20th Anniversary Celebration with visionary illustrators Brian Rea, Maira Kalman, Barry Blitt, Edel Rodriguez, and Christoph Niemann

0:00And I remember walking in and the woman said, didn't I tell you to put in the mail? I said, yeah, but today the mail's coming in person. It's easy to make jokes about stuff, but to understand it deeply, I don't think I do. The most wonderful thing about a profession is that we cannot repeat ourselves.

0:18From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we'll hear from some of the illustrators Debbie has interviewed over the years. You do your sketches, you get to a point, and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's too much, that's too strong, and it gets dialed back. Just be who you are, and I love you. You know, what more do you need?

0:58As a form of visual communication, illustration works fast. A good illustration will communicate an idea almost instantaneously. A great illustration will induce us to linger over the details. Over the 20 years of Design Matters, Debbie has spoken with some of the great illustrators of our time. Today, we're going to play some excerpts from a few of our favorite interviews. Debbie has interviewed Brian Ray at least three times over the years. He's not quite a podcast regular, but every five years or so, she's had the opportunity to check in on him and see what he's up to. In 2011, Brian Ray had recently completed a stint as art director of the op-ed section of The New York Times.

1:42He had also already started illustrating the Times column, Modern Love, which he is still doing to this day, along with a lot of other stuff. I mean, I was spending a lot of time working in a certain kind of way when I first got out of school. It was very collage-driven. But in the evenings and when I had free time, I would go and draw from life, you know, the things that I saw along the avenue or different parts of Baltimore. And I would send those drawings to different art directors who I respect, like Leanne Shapton. I showed some to Paul Serra, who was living in Baltimore at the time. So that's where you met.

2:13Exactly, yeah. And people whose work I really admired were responding maybe more so to those drawings, the drawings that were telling stories that were feeling more real. Do you know what I mean? And not so style driven. And so their reaction was such a positive reaction. I thought maybe I should continue doing more of this. I mean, and that's not to say, oh, I just suddenly changed the work. The work was kind of always happening. But I think it kind of percolated to the surface maybe a bit more because of people who I respected were saying, you know what, this is something you should really be spending a bit more time with.

2:50So when you were in Maryland, were you at that time very seriously working toward becoming a successful illustrator? I mean, illustration is a very, very hard business to be in. Yeah. Yeah. I talk to my students about this a lot. And each year it seems to be getting more and more challenging for sure. I mean, especially, you know, younger illustrators getting out of school. But I think choosing to go to the Maryland Institute is obviously a big enough commitment. And I knew I was down there to try to do this as a career. So I spent a lot of time working on my craft and working on really, really my concepts, I suppose, as well.

3:25What do you mean by concepts? Like the development of having a style that was driven by ideas, not so much driven by style, or at least a balance between the two. And nowadays, I can maybe see that if you have both good ideas and good style, your career is maybe a bit longer. And so that was something maybe that I was attempting to achieve. But I think that the storytelling became a bigger part of it as I started to not care so much about style. And the work definitely shifted after my time in Baltimore. And so you armed with all of these new drawings, this new type of work that you're doing, you decided to move to New York.

4:04Yeah, it's interesting. I had gone to New York. You know, I did that thing right out of college. You go to New York with your portfolio and you run around to all the art directors who, you know, people told you to go see. people you really, really like. Such a demoralizing, soul-crushing experience. I mean, everyone said no. I remember going to see, you know, I went to Spy Magazine, or I called Spy Magazine, and I said, you know, I'd love to drop off my portfolio. Did they laugh? Well, their reaction was, and it was when it was, I think it was in Union Square at the time, and they said, yeah, just put it in the mail.

4:36And so at that point, I was so demoralized. It had been like five days of everyone just saying, put it in the mail. So I actually went to the office and I remember walking in and the woman said, didn't I tell you to put in the mail? I said, yeah, but today the mail is coming in person. You know, it's like one of those kind of things. But it is hard. Did it work? I got a chance to show it to the art director. Did you show it to Alex Asley? Yeah, Alex Asley was the art director at the time, which was great. That's fantastic. Does he remember that? Probably not. Probably not. Although I have had a chance to work with him when I was at the paper.

5:06But I remember seeing Mirko Illich and I kept a journal. I'm sort of obsessive when it comes to lists and taking notes and remembering things like that. And Mirko, yeah, Mirko flipped through it like it was like a flip book. And he just said, you have nothing I can use here, but keep sending me samples. Oh, well, at least he was encouraging you to continue to send samples. But I have to say, those kinds of reactions were probably better than people saying, oh, we can, you know. It actually forced me to go back to Baltimore after two weeks of time here in New York and really kind of work on what it was that I was trying to say.

5:41And I think spending the time in Baltimore actually really did help that a lot. So when did you end up moving to New York full time? It was probably 96 or 97. And how did you get your job as the op-ed art editor? I lied. You did? Ooh, tell us everything. Hey. Nicholas Blackman, who's since become a really good friend, he was a real help in getting me in the door there. He knew that I had an interest in design. He knew Paul. And did you meet him through Paul Sayre? I did, yeah. And when I came to New York, Paul asked me if I wanted to share a studio space with him, which was obviously a great experience.

