I’m very pleased to be able to share with you today an up-close and personal interview with friend and Designer/Educator/Yoga Instructor/Painter Danielle Foushee. She divides her time between urban Los Angeles and the mountains of Colorado. Below, you will first find her bio, it will explain all of her various endeavors better than I ever could: Generous Adventure is a creative studio led by award-winning designer and fine artist Danielle Foushée. Her studio focuses on collaborations and projects that propagate a spirit of openness and exploration. It specializes in branding and design projects for cultural, educational, youth-oriented, environmental, and non-profit organizations.

Danielle Foushée has worked as a design consultant, artist, and educator for over ten years. Her work with The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising resulted in a 300% increase in student enrollment over eight years. Additionally, her efforts to update the collateral at The Museum of Contemporary Art initiated the process that restructured their entire visual identity. Ms. Foushée’s consulting practice has resulted in a number of successful collaborations that you will see throughout the site.

As a college-level design professor for ten years, Ms. Foushée shares her passion for graphic design and the visual arts with students. She leads a variety of courses including typography, design studios, and research seminars. She taught at Art Center College of Design, University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Otis College of Art & Design, Utah State University, and is currently teaching at Mesa State College.

Ms. Foushée continues a personal explorative practice that uses experimentation and research to generate new graphic ideas. The philosophy of Generous Adventure demands creative discipline that results in the most innovative solutions to our clients’ communications problems.

As part of her ongoing personal creative expansion, Ms. Foushée works as a practicing fine artist. She works in a variety of media and explores ways in which visual and physical texture can enhance the emotive qualities of the painted surface. As an extension of her professional graphic design work, Ms. Foushée enjoys using collage and mixed media to create stylized paintings that are inspired by relationships of body and mind, and the sometimes contradictory concepts of nature and popular culture. Her work also includes representational landscapes inspired by her travels around the American West.

Generous Adventure finds the middle ground between seemingly conflicting ides: wilderness and civilization, simplicity and materialism, stillness and activity, silence and language. it is our challenge to promote balance over excess, generosity over consumption, and curiosity over indifference as prevailing cultural values.
[Source: http://www.daniellefoushee.com]

Arjen Noordeman: 1. Over the past ten years you have been involved with teaching at the college level, is this something you purposely chose to do, in addition to working as a designer, right out of Cranbrook?

Danielle Foushee: It sort-of happened by accident. About a year out of Cranbrook, I got a call from Denise Gonzales-Crisp, who was teaching at Art Center at the time, to sub for her class one day. I had a great experience with the students and was asked to teach a full class the following term. I think I was younger than half the students in the class, which gave me the opportunity to cultivate a certain kind of collaborative, cooperative environment that I have tried to maintain as I’ve gotten older.

AN: 2. Has being an educator and a mentor to young designers influenced your outlook on the profession in particular ways over the years?

DF: My experience combining my primary professional practice with teaching has been valuable in so many ways.
Working through the creative process with students and witnessing their enthusiasm is always inspiring. I think being a good teacher is most importantly about having the mindset of a lifelong student. I’m not some authoritarian figure standing at the front of the room declaring the rights and wrongs of design (as if they exist!). I try to make my classroom environment a place with more questions than answers. I learn as much from the students as they do from me. They keep me on my toes and force me to look at every problem from a variety of perspectives. When I walk into the classroom and see twenty-five different solutions to a problem I set for them, I have to think on my feet and quickly find relationships between the pieces on the wall. Working with students really forces me to think things through completely—there’s no room for intellectual laziness, because they will inevitably ask you the question you aren’t ready to answer. I take these experiences into my professional practice all the time, especially as I’m communicating with clients about their needs.

My thesis at Cranbrook was all about the emotional connection between our thoughts and our actions, and that is still my main motivation eleven (!) years later. If graphic design is primarily about persuasion, then we have to know how to get the audience to act on our messages. We have to understand the audience’s emotional motivations. I think emotion trumps reason every time, so my work always comes from that point of view.
The interesting thing about this is that I’ve found it to be true with my professional design practice and also when I design projects for students. If students can’t find some reason to buy in on a personal level, they won’t have the most rewarding learning experience in the classroom. Almost all the projects I assign give students flexibility to tailor the assignments to their own personal story. In my professional work, I also try to open up a space where my audience can situate themselves personally into the story I’m telling/selling.

AN: 3. You have an obvious interest in the arts, and also worked as an in-house designer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in what ways have the arts inspired your graphic design over the years?

