Farewell, New York. And farewell, America!

I had some time before the plane. At my meeting with CO OP in the morning, Jim Moran had warned me about the cabs, which apparently all stop working between about 3pm and 5pm. There’s a shift change or something, and getting a cab is well nigh impossible. 

Well, my plane wasn’t until 8.55pm, and I’d finished the last meeting of the day – indeed, the whole trip – by about 3pm.

It had been a good one, too. I’d been invited into the offices of a major global branding consultancy to meet one of their Creative Directors. It turned out he’s keen to work with me later this year on an absolute plum of a job in New York. And I mean, a really, really exciting one. (Wish I could tell you more than that.) So I couldn’t really have asked for a better end to the tour.

But New York hadn’t quite finished dispensing gifts. With an afternoon to kill, and armed with Jim’s knowledge that there was little point trying for a cab until after about 5.30pm, I told myself I deserved a drink.

The snow on Madison Avenue

A couple of nights before I’d discovered O’Donoghue’s, an Irish bar on 44th Street near Times Square. It was just what you want from a New York bar: smallish, friendly, busy but not heaving. And Irish, which always helps. They did a good Guinness.

So I took myself back there for a celebration drink, while the cabbies were all off doing whatever New York cabbies do when they’re not driving cabs.  

And what do you know, I end up chatting to the guy next to me at the bar, and he’s a writer from England. Manchester, to be exact. Currently working for the BBC and spending two weeks in New York every couple of months.

I love the idea that if you scratch a New York bar, you’ve got a good chance of finding an English writer. That seems entirely as it should be.

So we had a beer together, and when that didn’t seem quite enough we had another one. As we were drinking that one, the barmaid said, ‘It’s snowing!’ And so it was. Snow in New York city to see me off. Perfect.

It was pretty snug in O’Donoghue’s, I have to say, and my new Mancunian friend seemed the sort you could happily chat to until suddenly it’s tomorrow morning, and someone with a tea-towel is insisting you go home. But I forced myself off the barstool, said my goodbyes, and walked through the gathering snow back to the Gotham for my bags.

What a trip! It was a fantastic experience from start to finish, managing even to exceed my own hopes and expectations. (As I write this, by the way, I still have all the meetings from Chicago and New York to write up here – bear with me!)

So I need to say a quick, but sincere, thank you to everyone I met along the way, many of whom went to some trouble to make the time to meet up. Thanks very much to all of you.

But the biggest thanks of all have to go to Ted Pearlman, who stage-managed every step of this odyssey with extraordinary sensitivity and skill, and amazing generosity.

Ted organised all the flights and hotels, and found me pretty much every restaurant, lunch spot, pub and coffee house I visited. And by the time I arrived at each of them, the staff knew I was coming and the bill was settled. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Thank you so much, Ted.

I’ve seen some wonderful places, met a whole string of truly inspiring people. I also have several definite assurances of collaborations to come, including some from people I hardly expected ever to meet, let alone work with. And I got to fall in love with New York City all over again. It’s been phenomenal.

Ted and I are now working on three or four ideas, all of which are pretty exciting. Those will be reported, in the fullness of time, on my main website. But this is me signing off on this blog. Thanks for reading!

Ted Pearlman

Arriving in New York on Friday afternoon meant I had the enormous luxury of a weekend off before the meetings began on Monday.

I’ve already been over what I got up to on Saturday. On Sunday, I headed back to Brooklyn to meet the same friends I’d been with the night before, this time for brunch with their three gorgeous young daughters. (We went to the splendidly named Prime Meats, on Court Street. Great sausages, as you’d expect.)

Then they were off to a kids’ birthday party, and I was back off into Manhattan to meet – finally – the mastermind behind this whole trip: my client, Ted Pearlman.

I’ve explained a little about Ted and why this all happened on the About page, so I won’t go back over that. But Ted’s a charming and fascinating guy, not to mention extremely generous, so it was great to finally meet him in person, rather than over Skype.

He had a great idea, too, which was to check out the Whitney museum, which I’d never been to. We strolled up there and spent an intriguing time peering at what felt to me like a somewhat patchy collection (but then, what do I know?), punctuated by a few great moments. Fabulous building, though – and good to see the collection there before it moves.

It turns out Ted and I share a sort of Yogi Bear fixation with food, the next meal never far from either of our minds, and Ted was fair cock-a-hoop when I mentioned my love of Thai.

That was it: we were off to Land, a New York favourite of Ted’s. And it was indeed fantastic. If you’re a fan of Thai food too, and happen to be in Manhattan, it’s definitely worth seeking out.

As we sat and ate, we talked (among other things) about Meddle, an idea Ted had had which I like a lot. (And the name of which I’d come up with on the plane between San Francisco and Chicago. Always working.)

The first ever Meddle is, hopefully, on the horizon. The idea is to pull a group of smart people together over two or three days, with the task of generating some tangible progress on a specific issue, chosen by the ‘middle Meddler’ around whom the whole thing is built. Somewhat dauntingly, the first Middle Meddler is going to be me.

It was a great way to spend the afternoon, and so good to spend some time chatting with Ted without him freezing mid-gesture or suddenly turning mute, as tends to happen during most of our conversations.

Even these days, when technology pretends to bring us so much closer together (and actually kind of does), there’s still no real substitute for sitting down with someone in person. Especially when there’s a good red curry on the table.

Hello, New York

‘To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements,’ wrote PG Wodehouse. ‘Being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the bother and expense of dying.’

What is it about New York that makes people feel that way? Because it does the same thing to me. Every time I step out of the hotel (which admittedly is just about perfectly located for the ‘classic New York experience’) I just start grinning.

And I stay that way, smiling like a lunatic, as I head off down Fifth Avenue, or Madison, or across Times Square – these legendary places whose names alone can give me goosebumps.

I’ve long dreamed of being in New York. I don’t just mean I wanted to come here, although I did, from an early age. But I literally dreamed, vividly and often, of finding myself in Manhattan, long before I first came to the city about 16 years ago. 

That dream Manhattan was a weird mish-mash of movies, imagination and the usual inexplicable dreaminess. But oddly, it always tended to be the same place. There was a kind of island in the middle of the city, with an enormous cathedral on it. A bit like the Île de la Cité in Paris. And all around, rather tawdry, sometimes slightly frightening, streets, which I suspect owed quite a lot to Scorsese.