6:17And I owe a lot to Paul for the experience itself. And it just gave me a chance to see a really, really fantastic designer work. So Nicholas had heard about me. I met with Nicholas. And he said, you know, if you're ever interested in filling in for me, you should maybe show your portfolio here. And so we set up a time to meet with, I believe it was Tom Bodkin. He's a sort of managing editor of the art department there. And so I sort of cobbled together this portfolio very quickly. And all of it was just sort of fake layouts and this kind of thing. And I put it on his desk. And, you know, it was the same kind of reaction, you know.

6:48You know, it was sort of like, so what you're saying is you have no practical design experience whatsoever. Oh, my God. And I just said, I said, yeah, but if you give me maybe three days of training, just three days and just see where I'm at after that, if it doesn't work out, then, you know, you can get rid of me. But I would love to just give this a shot. And I think he saw maybe that I was really excited about doing it. And so they did not put me in the op-ed section. They dumped me into, I think, like travel. Real estate. Yeah, exactly. I think automotive. But I think it was, I think I was in the dining section.

7:22So I did, you know, I laid out cupcakes and, you know, like picnics and things like that and these amazing spreads. So what was your, were you considered an art director? I was what they call a floating art director at the times. And there's quite a, at that time, there were sort of a handful of us. And when people would go on vacations, they would sort of dump us in for two or three days or a week, this kind of thing. And it actually was a great experience. You learned a lot about newspaper design, you know, the sort of make it fit design, which I like to call it. And then Janet Froehlich asked me to come down to the magazine, which, you know, that's kind of next level.

7:52It's mecca. That's intimidating. That's amazing. So she just happened to see your really interesting cupcake layouts and said, I want that guy in my magazine. Yeah, exactly. Those great layouts that I was doing in the dining section. Actually, there were a few people that I knew down there and they had asked, you know, would you be interested in coming down to our floor? And I said, you know, absolutely. I'd love to give this a shot. And it was kind of like graduate school. I mean, there were so many, you know, Andrea Fellow was there, Chris Dixon, Kathy Gilmore Barnes, you know, John Fulbrook was there at the time.

8:22I mean, obviously Janet, you know, they're just amazing people to sort of study, watch, learn from and learn quick. Well, everything at the time seems to be so quick. Yeah. So I was there for a bit. And then I had no interest in going backward to do any of the other sections. It just didn't really appeal to me or those sections weren't quite the right fit, but I was always sort of obsessed with what was going on on the op-ed page. And I think when that opportunity came up, then it was they reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in coming in for an interview. And then you got it.

8:53I did. So what does it mean being the art director of the op-ed page? How do you do that? How do you create all that work so quickly? How do you decide who you're going to be working with? How do you brief the artists and the designers and the illustrators that produce the work for you? There's three questions, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go. Yeah, right? What was the first one again? The first one was, how do you do it? How do you do that job? It certainly takes some time to get accustomed to the pace of it. I think the pace is really the thing. And once you lock into it, it's almost like you have an internal time clock when things need to get done.

9:30And you can sort of pre-sense your editor's pressure, you know, that phone call about to happen. And because it's a daily section, you know, it's, you know, two pieces of art every day, 365 days a year. And then on Sundays, it was at that time, it was like four pieces. And now it's actually quite, you know, it's quite a few more because they've kind of consolidated the Week in Review with the opinion section. You just reach out to the people who you admire the most. You aim as high as you can for what you want on the page every day. Peter Buchanan Smith, who was there before me, Steve Guarnaccio was there before me, but Peter was there before him.

10:01Peter gave me really good advice. He said, you know, look, don't try to hit a home run every day. Aim as high as you can, but there are going to be some strikeouts here and there, so just hit for average. I'd like to think we were trying to aim a little bit higher than that, but his advice was good advice because there's a burnout to that job. It is exhausting doing a daily section, but it's also exhilarating too. You're part of news, you're part of opinion, the pulse of things that are going on in culture. And when you match up great artists with a great piece and the page really, really comes together, there's nothing better.

10:32I think for the artists, it's always a thrill to do work for that paper, for sure. But I think it's also a kick for the art directors, too. You know, you get on the train in the morning and you see someone looking at your page and you watch how they're, you know, how they're looking at the page, what they look at first, how their eye tracks across things. And, you know, though it's a pretty gray page, you know, there are moments where we did some things that were a bit more dynamic with the page. And it was always pretty exciting to see how people reacted to it. Brian Ray in 2011. You can find Myra Kalman's work in museums, in children's books, and in many magazines, including The New Yorker and The New York Times.

11:08Debbie spoke with her in 2016, shortly after the publication of Beloved Dog, a book of texts and illustrations of the many canines she has encountered over the years. Let's talk about your columns for The New York Times, the Principles of Uncertainty, which was the first, and then The Pursuit of Happiness. The Principles of Uncertainty was in 2006, and it was essentially a narrative journal of your life. Despite the fact that it really was a very poignant journal of your life, you've said, how do you know who you are? Half the time, I do not know who I am. There is not one static place. How do you stay so centered?