DF: When I was an elementary school student, my mom enrolled me in an art program for kids on Saturday mornings at the local art museum. I remember refusing to leave one day, and being dragged out crying by my mother as the museum was closing. I always loved art museums and knew I would work in one someday. So when I graduated from Cranbrook, I sent my resume to every art museum in any city I would consider living in. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was the museum that called me back. After about 18 months, I realized that working behind the scenes in a museum took away all the romance I had once felt, so I quit and took another in-house design job at The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.

AN: 4. Incidentally, you also create abstract and autonomous works of art yourself. Has that always been a part of your life? What does the pursuit of this type of work contribute to your attitude towards life and work?

DF: I have always loved the fine arts and making things. I went to a high school for the arts in North Carolina (North Carolina School of the Arts, now known as University of North Carolina School of the Arts), where I lived in a dorm and studied art all day every day. It was the most amazing experience of my life. When I left for undergrad at NC State’s College of Design, I chose to major in graphic design because I was intrigued by words and stories and I knew I would work with words as a graphic designer. I really had no idea what I was doing when I was making these decisions at age 17!
I see my painting practice as an outlet for personal liberation and self-exploration. I’m not interested in making broad, critical, political or cultural statements through painting, but rather I’m simply making my meditations visible and somewhat tangible. I want my artwork to bring pleasure to others and give them a taste of the joy and gratitude I feel for the gifts of life and infinity that I witness everyday in people and in nature. I think my art-making practice is actually more essentially related to my yoga practice and my hiking habit rather than to my graphic design practice.
I’ve put a lot of my time, energy, and soul into design, and I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer see the graphic design object as an end point. I think design is inherently an interdisciplinary practice. In one way or another, design is about recognizing and creating relationships—combining narrative, linguistics, psychology, neurology, spirituality, anthropology, politics, business… you name it. These are the things that really draw me to design, more than the end product of the design itself.
I think I would probably be okay if I had to stop making graphic design artifacts today, as long as I could still work within a context of pulling disparate elements together to envision new relationships. I think it is at this point where my design practice, yoga practice, art making endeavors, and outdoor enthusiasm meet.

AN: 5. Since 2000, you have been in charge of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) brand as their brand manager and art director. Did you have a previous connection to or interest in the fashion world?

DF: There are about 20 designers, writers, and production people working in the publications studio at FIDM. I’ve been collaborating with Creative Director and fellow Cranbrook 2-d alumna Tamar Rosenthal (’88) for almost ten years now. My job is to clarify the visual brand of FIDM, and her job is to make sure it is implemented cohesively throughout the campus.
To be completely honest, I had/have no deep interest in fashion or fashion design in itself. What does interest me is how design in general reflects our cultural values at a given time. California (even more-so in Los Angeles) is all about image — the culture is a kind of controlled chaos. It’s different from anywhere else I’ve ever lived (including all four mainland U.S. time zones) in that people are always late, it’s ok to make plans and then cancel at the last minute… But at the same time there’s not a lot of spontaneity either. Traffic is too awful, and friends live too far away from each other for unexpected get-togethers. I don’t think this happens in other places as much.
I try to reflect the cultural realities in my graphic designs for the FIDM. Five years ago, the cultural mood was pretty much a free-for-all. Especially in California it felt like people were drunk with uncontrolled consumerism. It was like money was water! FIDM’s designs reflected that sense of wild abandon and optimism. Even when we had a grid, it was camouflaged. We used a lot of amorphic, organic shapes that don’t align well to a gridded layout.
With the new economic realities and subsequent cultural shifts in people’s attitudes and values, however, we’ve begun to shift the FIDM brand slightly to reflect an evolved outlook. People are making more informed and disciplined choices about their educations and how to spend their money. We’re keeping those elements of joy, passion, and dynamism in the design, but now we’re infusing a little bit more obvious structure (as well as more meaty content) into the college’s publications. You’ll see this shift more overtly in the new college catalog that is currently on press, due for delivery in July.

AN: 6. Under your art direction, the FIDM saw 300% hike in their enrollment, that is an astounding manifestation of the importance that graphic design can play in adding to an organization’s bottom line. Where was the FIDM brand when you came on, and how did you begin this enormous task?

DF: When I started work at FIDM, they had about 2,500 students. Now there are about 7,500. The FIDM look when I started was much more subdued and serious. After I spent some time learning more about the target audience, I realized that while FIDM’s students are very passionate, playful, and ambitious, they aren’t generally overly serious, ceremonious, or rigid in their approach to their own education. I wanted to begin to reflect the students’ own qualities of optimism, dynamism, creativity, and freedom back to them through the FIDM brand, and it seems to have worked!

AN: 7. A lot of your FIDM work has an extremely positive, vibrant, colorful and exciting energy to it. Are these attributes innate to your personal style, or were they very consciously developed as brand attributes for the school?