Even in these dreams, I was thrilled to be in New York. I would think about how I’d always dreamed about it, and now here I was – and it was just as I imagined! Then I woke up, of course, and it was just another dream.

So how marvellous to find, like Wodehouse, that the first time I encountered the real thing, it more than ‘came up to its advance billing’. This is my third visit, and I still find my first glimpse of that skyline, my first walk in these streets, overwhelmingly exciting.

Pacino and Cannavale in Glengarry Glen Ross

And what a treat for my first day: a trip out to the theatre for one of the last performances of Glengarry Glen Ross with Al Pacino – not to mention a great company of other actors, including Richard Schiff, Bobby Cannavale and John McGinley. 

It was terrific, I thought. It’s pretty hard to not be Al Pacino when you’re Al Pacino. Especially when so many of the audience were obviously here to see him – one guy shouted ‘Al Pacino!’ as the lights went down. But by the end even he had become as small and defeated as Shelley Levene needed to be.

It was interesting to compare this play with The Motherf**ker in the Hat, which I saw the night before. (Two plays in two cities in two days, not bad.) There had been all the fuss about the ‘profanity’ in that play, but Mamet’s dialogue gives it a good run for its money without any defensive programme notes about it. 

More importantly, I have to say Mamet’s dialogue shows just how great modern dialogue can be. Always natural and fresh, it also has cadence and rhythm and richness that are pure theatre. And this cast had crafted their delivery of it beautifully. It was a joy to watch.

Saturday

I had the next day free too. And it was a beautiful, clear Saturday so I did the inevitable tourist thing and went up the Empire State Building, to get a good look at the city.

It’s a surreal experience looking at the city from that height. You’re looking down onto the roofs of very, very tall buildings – all of which are nonetheless a long way below. A peculiar sensation it’s best not to dwell on as you walk around the deck.

From there, I took a long walk up Fifth Avenue and along the edge of Central Park to find the Guggenheim, where Picasso: Black & White was nearing the end of its run.

I’m so glad I did, it was a phenomenal show. Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with Picasso, but it was an inspired theme, with many works I hadn’t seen before. They filled the spiral rotunda galleries with work, and the little audio guide was great: entertaining and intelligent in equal measure.

Le Charnier, or ‘The Slaughter’ as Picasso called it. Terrifying and heart-breaking.

But lots of tender, beautiful pictures too, like this portrait of Marie-Thérèse.

After all that, I got to have dinner and drinks in Brooklyn with good friends of ours who moved out here a few years ago, and whom we miss.

So, a good day. And a good way to get reacquainted with this wonderful town. What a pleasure it is to be back.

A night in Chicago

On the advice of Mike McQuade, I started my second (and final) evening in Chicago with a trip up the John Hancock Center.

Mike had advised against the expensive tourist attraction at the top, and suggested instead ‘an overpriced drink’ in the Signature Lounge, a cocktail bar on the 96 Floor.

He was right about the drink: I felt like a simple beer, but even that came in at ten bucks, with the tip. But he was right about going up there, too. That ten bucks was a price easily worth paying for the extraordinary vista laid out through the window.

The landscape in portrait.

It hits you as soon as you turn from the elevators and head towards the lounge: broad picture windows giving onto this sight so astonishing and cinematic that it’s very difficult to believe in, even after you’ve sat staring at it for ten minutes. 

What struck me most, I think, was less the skyscrapers and more the background: that flat, endless expanse of glittering tangerine lights, leading away in ruler-straight lines towards the horizon. For someone used to the UK, and even someone used to the sprawl of London, the scale of Chicago is breathtaking.

I’d spotted some of that scale from the plane, but a hazy view of grey, patchwork blocks from 20,000 feet isn’t quite the same. The view from the Hancock tower set out the city’s stall in bright technicolor. It is vast.

From the John Hancock, I found my way to a subway station and took the first train ride of the trip, just a couple of stops north-ish. I was heading, thanks to the exceptionally generous Ted who got me a ticket, to the famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

No sign of John Malkovich

Tonight’s performance was memorably titled The Motherf**ker in the Hat. (I wouldn’t normally resort to those coy little asterisks, but that’s how the theatre renders the title, so I’m going with it.)

It’s a great little theatre: intimate and informal, almost like a university auditorium. And the play was funny, tragic, touching and dramatic by turn, so made for a great evening.

I was surprised, though, how much the language seemed to be a big deal. The characters swear a lot, but then they’re all downtrodden, unemployed, poor and struggling with various substance dependencies. And people like that do tend to swear quite a lot.

That seemed entirely reasonable to me, so I was surprised to read quite a defensive introduction in the programme justifying ‘the profanity.’ (It even suggested that of course we civilised folk who go to the theatre wouldn’t use this sort of language. Which sounds like a lot of horseshit to me.) 

I even got a semi-warning about the play from Jim Coudal when I met him earlier in the day. He wanted to make sure I understood the play would probably be on the rich side. Not that he was disapproving (he has tickets of his own), but I think he may have been concerned for my delicate English writer’s ears. 

But I didn’t hear anything I haven’t heard in countless movies (although it was more effectively employed here than in most of those). Or even, come to that, in the playground as a teenager. So I’m not sure why there was so much concern over that aspect.

What I really liked was that, at the end, they invite the audience to stay behind for a little discussion of the piece, moderated by someone from the theatre. A great idea, and even though only about 30 people stayed behind, it made an ideal coda to the performance.

Mind you, I had a little coda of my own in mind, and guided once again by the expert advice of Ted Pearlman, I found my way to the Clark Street Ale House – the perfect place to wrap up the evening with a beer (or possibly two) and a few chapters of The Burglar In The Library. Bliss.

Jim Coudal

Next up was a meeting with Jim Coudal, the genuinely visionary head of Coudal & Partners. (Although something tells me he’d squirm a little at that adjective.) 

Just in case you don’t know, Coudal used to be a traditional design agency until Jim got sick of having his success depend ‘on the whims of people who are stupider than we are.’

Forced by financial straits into a reassessment of the agency’s very raison d’être, he changed that raison completely. Instead of selling other people’s stuff, Coudal now sells its own stuff – most famously the beautiful, idiosyncratic Field Notes notebooks and other products.