11:55Well, that's a mystery. The end. Okay, then. In The Pursuit of Happiness, that was a year-long exploration of American history and democracy, and you revealed that you're a big fan of President Abraham Lincoln and even went on to write a book about Abraham Lincoln. What is it about Abraham Lincoln that you love so much? Well, I don't think anybody could study Lincoln and not fall in love with him. He was one of the greatest humanists in the history of the world and a very brilliant man. But I think that the intersection of kindness and intelligence is really something very interesting to look at.

12:34And he prevailed in extraordinary times. He was not soft by any means, obviously. But he had the great love of humanity, which is really something that shines through through all of these decades. Let's talk about your latest book, Beloved Dog. You did not always love dogs. In fact, your mom felt that dogs were bloodthirsty beasts gone undercover waiting for the perfect opportunity to upend a home or lunge at the throat of an unsuspecting little girl. That's accurate. So all that changed when you met Pete, the Irish Wheaton Terrier that stole your heart. Pete, the color of pink champagne. Talk about meeting Pete.

13:25Why did you get Pete? Well, we got Pete for very sad reasons because when Tibor was ill and the kids were little, people were saying that what we needed in the house, what would help for the mood of the house was to get a dog. and a dog would be an incredible mood elevator and a bringer of joy and fun and happiness. And it was true. But I was a little bit nervous at first. How did you even allow a dog into the house if you felt that somehow he was going to upend your home and lunge at the throat of your unsuspecting little girl? That's another mystery. You know, things happen and all of a sudden your brain just does a swivel and you go, okay.

14:04I think the most important decisions are made without any thought at all. Really? Yeah. Do you ever regret those decisions? Or do you feel like they're always good ones? No, I think that the decisions made without thinking are thrilling. Because that's your life. That's your whole life. With all of the twists and turns. And if you didn't do them, I mean, I might think like, oh, that wasn't so great. But of course I had to do that. You love spontaneity. I do. I like spontaneity that isn't insane. Yeah. So Pete He became your constant companion. He was your muse. Your mother even grew to love him, from what I understand.

14:41Is it true she made him platters of blintzes and schnitzel that were only for him? No one was allowed to touch? No one else was allowed to touch them. Yeah, it's true. It was extraordinary. And she knit him sweaters, of course, with his initial on it. Beautiful Bauhaus P. I read in a wonderful article in Vogue that you never consciously realized how often you were painting dogs and putting them in your stories. But it became clear to you that over the last however many years you'd been obsessed with dogs. You've also written quite a number of books now about Pete. So talk about your relationship to dogs, your unconscious and now your conscious relationship.

15:21Why do you think they were showing up so much in your work? Well, they're hilarious. And they're so heart-rending and they're so earnest and they're so nutty that you just, I mean, as entities in our world, as we're walking around the city, I don't understand how you could not notice and obsess about all the dogs. You stated that you and Pete were a couple and that you realized that he loved you above all others. Yeah, that's for sure. And that your children realized that he loved you above all others. And they also wondered if you loved him above all others. What do you think it is about dogs that make them so unconditionally lovable?

16:00First of all, they don't speak. Let's start with that. They don't speak. That's really big. I mean, if you were with somebody who didn't speak, you'd probably like them all the time. I know what I'm saying. So, you know, everybody talks too much and gives their opinion and needs support and needs encouragement. And dogs don't need any of that. So you don't have to give them anything, which is, you know, an incredibly selfish thing for people to do. But you don't have to give them anything except your presents. Plates of schnitzel. And, you know, and some schnitzels, you know, feed them. But the expectation is really just be who you are and I love you.

16:36You know, what more do you need? You are working on an illustrated edition of the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. talk about that. Can you tell us a bit about it? I wish I had to leave right now and go to Paris because that's what I would want to do. I just, you know, I adore her and I adore Alice B. Toklas. I just think Gertrude and Alice were sensational in their, you know, extreme and eccentricities and just the life that they lived. So I do want to travel to the south of France where they lived and go to visit their apartment, which I think I'm going to have access to, though of course it won't be the same, and just immerse myself, go to the cafe where Gertrude decided if she was going to buy that Cezanne or not.

17:17So that's, you know, that's one of the projects that I'm working on. And is that going to be a book of your own writing as well as, or are you using somebody else's text? No, I'm going to use the, I'm just illustrating the actual text that Gertrude wrote. Oh, so the actual text, yes. And I'll probably add an essay in the beginning or the end. You've said that there's a fluidity between the narrative word and the narrative picture. And I'm wondering if you could elaborate and talk about in what way there is this fluidity for you. I'm probably really influenced a lot by the Dadaists and the futurists who found no boundaries between language and art and text and the intersection of how you play with words and how you play with paintings.

