different voices, both in the books you design, and in the outside designers you hire. There’s twenty-some in-house designers, and they all have unique personalities and interests which they are encouraged to express in their work.

AN: 5. At Chronicle books you were involved with a tremendous amount of books. Did any of them have particular importance to you, if so, what made these projects special to you?

BM: A majority of the books I worked on as an art director, with out-of-house designers, and there can be great pride in matching the right project to the right designer, and seeing it come together well. Some of the best experiences were with people I knew from school, like Mike Essl (2D ‘01), who designed the lowbrow art book Weirdo Deluxe, or Warren Corbitt (2D ‘99) who I worked with on Super #1 Robot. Annabelle Gould (2D ‘99) was one of my favorite people to work with because she always made it so easy, both in terms of design and how buttoned-up the process was.

Perhaps the best perk of working in-house at Chronicle is the ability to pick those books you want to design from among your list. So nearly all the books I worked on were ones where I was invested in the subject. My first was Henry Horenstein’s Honky Tonk, a photo book about country music in the 1970’s. I couldn’t wait for the project to start because I was already into that music and, not surprisingly, it turned out to be a great experience. The cover photo now hangs in our house, and while working on the book, my wife and I adopted a shelter dog and named her Maybelle, after “Mother” Maybelle Carter.

Other standout projects included California Design, about a series of museum surveys on the state of California design and crafts in the 1960’s and 70s; Photo: Stoner, on the legendary surf photographer Ron Stoner; and NorCalMod, about the Bay Area’s vibrant post-war architecture scene. That last book was co-designed with Geoff Kaplan (2D ‘96), and was the only project I worked on at Chronicle where I teamed up with an outside designer.

AN: 6. Everyone needs a change at some points during their career. How come you hatched the plan to strike out on your own and form a design studio, as opposed to changing to a new job somewhere after chronicle books?

BM: I had been at Chronicle five years, and so I was in a stage to take stock of where things were going. Chronicle had actually gotten much better for me in my last year there as I moved into working exclusively on Art and Design titles. But since I had started working as a designer relatively late, I felt that if I wanted to branch out it was now or never, and the future of publishing was looking tough. Scott had similar priorities and interests, and I knew I didn’t want to work alone, so together we set out for the great beyond. I never really seriously considered other studios.

AN: 7. Both you and partner Scott Thorpe–who holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design–were sr. designers at Chronicle books in book design and the marketing departments, respectively. On your website you jokingly say that “RISD is “a bunch of bobble-head fashion-victims” by Brett’s estimate, and Cranbrook is “full of tire-kickers and dilettantes” says Scott”. All kidding aside, how did you and Scott settle on a unified vision and design approach for MacfaddenThorpe?

BM: Scott and I sat next to each other for a couple of years at Chronicle, and even before he started, the designers who had interviewed him came over and proclaimed were going to be total buds. A weird coincidence is that we grew up in adjacent towns in Massachusetts, and it’s clear that something about that mutual background allows us to relate. The guys I grew up with would constantly hound each other, and that line in our bios is born of the fine tradition of loving your friends by relentlessly giving them shit. But as designers and professionals, we compliment each other very well. In the Cranbrook way, I am more experimental and loosey-goosey, whereas Scott can make anything look refined in an half-hour, and his rags are outstanding. Not surprisingly, he also does our finances and maintains the project schedule that I never, ever, look at.

AN: 8. Your custom typography experiments are very unique and striking in a lo-tech sort of way. Can you explain how this particular body of work got its start and what place it has today, in your client work?

BM: Cranbrook infused me with a love for personal typography, but it took me several years out of school before I started in this direction. The first type drawing I did was on a birthday card for my boss. It was the name of a drinking game called “Kokon Tozai” that our Japanese co-worker Aya had taught us and that briefly came to mean anything in the design department. After that, I started trying to draw one a week—often sketching them in meetings-—and putting it on my personal site as the splash page. I still do, but at a rate more like once a quarter.

The drawings were initially all done in InDesign, because that’s what I typically had open when I was designing books. Soon I moved them over to illustrator, but in both programs they are were always made of grid-locked elements that I puzzle together to form a word or phrase. Like a lot of creative outlets, I started doing them just because, and I liked that they had no requirement to be good, or refined, or smart, or relevant. They just were, and I purposely didn’t try to incorporate them into my professional design work, because their independence was what made them fun. But soon enough they found their way in, first through a show proposed by Mark Callahan (Print ‘00) at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2007, then for William Saffire’s column in the Sunday New York Times, both of which were really exciting. Recently I’ve done type drawings for SFMOMA and a San Francisco art organization called Southern Exposure. We are currently hard at work on a pad of iron-on type drawings for Chronicle that will be called Hot Type, which is due out this fall and coming together quite nicely.

AN: 9. In addition to the experimental typography, are there other autonomous creative projects you explore that might some day find their way into your client work?

BM: As a designer, I love type and words, and if I create art, that’s the first place I want to go. So besides the digital drawings, I’ve also done some paintings on glass using type, and I hope that more opportunities will arise for those to be made as gallery installations, which I really enjoy, but don’t especially translate to client work. I think as designers we are lucky to have jobs that are creative and a living (more or less), and so I’m happy to let my outlets be outlets, and not need them to pay the bills.

Somewhere in this interview I wanted to mention that Scott and I recently started sharing a studio with Martin Venezky (2D ‘93), and that Martin is an example of someone who manages impressively to make his experiments his living, with seemingly very little lost in translation. So he’s an interesting role model to be around, and perhaps will inspire us in new directions.

AN: 10. In the current economic climate–for many companies–design is often the first expense to cut back on. How do you as a young, small design firm position yourself to show your clients that it is still attractive to keep investing in good graphic design?

BM: Basically our business strategy is to sit around, wipe our brows, and say things like, “We should send our portfolio to blankity blank, we really need some new work.” And then, magically!, a project arrives out of the blue. So we do that for a while until we find ourselves wiping our brows again. And then, voila!, here comes something else! I wish I could say we were more savvy, but for a year now, that’s pretty much how it’s gone down. I know objectively things don’t look good, but 2009 is coming along all right, and I think we (as a studio and global economy) are going to make it. If we try.

AN: Thanks for this interview Brett!