‘If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product,’ Jim says in an interview with 37 Signals that tells the Coudal story very well. ‘You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work-for-hire basis.’

Coudal & Partners’ office is on 400 N May Street, so I tapped that address into Google Maps and off I went. (Google Maps basically got me to everywhere on this trip. It was brilliant. Whatever did we do without it?)

The walk gets a little hairy, at least for the out-of-towner. Suddenly I was walking through scrubby industrial back lots, with very little to see except a huge truck idling on one street like the juggernaut in Duel, and a street sign that seemed about as far from home as I was:

I persevered, though, and eventually came to the warehouse building where Google insisted Coudal & Partners resided. 

Much as the home of Path had surprised me, so did this place. Could this anonymous building really be the home of the wry, laconic and restlessly creative Coudal? Apparently it couldal. (Sorry.)

Not quite the swanky entrance I’d been expecting.

Inside, Jim met me at the reception desk and immediately apologised for not being able to spare more than an hour and a quarter.

‘I have to pick up my daughter from basketball,’ he explained, quite unnecessarily, as an hour and a quarter sounded like a generous slot indeed. 

Very quickly, I realised I‘d been a fool to wonder about Coudal & Partners’ location. It’s perfect. This is no brushed-steel, shimmery-glass Creative Consultancy sort of place. It’s a wonderfully practical, working space – a place where they Make Things. You know, like people used to. So an industrial site makes perfect sense.

The latest Field Notes notebook (at time of writing)

Not that the offices aren’t attractive. Especially in the bright January sunlight, which floods through the tall windows into the high-ceilinged, brickwork spaces. It felt like a lovely place to work.

Jim took me on a little tour, revealing just how much of a workshop the place is. There were boxes of materials, and cutting mats thick with sheets of sample paper and card. (Jim showed me the stock they’re planning to use on the next Field Notes cover. Lovely.)

Around a corner and through a door, we came to the heart of the Field Notes enterprise, with tall ranks of neatly indexed, blue storage crates, each containing some specific piece of merchandise. 

There were boxes of books and calendars and Space Pens on the table tops, and a fellow diligently boxing up orders and checking inventory. 

‘Let’s get you some swag,’ Jim said, and loaded me up so generously with notebooks and other gifts that I won’t be short of anything to write on, or with, for some considerable time. Then we repaired to his office for a chat.

Field Notes Space Pen (I chose chrome. It’s gorgeous.)

I mentioned the 37 Signals interview (see above), and Jim agreed that was the one that sets the story out best. He was off for New Zealand soon, to give a talk (at Webstock). 

‘I know they’re basically expecting that 37 Signals interview again,’ he said a little wearily, ‘But I’ve done that. I’m going to do something different.’

He wanted to talk, instead, about working across analogue and digital media. Coudal’s two key ‘products’ – Field Notes and advertising platform The Deck – are from opposite ends of that spectrum.

‘Field Notes is totally analogue. There will never be a Field Notes iPad app,’ he said. (Of course, you can order your Field Notes stuff through their website, but I know what he means.) The Deck, on the other hand, is entirely digital.

And in the end, Jim said, those distinctions barely matter any more. I suggested that in many cases they’re different expressions of the same thing. Like journals – you can get your newspaper in print or digitally. It’s the same product, albeit treated in ways that differ according to the medium. But the essence remains. 

Newsweek had just announced its final print edition, for example. That didn’t make it any less Newsweek. 

‘Right,’ Jim agreed. ‘Actually, I might steal that example.’

All this reminded me of my chat with Naz Hamid in San Francisco. The point is no longer about the method of delivery. The novelty of digital has more or less gone. It’s a mainstream channel now – and has been for quite a while. We’re back to ‘Is this a quality product or service?’ Not, ‘Look what we can do with digital!’ (Thank heavens.)

In Coudal’s case, as Jim said, ‘It’s the same people. It’s the same business, just doing different things. Some digital, some analogue. It wasn’t planned. There is no plan.’

He presents it as a wonderfully ad hoc proces – just have ideas, do stuff, and it works or doesn’t. Or, as in the case of Coudal’s Jewelboxing service, works for a while then starts to wind down. 

And he says he takes a similarly laissez-faire attitude to his team and their work. Rather than standing over their shoulders, keeping a Creatively Directorial eye on their progress, Jim takes a far more hands-off approach:

‘If they’re making a film or a website, I just let them get on with it. I often don’t see it until it’s finished.’

It might sound hopelessly flaky, but there’s an obvious secret to this, which Jim went on to reveal: ‘You hire good people, and let them get on with it.’

There’s the rub: good people. Good people have good ideas. Suddenly ‘just do ideas’ really means ‘just do good ideas’. And the process doesn’t sound quite so flaky any more.

Even so, it is brave, in a way that many businesses would quail at. What is a good idea? How do you know? Where’s the Good-ometer? And if there was such a thing, what would it read when wired up to the idea of producing a boxed set of notebooks ‘Celebrating the Mighty Crops of the North American Agricultural Landscape’?

Field Notes ‘National Crop’ Edition

The lovely thing about Coudal (and it reminds one rather of McSweeney’s) is that despite the fact everything rests on the quality of their ideas, and their ideas are genuinely unusual (even outlandish), there isn’t a focus group or a research paper or a a ‘benchmarking process’ in sight. Just trust in the ideas. 

There’s clearly a culture here of just trying stuff out. Even when it was a traditional service agency, they had a trick for clearing the way for ideas.

‘If we had a naming brief or something,’ Jim explained, ‘And you put your hand in the air when you spoke, that meant, “Look, I know this isn’t the answer, it’s not even an idea, I’m just talking.” If you had your hand up, everyone knew you were just riffing. It’s not a real idea, so no one can shoot you down. And it might be something stupid – but that might make me think of something brilliant.’ It’s a great trick for any creative workshop.

And for those of us still not quite brave enough to turn our creative talents to making products of our own, Jim had another useful trick to impart.

‘We used to say we’ll do quality work for little money, or mediocre work for lots of money,’ he explained. ‘But not mediocre work for little money. The formula is, if it’s shit work, or shit people, you double the usual quote. And add 20%. That way at least you get paid well.’