18:01And perhaps coming from another country and learning English and just falling in love with that language and falling in love with words and letter forms. I mean, it all comes to play in a very vivid way. Do you have favorite words? It depends on the week or the month. But, you know, sometimes I latch on to something and I don't stop saying it until people around me say, please stop saying that or else I don't know what – recalcitrant. I don't know what the word is this week. Recalcitrant. But also, you know, the names of authors like, you know, Franz Grillparser, I embroider that all over the place because I just can't believe that somebody has the name Grillparser and it makes me so happy.

18:39And there is a Grillparser tort. So right away, all the things in my life, the cake and the name and the writer, it's all there. Myra Kalman from 2016. Barry Blitz has been one of the premier political satirists of our era. His covers frequently grace The New Yorker, and a few of them, like his drawing of Barack Obama in Muslim garb, fist bumping, a machine gun toting Michelle Obama, have been wildly controversial. Debbie spoke with him in 2017, shortly after the publication of a collection of his work called Simply Blit. When you were a teenager, your focus was on drawing hockey players, baseball players, Elton John, all of which I can understand.

19:25But you also had a focus on drawing Dorothy Hamill. Right. Why Dorothy Hamill? I don't think we have to talk about this, really. Why? I liked Dorothy Hamill at a certain age where I was vulnerable. Oh, wait, so you had a crush on her. I had a crush on Dorothy Hamill. Oh, I was thinking that it might have had something to do with her hair. Well, she had good hair. But you had a crush on her. I did. And did you ever send her any of your drawings? I hope I didn't. I can't totally remember. Yeah. Did you send your drawings out a lot to people? I did, yeah. I grew up in Montreal, so I was a hockey fan, as you pretty well had to be.

19:59And I had a sort of a scam going where I would draw hockey players, usually the visiting teams, and I would go down to the hotel where they stayed. And I would wait for them to come down into the lobby, and I would present them with their drawings. And I ended up, you know, befriending a lot of hockey players and getting free tickets to hockey games. So that was the scam part? That was the scam, yeah. Maybe it wasn't a scam. It was more of an angle. But I had my work published in the Pittsburgh Penguins playoff yearbook and the Philadelphia Flyers yearbook. Can you see, if you were to look back on those drawings now, the beginning of your signature style?

20:33No. No, they were reverential, you know. I mean, I was a smart aleck, as I mentioned, but I sort of kept that out of my work. I thought one's art shouldn't be sullied by your wise cracks and your attitude. From all the research that I've done about your early drawing and going to college and so forth, it seems that you really had two separate camps of work. You had this what you called crazy pictures that you kept out of your portfolio. They were for your friend's eyes only. And then you had the more serious, what you considered to be artistic work. What kind of work was that? Once I, at a certain age, learned to capture a likeness, you know, it was hero worship, basically.

21:14And then when that started to feel uncomfortable, it was sort of photorealism with very soft pencils, charcoal and stuff like that. And at the same time, I was doing pen and ink stuff. So I had sort of a dual portfolio that I brought around to magazines in Toronto after I finished school. Now, you never took any art classes before you went to college. Yet you got into the Concordia University in Montreal and then the Ontario College of Art on the strength of what you referred to as your humorless portfolio. And so those were just drawings that you made on your own that weren't hockey players or Dorothy Hamill.

21:52What kinds of things were you doing at that point? There was probably some Dorothy Hamill. I mean, there was rock star drawings. And so then when you got into school, you decided, OK, this is it. I'm going to be an artist. I want to do this for a living. I mean, I felt I was going to do this for a living. I thought maybe I'd be drawing portraits in hotels, or I'm not sure what I thought I would be doing. You wrote that you were intimidated when you first got to college. Just being around so many terrific artists, you know, I wasn't used to that. Being around with, you know, surrounded by people who were damn good at this, for one thing.

22:28And maybe realizing that what I was doing was crap, you know. which, you know, I feel every day, but that's when I was first introduced to it. When I was, you know, 14 and drawing hockey players, I thought I was just doing fantastic work. Given that the bulk of your work for school assignments was, as you put it, authentically realistic, with slavish adherence to likeness and mood, what kind of response were you getting from your professors? Did you ever show them your more slapdash pen and ink drawings? I did some. I remember one of the first pen and ink drawings I did, the slapdash style, was a drawing of Rodney Dangerfield that I haven't matched since.

23:09It was just, you know, the colors were bright. I wish I still drew like that. And you still have that drawing? I still have that drawing. It should be in the book. It's not. Yeah, it should be in the book. Yeah, so I got a good response to that particular drawing. But after that, I went back to the charcoal stuff. And at that point, you just said that you were thinking you might make illustrations in a hotel or something like that. But what was – did you have aspirations? Were you thinking, I'd like to be a cartoonist in the vein of? I think I was fighting against the cartoonist label, you know, and I had a roommate in art school who was a fine artist, an aspiring fine artist, and he would look at my drawings and say, oh, it's cartoons, you know, what you're doing.

23:54He would belittle it by that. I think I took that as a pejorative and I was trying to do something higher, but I'm not sure what it is I was trying to do. How did you go about getting work when you first graduated? So, yeah, I brought around a portfolio of my pieces I was proud of, but, you know, I wanted to stack the portfolio and I also had some funny stuff. And every art director I went to, except for a few notable ones, preferred the funny stuff. Did that worry you at the time? I was happy to get work. You know, I was happy that I expected to bring work in and, you know, not have it be well received.