DF: I think it’s a little of both. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to work for FIDM had my personal approach and graphic style not been in line with their vision of who they wanted to become. I do find it ironic, though, that while my designs and paintings are often multi-layered and in-your-face, I’m actually an introverted and quiet person.

AN: 8. In your work for The Boston Conservatory, we see some of your autonomous work bleed over in the form of watercolors that create a vibrant and organic framework for clean typography and silhouetted photography. How did you arrive at this solution?

DF: I actually traveled to Boston and visited the campus, met some of the people involved and got a visceral feel for the place. My experience of the space was two-fold. I got an immediate sense of the creativity of the place. The buildings were old. It was a little bit dirty. The layout of the campus was a maze leading through multiple, disconnected buildings. You could really sense the history and haphazard quality of the creative vibe there. At the same time, I could see that the students were serious (not as fun-loving and carefree as the students at FIDM) and focused on their crafts. I wanted to reflect that combination of ideas in the design with the use of the organic, uncontrolled ink blots and contour drawings juxtaposed with a strict use of typography. This is one of my favorite designs I’ve done. I thought it really reflected the energy and environment at The Boston Conservatory, and the client didn’t require a lot of compromises. I felt like for once my vision came off intact.

AN: 9. In 2006 you added another facet to your life as a creative person, and opened your Yoga teaching practice called “Generous Adventure”. It makes sense that a designer who has to sit still all day would take up yoga to stretch and rejuvenate a sore body. What made you want to take the extra step to get certified as a yoga teacher and open “Generous Adventure”?

DF: One of my classmates at Cranbrook survived by going to yoga classes all the time. I didn’t even know what yoga was then, but her ability to remain focused and calm in the lion’s den intrigued me. I got to L.A. in 1998 and started taking yoga classes at the YMCA. What kept me coming back was the simultaneous feeling of nothing and everything I felt during the final meditation, called “savasana” or “corpse pose.” I walked out of classes feeling as though I was floating on a cloud. Los Angeles is one of the best places in the U.S. for developing a yoga practice. There are so many expert teachers working in so many traditions — a student can find a good class to attend any time of night or day, and that’s what I did.
I got to the point where I wanted to move my practice beyond the physical aspects of asana alone. I wanted to know more about the mysterious “eight limbs” of yoga and how they work together to create a strong mind, body, and spirit. It was then that I signed up for my first teacher training course, and haven’t stopped since.
I think it is important for people who primarily sit still in their jobs to get up and move around. The body and mind are inseparable and neither can work at its best when the other is unhealthy or compromised. Since I began my yoga practice, my body has become stronger, as expected. But in addition my memory has improved, my creativity is enhanced, and I’m more patient and confident, among a variety of other benefits. Using the skills I’ve learned in yoga, I’m able to tap into mental and emotional places that were once off limits.

AN: 10. You currently live surrounded by nature in Colorado and are also involved with “Friends of McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area (FMC)”, has all this nature in your life had a recognizable effect on your various painting and design work?

DF: McInnis Canyons National Conservation area is a federally protected area encompassing about 125,000 acres of pristine desert wilderness, including natural red-rock formations, canyons, dinosaur fossils, Native American rock art, and the Colorado River. The FMC is a local group of outdoor enthusiasts, and we partner with the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to assist with the stewardship of the land. We organize volunteer events and educational activities, and raise money to assist the BLM with projects that wouldn’t otherwise get funded. We’re working on an oral history of the land right now — creating a documentary interviewing a few of the old-time cattle ranchers who have known the land since the days of the homesteaders in the 1800s.
My painting practice has been more affected by living in the boonies than my design practice, because most of my design clients are in urban areas. As an example, I’ve been working on a series of paintings inspired by my monthly flights over Utah as I’m flying back and forth from L.A. to Western Colorado.
Most people have never visited the Utah wilderness—there are vast areas of unpopulated desert. Nearly 80% of the entire area of the state is public land. I can see these places from the airplane and can recognize massive geological formations from the air that I’ve visited on the ground… Deep monstrous canyons, red rock spires, sage brush, the Colorado River. What I find equally interesting are the dirt roads that criss-cross the land at right angles — The roads are left from decades-ago uranium mining efforts. Once the desert landscape is marred by humans, it can take centuries for the land to return to its natural state. People who live back east and have never been to the west cannot imagine the expanses of openness out here. It’s awe-inspiring to look out into the horizon and see a snowcapped mountain that is over 100 miles away. You can drive on bumpy, dirt roads out to places where you need to bring an extra can of gas to get back to civilization. You just can’t do that back east. The experience of these places, in addition to my yoga practice, is another lens through which I can view my own creative process.