Good thinking. Which is exactly what Coudal and Partners is all about.

(Many thanks for your time, Jim. It was a real pleasure.)

Delicious Blackbird

Between my meetings with Dan and Jim, Ted had arranged lunch for me at Blackbird, a little restaurant tucked away on what felt like a slightly out-of-the-way street. (But which, given my knowledge of Chicago, may well be the throbbing centre of its bohemian heart.) 

The unprepossessing location is no clue to the restaurant’s quality, though. I think this may have been the best meal I ate in the whole trip – and thanks to Ted, I ate very well.

Inside, Blackbird was just the right balance of buzzy lunchtime crowd, urban minimal chic, and relaxed bar (where I sat).

In fact, the atmosphere was so lively and welcoming, I can’t imagine why the pictures on their site show the place deserted (like the one above). It makes the restaurant look like an Edward Hopper cantina – and one so sterile, not even Edward Hopper people can bear to be in it. 

Anyway, it was nothing like that. And the food was glorious. I had an endive salad, followed by confit duck leg, and both were beautiful: delicately served (so delicate this gluttonous Englishman looked with some dismay at the little bit of duck sitting in the centre of a great expanse of white china), but packed with flavour.

I have to confess to a chocolate torte too, I seem to recall. I also had a glass of Vouvray that was so good I wrote the name down. And ordered another one.

Basically, it was terrific. If you should find yourself anywhere near 619 West Randolph Street, I heartily recommend a visit.

Dan Fietsam

A January Chicago morning, it transpired, is rather different from a January San Francisco morning. The sky was just as blue, but the air cut considerably more sharply, especially when you turned a corner into the wind. It was hard to imagine what those newsreaders in California were complaining about.

But what a pleasure to walk down the brightly sunlit North Michigan Avenue – a stretch known, understandably, as the Magnificent Mile.

The architecture fits with a lot of the dreams we have of American cities: skyscrapers from the 1920s and ’30s, clad in stone and rearing like great waves, topped with a froth of Gothic-style decoration.

The Tribune Tower

The Tribune Tower is the one that really sticks in my mind, and it’s that combination that’s so beguiling – clean, straight lines flying straight upward, but each end intricately embellished with stonework reminiscent of great European cathedrals. Who’d have thought that could work as successfully as it does?

Anyway, gawping skyward in my best Out-of-Towner fashion, I eventually came to number 225 N Michigan, and the offices of EnergyBBDO.

I was slated for a coffee with Chief Creative Officer Dan Fietsam, but the Starbucks on the ground floor was so busy we gave up on it and climbed the stairs to the offices above. I should have taken a picture – they have a fabulous view.

It’s a new home for the agency – so new, some rooms were still being unpacked. And no wonder they’ve moved – Dan revealed that the agency has grown from 140 people to around 300 in just two years. Pretty impressive in these doom-and-gloom times.

Dan was too modest to suggest his own hand in this growth, but I had some inside dope. The night before, Mike McQuade had told me that he used to work at EnergyBBDO, and had been blown away by the way Dan had completely revolutionised the place. The degree of awe in Mike’s description suggested there was more to Dan than his breezy, cheerful manner might have you think.

Anyway, we settled into his office and had an interesting chat about the state of creative play in US advertising and design. Dan echoed what I’d heard from Rob Duncan in San Francisco – that irony, imagination and wit are still fairly rare commodities in most US advertising. (Even if work like the Old Spice campaign suggests there’s no reason they should be.)

One factor, Dan suggested, is that the really big names often own so much market share that their over-riding principle is, as he put it, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ Few bold creative choices get made when all you want to do is keep the boat steady.

Even so, the opportunities are there. And that clearly includes the opportunity for smaller, fiestier brands to upset the big boats themselves. Especially if those big boats have become complacent. And that only happens with brilliant ideas.

We had a laugh, too, about the advertising that was registering most with me while in the States: the drug ads.

I’d been stunned by two things. First, just how many drug ads there were. Like, dozens. It seemed every other commercial was promising to help me sleep, overcome back pain or achieve an erection. The impression is one of a nation obsessed with medicating itself.

The second thing, though, was the caveats in these ads. They all follow a formula. They start with a little intro, often in the form of a (clearly fake) testimonial about how Bob or Susan or Jeff had this terrible pain/awful insomnia/embarrassing problem, and how a certain drug had helped enormously.

Then there followed, over slow shots of baseball games, or starlit nights, or an older couple chuckling intimately in a convertible, a near endless litany of the many ways this drug could damage, or even kill, you. (I couldn’t find a good example online, but someone made the little montage above, which gives you an idea.) 

It was hard to believe these ads could sell anything. By the time each one finsihed, the overriding message seemed to be that on no account should you even consider buying this lethal product. But presumably they must work. I suppose viewers tune all that stuff out, the way we stop listeing to a radio ad when it goes into that high-speed gabble through the Ts and Cs.

Anyway, I digress. Dan was generous with his time, and offers of other introductions. (Thanks very much, Dan.) Then it was time for him to get back to growing his agency, and for me to get back on the road. I had a date with Jim Coudal.

Mike McQuade

I just about had time to get to the James (very nice, thank you Ted) and drop my things before heading out again, my stomach rumbling appropriately, to Rangoli. 

There’s something a bit weird about arriving in a city you’ve never been to and jumping straight in a cab to go through streets you’ve never seen to a restaurant you’ve never heard of to have dinner with someone you’ve never met before. Well, it felt weird to me. I guess some people do it all the time.

Rangoli seemed very nice, anyway, and when Mike turned up he seemed the same. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, I think he may have felt initially as off-kilter as I did, each meeting the other somewhat randomly through the complex machinations of Ted Pearlman – or, as I was starting to think of him, ‘that man behind the curtain’.

But we soon settled into a very interesting chat, and found a lot of common ground, I felt. Mike described how he’s started off working at a very large agency, and then gone to a very much smaller one, and liked the change. Liked it so much, in fact, that he went even smaller – ‘so now it’s just me.’

New York Times illustration

I can relate to that, certainly. And we agreed about the difficulty of getting swamped in work, and rushing from one job to the next. (A nice problem to have, as they say, but that doesn’t make it any less of a problem.)