24:32So I was excited that they liked something. You wrote how you felt that indulging in the humorous for money in real magazines and newspapers felt like cheating. Is it because you enjoyed it so much? I don't know about the money part. I mean, I would have happily sold the realistic stuff for money. But, yeah, I thought that art was something higher than, you know, wisecracks. Little did I know. You can make a good living at this stuff. Yeah, and there's tremendous art in wisecracks. And, you know, I've come to appreciate that. But your work is really more than just wisecracks. It's not Three Stooges kind of ha-ha-ha work.

25:14There's a real biting satire to it. Not that there's not some biting satire as well to the Three Stooges, but how did you start to bring politics and satire into your work? I started getting work with the funny stuff, the so-called funny stuff. And then I started sending my portfolio to the United States and getting work there. And before too long, I had a regular gig with Entertainment Weekly and I was doing pop culture stuff. So it still had echoes of Dorothy Hamill and Electric Light Orchestra, etc. And I think the political angle emerged with the Monica Lewinsky scandal when suddenly it seemed like politics became pop culture.

25:54And I was being asked by Entertainment Weekly, of all places, you know, to make Bill Clinton jokes. And politics was everywhere. And it sort of happened that way. From what I've uncovered in my research, when you first started out doing this type of work, you, by your own admission, say that your knowledge of politics was superficial. You don't still feel that way, do you? I think so. I mean, I don't have strong feelings or understanding of economic policy or anything like that. I mean, I find I go to a dinner party and if everyone is left wing there, which I consider myself strongly left wing, but I argue with whoever I'm talking to.

26:35I'm sort of a contrarian. It's easy to make jokes about stuff, but to understand it deeply, I don't think I do. Because there really is a deep pathos embedded in your work, at least that I perceive, that leads me to believe that the person behind those drawings is sort of deeply feeling the humanity in any situation. No? Just making it up. Sure, yeah. I hope I am. I know. You don't like compliments. I have to keep up. I have to be careful. I would rather not think about these things too much. I think if I were to worry or to look inward too far, it would kill every artistic impulse I had. It would make me too self-conscious.

27:14Not that I'm not enough already. When you first started working at The New Yorker in the 1990s with Chris Curry, you began drawing illustrations for reviews and for articles and either pen and ink or watercolors. So at that point, do you feel that you had sort of found your style, your book? Yeah, quite a bit before that, by the late 80s, by the late 80s. How did you get your first big break with The New Yorker? The first big break with The New Yorker, I mean, I remember, I think they still used to see artists then. I don't know if they do anymore, but I brought my portfolio in. I called Chris Curry, and she came out into the lobby and looked through my portfolio and then gave me a movie review to illustrate.

27:58I did several of those. And then she introduced me to Francoise Mouly, who had just started at the magazine. Now, I read when she first reviewed your portfolio, you showed her a few panels on a page about a beard. museum. Right. So does that really exist or was it an idea to develop one? That was an idea just I kept showing to Francoise. Part of my relationship with Francoise is to try and make her laugh. If I would bring her a sketch that she didn't like, I would make sure to bring it back, you know, and I think she said, that's ridiculous, you know, we're not going to run that. So kept bringing it back to her.

28:36Well, in 1993, Françoise invited you to try, in quotes, a cover. What does it mean to try a cover? At the end of a phone call about something else, she just said, you know, why don't you, you should be pitching covers. You know, why don't you? And I was doing a lot of spot illustrations by then, so the amount of real estate a cover has is intimidating. I mean, there's a shroud of mystery around how the New Yorker covers come into being. I learned a lot reading your book about it, and it's really fascinating, especially the speed in which it happens. But I do know that there's this process of pitching ideas for the covers.

29:19So how do you go about doing that? You just decide that this is a topic that you believe is worthy of a cover and then execute and send in a sketch? Is that really how simple it is? I guess so. I mean, back then, this was before I had a scanner probably. And so I would walk, it was before I was doing political stuff, I would walk around the city and have a sketchbook open and see things that amused me. And in this particular time, I'm sure I sent in quite a few sketches. But one, I was watching people newly, you know, congregating outside of buildings smoking cigarettes. That was a new law that you couldn't smoke in an office.

29:59And so I had them standing on window ledges. That was the sketch. Barry Blitt in 2017. Adele Rodriguez writes and illustrates children's books. He also designs posters and book covers. but he's best known for his political illustrations. Debbie spoke with him in 2018. Your cover for Newsweek, What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women, that issue won a National Magazine Award, and it also stirred up a fair amount of controversy. Prior to that, your work appeared on the cover of Communication Arts. It showed Che Guevara with a Nike swoosh on his hat and Apple earbuds, which is a bit like blasphemy to the people in Cuba.

30:44And then, of course, there's your amazing Trump covers for Time, which landed you on Ad Age's 50 Most Creative People of the Year list in 2016, alongside Frank Ocean, Prince, Tom Ford, David Bowie, and Beyonce. How ridiculous is that, right? Well, I think it's kind of amazing. It's kind of amazing. How do you feel about all this press? um i'm just always shocked by all of it i'm surprised by anything that happens in my life on a regular basis so i'm always telling friends or asking someone like is this really happening is this you know am i on this list with these people am i doing this is this you know because it's really um strange to me it's exciting and it's fun um and it's it's actually what i've learned is how sometimes simple it is to to get to places where you never dreamed you'd be at If you just kind of work and show it and be open, not be scared, speak your mind, confront problems, confront people that you think are not good for society.

31:49So when you're honest, people just get a vibe off it and they just want to be near that or be close to that. And that's what I try to do with my work. Let's talk about the Time magazine cover from 2016, the Meltdown cover. It showed an illustrated Trump literally melting. How did you come up with the idea? I'd been doing sort of these kinds of images where the face or something is kind of falling down or falling apart. I actually did it with a portrait of Gaddafi for Newsweek after they killed him, and it was very similar, this sort of graphic of things melting down. And the art director of Time, D.W.

32:33Pine, called me and said, hey, I have an idea. It's actually kind of like his idea with my stuff. And the way I work with DW is like that. He knows my vocabulary, knows my things. And he's like, we have a headline. It's called Meltdown. We want a face of him melting down. It was not that complicated. And I just followed along and we worked on it together. The trick was to making it work, because you can do a face that has a bunch of details. And I really wanted it to just focus on his mouth. And it was all about him screaming. And that's really what got him in trouble all the time was this, he can't stop talking.

33:09So I did this, the image, and I actually thought when I turned it in, that it would just never be published, which happens very much at Time Magazine. At the time, it was in the middle of the election. And there's always a sense of being conservative around the time of election and being neutral, whatever. But Trump had gone so far and done and said so many awful things that even time magazine had turned on him and not not turned on but but just wanted to really show what was going on um it was it was so out there was at the time that he was making fun or mocking the the family of the muslim soldier i always turn my artwork in and i just detach and i and i don't you know see what happens and then i started hearing that it was published on the internet and like oh wow they published it.

33:59I actually never heard back from the art director. It was the cover that was heard around the world and I think it ushered in a really new phase of illustration work on magazine covers. Much stronger, much more direct, much more brutal. Yeah, that's the right word. Brutal. The danger that we were facing and that we are occasionally still facing in this country is this neutrality, this this, oh, both sides have their own point of view. We need to listen to both sides, that kind of thing, which liberals practice very well. It's this very thing of, oh, let's just listen. They have concerns, let's listen to that.

34:40Or he said this, let's listen to it and take into account. But it got to a point where I felt you needed to confront this. It was basically fascism in the United States and you don't appease fascists. You really do confront it as strongly as possible. And that's what I want to do with that cover. You know, making him orange is a very strong visual. You know, it's taking what he kind of looks like and then tweak it even more. So I wanted that strength. It was just nice to have the backing of the magazine. Because once that Time magazine does that, then everybody else is like, oh, okay, we can do it too.

35:18we can confront this in the same way. What I had been doing for about six months before was to do this stuff on my own, do these graphics on my own and put them out there. I've been doing things on Twitter and Facebook and all these art directors at these magazines follow my work. So I was trying to sort of change the mentality and create sort of a brand of Trump as this, as what he really was. And I was just kind of waiting for magazines or clients to catch up or waiting for a moment where I could stick it into the sketch phase or send it to a client. And it happened. It started happening about six months or a year after I was working.

36:00I was doing this kind of stuff during the primaries. So you were doing it, you were self-generating the work and then it... Yeah. And that was the idea. That was the idea. About two years earlier, I had done a similar campaign on ISIS where I felt what was happening with ISIS was so strong and nobody was really covering it with strength. And I started doing this work about ISIS and being very strong, mostly on the Internet. And at some point, I started getting hired to do this ISIS work for The New York Times and for a bunch of other places. I've been working with these publications for such a long time.

36:35You do your sketches, you get to a point and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's too much. That's too strong. and it gets dialed back. So I was trying to find a way to subvert that process. And the way I found was to get ahead of it, put things out myself, have fan base or people on the internet sharing, commenting. And when it becomes so big, all of a sudden clients want a part of that, which is what I found over the last two years, roughly, is a different way of working. Did you go to time with the total meltdown follow-up or did they come to you and ask you to do it? No, that was that made it even more brilliant.

37:12No, that was also them. That was also it was at a point where it was a funny week. The Hollywood reporter, Hollywood, I forget how access Hollywood tape had come out. And I got another call from the art director, DW, and he said, hey, we want you to do a similar thing, but do the GOP logo melting down. And I was like, that's kind of weird, you know, like just repeating as a GP logo. And I tried it, I sent it to them, and they held on to it, and I never heard back until Wednesday morning at 10, which is their publication day. The EW calls, hey, we decided, we've gone through everything, we want to do a total Meltdown cover.