Mike said he’s taken to meditating daily. Not a formal meditation, but ‘half an hour a day or so when I just try to think about nothing.’

What a sensible idea. Most of the times I feel truly frazzled, it’s because I haven’t done that: just taken my feet off the pedals and let them spin on their own for a bit. And it’s amazing how much thinking the brain can do while you’re ‘thinking about nothing’.

Mike was equally interesting on his process of thinking work through in advance, not just ‘jumping on the computer.’ He tries to take a strategic view, plotting out the solution to a brief in some detail, so that when he comes to the actual implementation, 90% of the work is done.

The juggling act one gets into when there’s a lot of work around only gets tougher when you decide you want to work on side projects of your own as well.

Mike, for example, is an illustrator as well as a graphic designer, with some terrific clients (The New York Times, WIRED, Hardvard Business Review...). And he’s keen to pursue his own artistic ambitions as well as client work. 

I had cause to remember my chat with Jessica Hische, Queen of the Side Project, and her direct way of ensuring such projects happen: essentially, ‘work harder’. Which has a lot going for it, but then so does sleep.

Poster for The Silver Screen Society

We batted all this around, and also agreed that you have to be open to whatever comes along. If a great opportunity to set up with someone he admired came along, Mike said, he’d be a fool not to take it. Even if it meant re-adjusting some ambitions.

In the end, I suppose it’s always about deciding which ambitions you’re truly passionate about, and which you can afford to sacrifice.

We both arrived at Rangoli ravenous, but the superb Indian food beat us both. (I made a slight faux pas by asking for a beer. The restaurant was teetotal. Coming from Great Britain, I simply assumed that every Indian restaurant has a Cobra or Kingfisher pump in it somewhere. How very parochial of me.)

Anyway, it was a very interesting natter indeed, and a pleasure to meet you, Mike. Hope all those ambitions are soon fulfilled.

Hello, Chicago

I got to O’Hare at about 5pm Chicago time – a couple of hours ahead of where my brain was, now that it had just about settled into the California schedule.

The cab ride from the airport into the city felt surreal, partly because I was a bit disoriented – I don’t tend to hop around time zones and major cities like this in general – and also because so much of the ride felt oddly familiar. 

Entirely unlike San Francisco, Chicago feels – and in many places looks – surprisingly like London. Especially those outskirts between airport and city centre. Many of the houses and industrial buildings felt like they could have been in Wandsworth or Battersea, and glimpsed from my usual train into London from Surrey.

Of course, once you hit the centre, and those uniqiuely American towers rear up about you, no one would mistake this place for London. Even so, walking around the city today, and this evening, there’s a vibe that feels distinctly London-ish, in a way SF didn’t at all.

Maybe its the industrial heritage: you see a lot of warehouses and factories – or possibly former factories. And whereas SF felt in general like it had been put together in a charming craft shop by sweet-natured and perhaps mildly stoned folk, Chicago feels like it’s been constructed almost entirely from sheets of iron, riveted together by enormous, bulging men in overalls.

The 1925 Tribune Tower

London is perhaps somewhere between the two, and there’s no getting around the fact that everything just feels so much newer over here. But the energy, the scale and the buzz of Chicago definitely reminds me of home.

Farewell, San Francisco

What a beautiful town. Sorry I didn’t get to see more of you. But hey, I’m leaving with a new language to play with. So (clears throat):

‘Seeya. Bummed I couldn’t max out my time with you any more. But it’s been rad, crazy and awesome.’

How was that?

Brian McMullen – The one that got away

There had to be one. And, in line with the angling metaphor, it was a big one.

Ted had somehow managed to fix me up for a drink with Brian McMullen, the head of McSweeney’s new children’s book imprint – inevitably named McSweeney’s McMullen’s. (That’s Brian above, talking about the wonderful Keep Our Secrets, by Jordan Crane.)

If there’s a writer who doesn’t love McSweeney’s (or a designer, come to that), I have yet to meet them. I shan’t ramble on about how wonderful McSweeney’s is here – if by some horrible chance you’ve never heard of them, use the links above and open a sluice gate of joy in your head. Who wouldn’t be thrilled to meet a McSweenyite?

And here I was, in beautiful San Francisco, settling in behind a cold glass of beer at the bar in Amnesia, waiting for Brian himself. Amazing.

Plus, that morning Jessica Hische had revealed she was a friend of Brian’s, and had promised to ‘totally crash your evening’. This was shaping up to be the perfect finale to my brief stint in SF.

Click this image to read about McSweeney’s McMullen’s in The Atlantic

So even as the clock approached an hour after our allotted meeting time, I was still hoping that there’s been some silly foul-up, and Mr McMullen would come bounding – red-faced, no doubt, and spilling apologies – through the narrow doorway from the street beyond.

Well, Brian had forgotten, that was true. But he wasn’t about to bound through any doors. In fact, he wasn’t bounding anywhere. He’d forgotten, quite understandably, because he was very sick at home, and had been so for a while. I finally received this dread news from Ted, along with Brian’s profuse apologies. 

Plus, Jessica had got stuck late at work, and then had another appointment of her own that she’d forgotten. I was stuck in Amnesia – and so was everyone else. It was too poetic to be true.

I sighed a heavy sigh, downed the last of the beer, and told myself it was for the best: I had an early plane to catch the next day. Back to Union Street I went.

All of which, hopefully, will make Brian feel guilty enough to publish the children’s book I’ve written, and which I was planning subtly to introduce into our conversation.

(Well, the hell with subtlety, right?)

Hope you’re feeling better anyway, Brian. And maybe I can buy you that beer another time.

Path

I couldn’t come to San Francisco and not make an effort to meet with Path. This social network has become a completely integral part of my day-to-day life. 

Unlike Twitter, Path limits the number of contacts you can make, and encourages you to make them only with people you know. (That breaks down fairly quickly, of course, but in my experience the ‘ripple’ tends only to go one degree out – friends and friends-of-friends, but rarely any further.)

The Path UI is another big attraction. It’s deceptively simple, and includes lovely little bouncy, swingy transitions that make using it feel pretty effortless, and rather fun.

(I’d be dishonest if I didn’t also mention that Path remains plagued by bugs. But it’s a measure of the affection in which it’s held that the core group I tend to chat to on Path all maintain a sort of exasperated affection for it, despite frequent frustrations.