37:56Take your image and just splash it all the way down. And I was like, okay, when's the deadline? At noon? So it was a two-hour deadline to create this new piece of art. and I started frantically sketching and trying to figure out how to do that. It was actually, for me, it was difficult to do that compression and do it well. So I think I sent it around 11.45 or something and then he's like, well, let's rework it. I'm like, we have no time. So they were treating it like a regular assignment where we tweak things. And then finally I was able to resolve it and it came out the next day. Yeah, but a lot, you know, time definitely gets a lot of credit for writing.

38:36headlines and sort of like working with me on these things. I read that you'd much rather not be creating work about Trump. How do you manage to look at that face as much as you have to look at it? I don't really look at him. I don't really look at pictures of him. It's like all just symbols and graphics in my head. I usually spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you know, on something. If it's a cover or something. 15 minutes? Yeah, on a daily thing, like something I might put on the internet. It's very fast, actually. If it's a cover, then definitely I'll spend more time tweaking it and things like that.

39:17You know, I could maybe do something in three or four hours. You know, part of the reason there's no visual cues that it seems I don't want to draw his eyes and his nose and get involved in all of this stuff. I have friends that have painted him. Yeah, Barry Blit can do that. Yeah. How could you, like, sit there and, like, render his face? I just can't do it. I wouldn't do it. So for me, it's more of an object and a brand. Sort of like I've created this branding and this brand of him, and I can now tweak it and change it. And it's not even him that I'm doing. It's more about, it's anti-branding.

39:50It's creating a brand and then doing everything to destroy it, basically. Adele Rodriguez in 2018. Christoph Niemann is an artist, author, and animator. His illustrations appear frequently on the covers of The New Yorker and The New York Times magazine. Debbie spoke with him also in 2018. When you first came to New York, I read that your original portfolio didn't showcase one specific visual style or technique. And I understand you had everything in there from vector graphics to pixel drawings. But the common denominator was that the centerpiece of all your work has an idea. so much so that you stated that if someone approached you with a fixed idea about what they wanted the conversation was pretty much over why frankly because i knew they had the wrong person and i would tell them often and and not in a confrontational way like oh i would never can i execute your drawing but i feel there isn't a lot of incredible kind of grafts people out there if you have a concept and you need to execute it in watercolor oil or wooden sculpture There's people for that.

40:58And my talents would be more in coming up with a concept and then trying to find a style within my limitations to make it come alive. What limitations? Limitations are good. I mean, I still struggle with my limitations. And, you know, like there's in any kind of drawing, once you want to draw as with anything, you're constantly aware of the stuff that you cannot do. on the other hand you know that often in that limitation interesting stuff happens because what makes a drawing or a concept interesting is that something unexpected is happening and if i was able to take what's in my head and put it on paper really one-to-one it would be boring often it's 90 correct but 10 off and these 10 where your hand does something that your mind didn't think of, that's where you sometimes open a door into something that's really surprising.

41:50Let's go back to your history, and then we're going to go deeply into the way you work. 2001 was a big year for you. You had your first New Yorker cover, and you met and married your wife, Lisa. Since that time, you've had three children. You've illustrated nearly 30 covers for The New Yorker. I counted them last night, as well as several columns for The New York Times, Covers for the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Wired. Illustrations for the Museum of Modern Art, National Geographic, and so forth. You've published 13 books. Numerous apps, and frankly, that's the shortlist, Christoph.

42:28So after your internships with Paul and Paula, you were never officially employed full-time again. It's true. Talk about your first New Yorker cover. What was the process like? How did you feel when you were assigned a cover? How does it work? No, you're never assigned a cover. It's an open contest. And when you know Françoise, basically anybody can send the sketch. But of course, it's so much about trust. They want to know that you can actually execute it. So if you know her, if you're in the system a little bit, which you get by sending and stuff. And I had worked for a New Yorker before. Or we talked and July 4th was, you know, that's a recurring theme, something about fireworks or barbecue.

43:09And then I just started sending in work. And I think that was not even the first one. I think I'd worked on some Martin Luther King holiday ones before. And it just didn't work out because the chances are pretty slim. How many covers would they get for a specific issue? Well, you don't want to know. It's a lot. Really? Yeah. So it's just illustrators all over the world sending in work because they… Sketches. sketches. Yeah. It's a conversation start and then you start to mold that idea into something. It's a back and forth and Francoise is a great art director. She has such a great sensibility of what the cover does and also the long narrative.

43:46Not only one cover but really the cover week after week. So all these things are taken into consideration. So if you have an idea, Barry Blitt might have an idea and Paul Sayre might have an idea and everybody's sending in their ideas and then Francoise picks the ideas that she likes best. Is that how it works? Well, and there's also David Remnick, who has the final say. Yes, the editor-in-chief. It's a system. I know I'm extremely... It really has to do a lot with luck. No, it's just... That's such a troubling word for me. It is. Well, you can increase luck by just trying a lot, and that will increase your chances for luck to work out.

44:24But I just know that a lot of people send in incredible ideas, and that there's no scale of brilliance. And then if you hit like above 17 or if you have the most brilliant cover this week, it will end up on the cover. It's just, you know, for that, it's too much of a human subjective process. And it's a good thing. But I can see how this process can be incredibly frustrating. It's been frustrating for me. I had, I was lucky a lot of times. It's still frustrating when you have an idea where you think, oh, come on, that would be so good and so right. It's a system I have not figured out. Well, with nearly 30 covers, something must be working.

44:59In one of your 13 books, the monograph of sorts titled Sunday Sketching, you state that for anything decent you've ever done, you distinctly remember being in a tense and grumpy mood. Even worse, you get suspicious when you're having too good of a time working since you know this doesn't bode well for the outcome. Why? I got to say that the book was based a little bit on that sentiment. and me trying to figure out why that is because I realized it was actually bearing down on my work and it was making me unhappy. And I want to make fun work. I want to make work that inspires or makes you think or that in general can create some sort of like a positive or like emotional experience.

45:46And I think a common and natural mistake is that you think that the emotion that you want to convey in a drawing, you would have as you create it. So let's say you do a surprising idea that the idea happens in a surprising way. You sit there and go, and then it just like it sits on the page. And that's just not the case. And that's frustrating. And so I think when you feel too kind of enchanted by your own process and by your drawing, it distracts you from what you're trying to do. And what you're trying to do is really you have an idea. You put it on paper. You judge it as you draw it. You put it back into you, through your eyes, into your head, and then your hand does a second iteration.

46:29So it's a circular process. And this process requires a huge amount of almost physical effort. It's mental effort, but it feels like physical effort. And when you run or when you do any kind of physical exercise, like usually when you're putting in your full effort, you're tense. And so I think tension is a good thing. It shouldn't turn into kind of outright depression. But I think it's, I love this job, but just because the end result might be funny, the process isn't funny. You've actually said that the more playful something looks, the more gruesome the process is for you. Is that still the case?

47:05Yes, usually it is. And it's, you know, gruesome makes it sound terrible. But let's say a drawing that has a very swift feel, you have to, you cannot, like a certain brush stroke, you cannot slow that down. It really has to kind of come in one swoop. And when you have five or six brush strokes, that means the sixth one might ruin the whole drawing. And so that's a very, it's a very tense situation. And just like this fear of messing things up, it kind of, of course, it weighs on you. Your grumpy mood has very little to do with the creative challenge in front of you. It seems to be more of a cloud of generic fears that included the following, and I'm quoting you from your book.

47:46One, I'm not good enough. Two, my work is irrelevant and soon I'll be broke. Three, I'm out of ideas. That actually doesn't just apply to Christoph. I think there's not one creative person I've ever interviewed, except maybe Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser, who don't suffer from those things. And I think the only reason those guys haven't or didn't was because when I interviewed them, they were in their 80s. So really, those things plague you? I can't even imagine how you, Christoph Nieman, you know, one of the greatest illustrators of our time, is plagued by those fears. You're not good enough, your work is irrelevant, and you'll be broken, you're out of ideas.

48:28Frankly, I think if they wouldn't plague me, I would be in big trouble. Because how can you work creatively if you don't worry about these things? And again, worry is a relative term, but one of our curses and the most wonderful thing about our profession is that we cannot repeat ourselves. So everything that we do that's great means we can never do it again. But can't you rely on yourself to be able to continue to hit it out of the ballpark? No, because, you know, I guess when you're a heart surgeon and you do an operation 200 times, I guess you get a better feel for texture for your hands. You feel like, okay, you've been in tough situations and your chance to do a good job will increase.

49:07But for us, it's really you do something great and you cannot repeat it because that thing is off limits. It must be even worse for writers. I mean, there's the curse of the second book. You've done a book and then it's great and you sit there and you know everybody will even measure you. You just want to be a new writer again who's allowed to write a first book, which you're not. Same thing with musicians and their second album. Joni Mitchell once joked that nobody ever asked Van Gogh to play a starry night again. And of course, it's great. This is how we get to work because we get to reinvent and redo.

49:41But so I think in general, just questioning yourself and not being able to rest on your laurel is extremely important. But I found that since what I do is, you know, it's sitting at your desk. So you're there with your thoughts and with your tools. There's a lot of thinking going on. And the thinking should be about what's happening on the page. And I think it's important to think about relevance. I think it's very important for us to think about where our industry goes and where is our place in that and to observe what's happening, what's happening in technology, in media, in language, in communication.

50:16But the moment I sit there to do a drawing, I shouldn't be thinking about that. Then I just have to think about what I do. And I'm very aware of my shortcomings in terms of drawing. I mean, I was at the Met yesterday looking at the Delacroix exhibition, and that's really putting the bar insanely high. But you just look at these drawings, and you know there's a long way to go to artistic excellence. Then again, when I sit down to draw, I only have what I have. So it's absolutely pointless to beat myself up about, oh, I should have spent more time drawing feet. I have to do with what I got. Christoph Niemann in 2018.

50:55You can hear full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with a huge variety of illustrators, artists, and other creative people on our website, designmatters.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.