It’s like a favourite dog that you keep finding has eaten another of your slippers. It drives you nuts, but you just can’t stop loving it. A less inherently enjoyable service would have gone to the digital wall long ago.)

Luckily, Nell Frabotta and Vero Maldonado at Path were delighted to hear that I wanted to pop round, and gave me a warm welcome to the place.

Where Path lives – a startlingly dull building.

Path is based at 301 Howard Street in San Francisco (above). And again, it says something for the brand that I saw this very ordinary office building and thought, ‘Oh dear. That’s not right at all.’

Because Path, to me, feels intimate, small-scale and cottage-industry-ish. Not the sort of operation you find in a gleaming, anonymous tower like this one.  

No matter. Once you get into reception, and find things like a copy of a Star Wars book called The Path of the Jedi placed archly on a shelf, things start feeling a lot more Path-ish.

And Nell and Vero couldn’t have been more welcoming. I even got a beer from their in-house Smithwicks keg, which was a nice surprise.

We also had to step over the cables, and through the lights, of a photography crew who were shooting portraits of various Path staffers. This all felt much more homely and scrappy: more like the Path I knew.

Quite a view from the 22nd floor balcony

We had a good natter about how I used Path, what I loved and what drove me mad. Nell and Vero were very interested to see how many ‘moments’ (posts, basically) were on my Path, and it astonished all of us that I had way more than either of them. My wife would raise a knowing eyebrow at that.

I finished my Smithwicks, and we convened on their lovely, if slightly vertiginous, balcony for a group snap.

L-R: Vero, Yours Truly (never happy in front of a camera, as you can tell), and Nell.

Big thanks to Vero and Nell for their time, and for the intriguing glimpse behind the scenes of my favourite social network. 

Rob Duncan

Portrait from Rob’s AIGA page

Okay, I admit it – it was quite nice to hear a British accent again.

I met Rob Duncan, one half of the Anglo-American design partnership Dowling|Duncan, at their office on Geary Street.

It was weirdly like being teleported back to London, chatting in a very London-looking design studio (no, I’m not sure what that means either) with a chap whose accent seems to have altered not a bit through long-term exposure to the US.

It was the first time I’d formally presented my stuff to anyone so far. (A mistake, maybe, but dragging out the laptop – or even the iPad – over coffee always seems a bit crass somehow. Probably need to get over that.)

Logo by Dowling|Duncan

Rob seemed to like it though, and we chatted about our shared love for creative, witty design of the Smile In The Mind variety. We’d both discovered that book early on in our careers, it turned out, and fallen in love with it. (Well, how can you not?)

But Rob’s experience was that this brand of ‘wit’ was rare in US graphic design. I mentioned Pentagram, and he said, ‘Well, of course, Pentagram.’ But apparently most American work is much more straightforward. (It’ll be intriguing to chat to Michael Bierut about this next week.)

Packaging by Dowling|Duncan

I’ll have to bow to Rob’s greater experience on this whole question, but it seems slightly bizarre that there shouldn’t be a stronger American tradition of wit in design and advertising.

This is, after all, the nation of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley; Mark Twain and Woody Allen. (To name but a few.) The nation that previously embraced Wilde and Wodehouse. Plus, of course, the nation of industry names like Doyle Dane Bernbach, Bob Gill, Paul Rand and Milton Glaser.

People say America has no sense of irony, but that’s self-evidently not the case. So where is it in the advertising and design world? (That’s not a rhetorical question, I’d be interested in replies.)

Anyway, we had a good chat, agreed a lot, and, I think, decided to do a project together. So it doesn’t get much better than that. Thanks again, Rob.

Naz Hamid

Naz, taken from the Weightshift site

After saying cheerio to Jessica, I had another coffee and checked emails before heading out to another coffee place – Sightglass – to meet Naz Hamid, founder and principal of design studio Weighshift (among other things).

Once we’d got settled, Naz told me how ‘there are always at least one or two tech meetings or interviews going on in this place’ – Sightglass is a bit of an industry mecca by the sounds of it. And it certainly looks the part, all industrial grey steel, bare timber and steel countertops. 

Sightglass – image from Drip Blog

As a digitally-focused designer (Weightshift’s clients include Google, Twitter, Adobe and Rdio, among others), Naz is naturally fascinated by the ongoing buzz of start-ups and tech industries in and around San Francisco.

The industry has matured, he reckons, from a time when ‘people were just building stuff, with no business model, and you just think, why are you making that? Who’s going to use that?’

He remembers one of his former employers, in the days of the ‘bubble’, burning through $25 million in a year. ‘Just crazy,’ was his judgement on that, which sounds about right.

Now, though, investors are playing their cards closer to their chests, as you might expect. And start-ups have to think more about real-world business plans. Companies can’t survive unless they make something people actually want – a bit of commercial economics you’d think was fundamental enough never to be forgotten.

I mention Newspaper Club, one of the great successes of our own tech hotspot – the splendidly British ‘Silicon Roundabout’. It‘s a technology business, but with a real product to make and ship to people. In many ways, a perfectly traditional business.

The Silicon Roundabout name makes Naz laugh, but he also says he loves Newspaper Club. He loves the fact it produces something real and tangible. In fact, he turns out to have a real affection for ‘old-school’ graphic design and the business of print, which for someone who remembers cutting mats and ‘rub-downs’, is heartening to hear. 

It’s also heartening to hear Naz suggest that services like mine are increasingly in demand by tech businesses. ‘They’re realising they have to be able to communicate what they do,’ he says, ‘not just to users but to investors. And they’re realising the importance of content.’

Music to my ears, naturally. And it makes me think of Scoopt, my relatively new app client in the UK. Just as Naz is describing, Scoopt had a great idea, and some smart technology. But as founder and CEO Glynn Jones is first to admit, they found it almost impossible to sum the offer up in a line, or a paragraph. (Here’s how I answered that brief, by the way.)

What all that means, hopefully, is a whole sector waking up to what ‘old-fashioned’ copywriting (and design, come to that) can offer. Because however clever a piece of technology is, no one’s going to buy it if they don’t understand what it does.

Our conversation ranged pretty widely, as they all have so far. We chatted about logo design (‘No one wants to know how it’ll look in black and white any more – it’s irrelevant. Give me all the colours!’), and about the irresistible move from paper journals and newspapers to digital media. (The recent Newsweek decision being a case in point.) Naz wondered about the issues that raises for access – not everyone can buy an iPad the way anyone can buy a newspaper.

We talked about families, and careers, and the best places to live. (San Francisco sounds pretty awesome, to use the local argot: anywhere you can go from skiing to city centre to beach in one day has to be a good place to live.)

In short, we had a good old natter, and I was amazed again (as I continue to be on this trip) how open everyone is to having a good old natter with a complete stranger who has been introduced to them out of the blue.

It’s a lovely, refreshing attitude, and – unfair as this may be – it feels like it comes much more naturally to people over here than it does the British. But then, maybe I just haven’t tried randomly hooking up with industry people in the UK. It’s definitely helping with my own ‘British Reserve’ problem, anyway. 

So thanks again for your time and thoughts, Naz. Onward.

Jessica Hische

My second full day in San Francisco dawned every bit as bright and sunny as the previous one. (And I should know – jetlag woke me up both mornings at 4am.)

The pathologically cheerful people on NBC were aghast at the temperatures – apparently SF is usually about 20 degrees warmer than this in January (Fahrenheit, don’t forget). But to this pale Englishman, the bright, clear weather felt like a very pleasant summer holiday. Or at least late spring.

So I made my balmy way over to Ritual Coffee Roasters (isn’t Ritual a good name for a coffee place?) for a 9am meeting with world-conquering typographer and letterer Jessica Hische.

As it was, we met earlier than that, because I got there early and tweeted to let Jessica know I’d arrived. She rushed down, thinking she was late when she wasn’t. The whole thing got even more crazy when Ted, Grand Overseer of All My Meetings, made a typically generous call to Ritual to tell them our coffees were on him.

By then, however, we were settled with our croissants and coffee, and the barista was trying to mouth over to Jessica about this guy on the phone wanting to pay for her coffee. For a moment, we thought we’d discovered her first ever stalker, until my brain woke up and I realised who it must be. 

After all that got sorted out, we got chatting properly – and what a delight to meet someone so brimming with energy and enthusiasm about what they do.

Gorgeous lettering for Florence and The Machine

You can understand that enthusiasm, of course. Jessica’s work is beautiful, and she works with some fantastic clients. (Not least, very recently, Wes Anderson, for whom she designed the titles for Moonrise Kingdom. Say no more, as far as I’m concerned.)

We chatted about all sorts of things, but I was particularly keen to talk to her about her side projects. It’s something I wrestle with a lot – like many creatives I expect: where does one find the time to do all those side projects, especially when you‘re as busy as Jessica clearly is?

Her answer was so obvious as to make me feel pretty dim. In précis, it was this: ‘I work longer hours.’

‘When I get an idea for a project, I just have to do it,’ she explained. ‘If something lights a fire under my skirt I just have to stop everything else and do it. The other stuff just has to wait and get done later. Sometimes I’m up until two or three in the morning. That’s just what you have to do.’

And that’s it, isn’t it? Everyone’s always looking for the secret of success like Jessica’s. But the secret isn’t a secret: you just have to work really hard. 

Editorial design for Sunset Magazine

Of course, she’s clearly a very talented lady. But talent is just the start. What her work also makes evident is how much she’s worked at developing that talent, and just getting on with stuff – even if it does take until 3am.

Stephen Fry has spoken about this, I recall. In this interview with Clive James (about 17 minutes in), Fry talks about people who say how lucky successful people are:

‘If you tell someone, “Yes, I can tell you where the golden palace is, I can tell you how to get there, it’s a very long, hard climb though, and you’ll blister your knees and you will hurt yourself, and you will fall down and have to start climbing again,” and they go, “Oh well in that case I don’t want to – but he’s so lucky to get there.”’

Have a look at the video – he goes on to make a good analogy about what it takes to strike gold. But the point is, we often want to believe that successful people are lucky, especially in this X Factor age. But in fact, the secret is the same as it’s always been: bloody hard work. As Woody Allen said, ‘95% of success is turning up.’

All of which will help enormously next time something lights a fire under my own skirt (what a splendid phrase). Instead of extinguishing it with a testy complaint about the number of hours in a day, I’ll remember Jessica, and her fizzing enthusiasm, and just damn well put the hours in.

(Incidentally, go to Jessica’s site and check out the URLs on each page: a wonderful little touch.)

The Bridge

Obviously I couldn’t leave without seeing this. But I knew tomorrow was impossible: way too many meetings. So after I got back from meeting Jamie, I dug out the running gear and combined sightseeing with some marathon training. And endless photographing, obviously.

(Ran nine miles though, which is not to be sniffed at. Amazingly, the bridge itself is 1.7 miles long on its own.)

Obviously had to slow down a bit here.

It’s a truly magnificent thing, the Golden Gate Bridge. You think you’ve seen it, because it’s such a familiar sight from the movies and TV, but like all such wonders nothing comes close to the real thing.

The graceful immensity is overwhelming

Sad though it is that it has to exist, I thought there was a rather brilliant bit of copywriting here. The boxed copy on the smaller blue sign reads:

THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.

That struck me pretty forcibly. It’s the AND TRAGIC bit. FATAL, yes, of course. And if it stopped there you’d have a simple, stark warning that no one could argue with.

But someone thought to add AND TRAGIC. That adds a whole new layer to the message. Because, I’d suggest, the tragedy is not felt by the suicide. Tragedy is something only the living can experience. Tragedy is what is left behind after the death: the numbing shockwave that hits those whose loved one has not only died, but taken their own life.

So to me, AND TRAGIC widened the scope of the message enormously, inviting a last-second reflection on the impact one’s desperate leap might have on others left behind. As an example of compressed messaging, it’s pretty hard to beat.

The city in sunset, from the middle of the Bridge.

Saying farewell. What a sight. (And three cheers for the iPhone 5’s panoramic photo feature.)

Jamie Barrett

I confess I checked the address for barrettsf a couple of times when I arrived. Yes, this was it: 603 Battery Street. It didn’t look the sort of entranceway I was expecting, though – more like an old bank. 

‘I think it’s an old bank,’ Jamie Barrett explained, once I’d tentatively pushed the door open and stuck my head inside.

His new agency is very new indeed, and they’re still getting the office licked into shape. Jamie showed me the new conference room they just built, and the (beautiful) custom-made bench tables the burgeoning team were busily working at.

What about the graffiti at the door? It had stopped me in my tracks, and I still hadn’t decided which I thought was most likely: a synchronicitous bit of genuine vandalism, or the kind of ‘artwork’ one might expect a San Francisco ad agency to have in its entrance.

It turned out to be the former. ‘It just appeared,’ Jamie said, ‘But we liked it: Don’t let your dreams be dreams. It’s kind of cool for an agency.’

They’re going to keep it, which seems the right decision. It’s a talking point if nothing else.

Jamie Barrett (Screen-grabbed from his agency site. Hope that’s okay, Jamie.)

After introductions and a quick tour of the developing office space, we walked along the street for a coffee. (I’m drinking a lot of coffee in San Francisco. Like, A LOT OF COFFEE!!! And US coffee seems to come in European Strength Squared, too. I may need to tone it down.)

Anyway, this proved a very pleasant, informal start to my ‘tour’. Jamie has every reason to preen a little, given his background in some of the world’s best agencies – from Fallon to Wieden+Kennedy and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – as well as the quality of the work on his new agency’s website. But he did nothing of the sort. We chatted amiably about advertising, creativity and writing (and also about our kids, and sports, and TV shows).

We talked about the difficulty of the ‘About us’ page: how do you make yourself sound credibly different as an agency? The only way is by being specific, but that can put you in a niche, and discourage potentially great new clients.

It’s a tough one, but barrettsf’s solution has a fair amount going for it, not least its simplicity.

It was interesting to hear that one of Jamie’s major ambitions for the new shop is to do work with clients ‘who do well by doing good’.

This feels like a theme at the moment: maybe it’s the age bracket I’m now in, but I hear a lot of rumblings from creatives about doing something socially valuable with their skills. It’s the impulse behind the new D&AD White Pencil, of course, so maybe there really is something in the air.

Jamie was generous with his time, and also offered to introduce me to other interesting people in San Francisco – an added generosity I was soon to discover is remarkably common over here.

There wasn’t the time in the schedule to make it work, but it was a kind offer – thanks Jamie. And thanks for such a great kick-off to what Ted has memorably called my ‘star-spangled goose chase’.

Hello San Francisco

A few more pictures from yesterday, or I’ll never keep up.

Ted (my amazing client at Us Is Two who’s masterminding this odyssey) suggested that I try out a service called Uber to get me from the airport to my hotel.

Uber turns out to be a brilliant thing. You register yourself (and your credit card) in the iPhone app, and then when you need a car you just open the app. It knows where you are from the iPhone’s location service, works out the nearest available car and sends it round. Mine took six minutes to get to me. Pretty quick.

Uber looks very nice, too

The driver, Zen, turned out to a be a friendly guy, pointing out the sights as we went along. He’d been in San Francisco as a youth, but until a year ago had spent ten years back home in Syria – a name he gave me with a rueful smile.

‘Better to be over here, eh?’ I said, which ranks among the more asinine statements of my life. Zen took it in his stride though, and told me about his sister, still in Damascus and thankfully safe despite ‘bombs here, bombs there.’

Zen was driving a cab because that’s all he’s authorised to do, but actually he’s a computer and electronics man. He’d even customised his Mercedes with Apple chargers for passengers:

Phone charger jacks, rigged into the car’s electrics. Genius.

And so to the Union Street Inn, to be greeted by Kit and shown into my lovely room. Another gem discovered by Ted.

Kit had a friendly, scatty air about her that reminded me – given the context – of Mrs Madrigal, that ministering angel of San Francisco. (If you don’t know who Mrs Madrigal is, I recommend you find out.) And the Inn is lovely: a B&B that feels more like a friendly home than a hotel.

On another of Ted’s recommendations, I decided on a beer at the Top of the Mark to introduce myself to the city. It’s a 30-odd minute walk from the hotel, which gave me a chance to walk a few streets – always the best thing to do in a new city, I reckon. I got some pictures, too.

A Hopper-ish corner

A California moon

Shop window display, presented without comment

An eruption of European Gothic.

... and the city from the Top of the Mark

Arriving

So – here I am at last, safely ensconced in the very friendly surroundings of the Union Street Inn.

It’s about 8pm right now, but that means it’s 3am in my head, and I didn’t sleep as much as I’d planned on the plane. So I hope you’ll forgive me if this first post is a little light on words. But I do have a few pictures to show, before we get started in earnest tomorrow...

Starting with some obligatory Plane Window shots. Sadly we had a lot of cloud as we crossed Iceland and Greenland, but it cleared for some truly spectacular views of the frozen wilds of northern Canada and Alaska. A barren place indeed, and endless through the glass...

White rivers, white lakes

...clearing to clean rock as we head south.

A cheerful lady from Palo Alto tried to work out where we were for me as we went along, and apologised for not knowing the names of exact peaks, which seemed a little tough on herself.

As we chatted, I was feeling that I really ought to be getting some sleep, but how often do you get to see views like this? Well, if you’re me, very rarely. Sleeping seemed churlish. 

But now it doesn’t in the least, so I’ll complete the brief tale of my arrival tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

The diary’s filling up

Happy new year to you! And it’s looking increasingly happy for my trip, I must say. Ted is now in high gear, setting up appointments for me left, right and centre. And with some really incredible people, too.

The Itinerary page lists everything currently in the diary, and every one of them just sounds brilliant.

There are some starry names in there – I’m having coffee with Jessica Hische in San Francisco, and with Jim Coudal in Chicago, as well as (all being well) a drink with Michael Bierut in New York. Design industry names don’t get much bigger than those.

I’m thrilled also to be meeting some film-related folk. I’ve always loved film, and done some – but not enough – writing for brand films. I’m very keen to do more moving-image work and, true to his word, Ted has come through with some terrific meetings – like Jamie Barrett in San Francisco and Keith Ehrlich in New York.

With under a fortnight until I leave, it’s impossible not to feel a knot of excitement and – I confess – nerves in the belly. Just have to make sure I make the most of it all.