Kim: Brandon! Welcome to our second conversation. And then what?

Brandon: So happy to be here!
‍
K: I'm so pleased. Where are we right now?
‍
B: We are at the beautiful Suttle Lake in Sisters, Oregon. A picturesque day. The fire is crackling, we're chillin’ in this beautiful cabin. Just a dreamy scene.

K:  It’s a sunny, fall, crispy, windy day. So, the purpose of this conversation is to hear about your creative journey and how you got to where you are. But before we get into that, I would like to know what you had for breakfast?
‍
B: Today's breakfast was incredible. We shared it together. We're gathered in the boathouse around a big table of flapjacks and hash browns and a little breakfast sandwich situation. A bowl of yogurt with granola and spiced apples. And as I'm saying this, I'm realizing it was a stellar breakfast. That was a strong start to the day.
‍
K: And to top it off, that fresh squeezed OJ!
‍
B: The fresh squeezed OJ, the perfect amount of pulp. It was a short glass, but it was exactly the amount of OJ that you need.
‍
K: Okay. So where did you grow up?
‍
B: I grew up in the kind of southeastern part of Michigan, about 20 minutes outside of Detroit. Spent a lot of time drawing and skateboarding and playing music. And it's definitely the type of place where you kind of make your own fun. For me, that was a lot of a lot of different kind of creative outlets.

K: Okay, let's hear about that. So how did your creative path start? Was there a moment or how did that sort of unfold for you?
‍
B: I mean, for as long as I can think back, I loved anything creative. I loved drawing. I loved writing, making stories. I was in improv acting as a kid, which was super fun. It was like my sister was in it and my dad was a coach for it growing up. So I was just like, from as early as I can remember, just surrounded by creative thinking. And that was super fun. I think, I did that kind of all through elementary school, and it just got me interested in lots of different expressions of creativity.
‍
K: That's awesome. Do you keep acting after that?
‍
B: I mean, not like in theater or anything. I got super into music. I played in bands and played live shows, and I think the theatrical, kind of performance aspect came out in that way. Yeah, I spent a lot of time with my sister. She would write and put on these plays, almost just for me or for our friends. And so growing up watching her, I was just like, “oh, that's cool. You can just make things up?” It's fun and It doesn't matter and it's entertaining. So a lot of creativity, I think, kind of came from my relationship with her, for sure. At a young age I was like, “oh, this is a way you can be. This is a way you can spend your time."
‍
K: And collaborate together, right?
‍
B: For sure! Yeah.
‍
K: Did she draw and stuff with you too?
‍
B: Yeah, she was a really good artist. Drawing. Painting, All of it. I think everything that I did. My mom was also a painter, and her sister's a painter. That whole side of my family, everyone was very artistic. So I think a lot of my interest in visual art just came from kind of being surrounded by that.
‍
K: I mean, that does make a big difference.
‍

‍B: Yeah, my mom, it came out more and like crafts. She loved making things for a purpose. Like, school things that were going on, she would make t-shirts for everyone.  She was very, very creative. She took any opportunity to… like if something could be thoughtful, and be creative she would see to make it that way.
‍
K: That's amazing. So you were taught well!

B: I was, yeah thankfully!

K: So you started out with this kind of like artistic environment, drawing and writing and things like that. Did you then go to school? Did you go to college for art or what happened after that? And how did you eventually make your way to design?
‍
B: Yeah, I just kept drawing. I think out of all the things that I like to do, that one just like stuck with me. That was the way that I most like to spend my time and express myself. And so all through childhood, I kept drawing. Into high school I was taking every art class that I could. I had really great art teachers in high school.
‍
K: It makes such a difference.
‍
B: It really does! Joe Acker and Christine Cooper. They were incredible teachers.

‍K: Shout out to the art teachers!
‍
B: Yeah, oh my God. They were like, “Hey, there's creative jobs that you can do. Like, you can go to school for this, if this is something you really like to do. You're in here five hours a day, it seems like this is your thing.” I kind of took them up on their recommendation and applied to a few different art schools in Michigan. And I ended up going to College for Creative Studies. It's a small visual art school in Detroit. I went and studied illustration and just kept drawing. That was kind of the thing I love doing the thing I feel most like myself when I do.
‍
K: Do you have an environment that you prefer to draw in?
‍
B: I think it's changed over time. Lately I like to draw where I am. I like it as a method of documenting. Living in New York now and being in such a visually dense and inspiring place, it's really fun to just go out and kind of capture those moments through sketching. Yeah, it's almost like journaling. I don't keep a written journal, but I have a sketchbook where I remember how I was feeling or what I was thinking about as I was kind of capturing little vignettes or looking at the way lights falling or whatever it is. All those feelings are kind of caught in those little moments.
‍
K: Do people you find people are curious as to what you're doing?
‍
B: They are. I've met some great people just by sketching in public, just drawing and doing my personal practice of how I like to spend my time around. Yeah, people are curious.

K: I know, it's so interesting. It's like an entryway for conversation. “Oh, you're doing something that seems kind of vulnerable. And I'm curious and we're humans...what are you doing, human?”
‍
B: For sure, it's nice. It definitely does kind of create like a sense of openness. I think you're right, even though it doesn't feel like a super vulnerable practice on my end, you are kind of putting a piece of yourself down in a public space. It creates an invitation for conversation. Sometimes those are other people who are visual artists, and then you start talking with them, or it's been people who are like, “Oh, I want merch done for my whatever project that I'm working on. So I don't think of it as like an opportunity for advertising yourself, but it's kind of like, “Hey, I do this thing. You can see that I'm doing it.” So yeah, I've met lots of people through just little like serendipitous interactions.
‍
K: So how did you find your way to design and branding from art school and working on illustration and things like that.
‍
B: As I was in school, I was playing in a band the whole time.
‍
K: Please tell us the name.
‍
B: We were called The Directive.
‍
K: That’s right, check it out on YouTube!
‍
B: Yeah, it’s on YouTube and Spotify and all that. But it was fun. It was great. I got to travel around with my best friends and play music that we loved and met really rad people, and it was it was a great time, but it was a great context for illustration and for design. Because in that space, every band that we played with wanted merch and I was kind of the person in that social circle that could draw and could design things. And I was like, “Oh,  I'll make t shirts for everyone.” Without, you know, thinking of it as like anything you could do for a job or anything like that. It was just kind of like,“This is my community, and this is a thing I can offer and do, and it's fun.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was making the work that I would go on to make a lot more of, which was doing album artwork and merchandise. Working on merch for bands, I was like, “This is really interesting.  I think that there's something here, I really like doing this.” And so there were recruiters from different sportswear companies that were coming to the college to talk to industrial design students for like footwear design and hard goods and things like that. And I was like, “Well, I make graphics. I don’t know, I guess they make graphic tees? I guess I could talk to them?”

And it went great. I was like, “Hey, here's my work. This is what I'm into, this is what I'm inspired by. I make these shirts for bands and, at that time I was really into tattoo flash, and it resonated with them. And so I ended up going and doing an internship with Reebok. I moved out to Boston for the summer and that was crazy. It was like seeing that I could do the thing I was doing with my friends, just making t-shirts, but do it at like a scale where it's a big global company, and there's like whole careers and teams of people that are doing this.

‍K: Yeah, they don't tell you that these are jobs!
‍
B: Even in college, like nobody knew that you could go and do that. Or like if they did, they weren't telling people.
‍
K: They’re like “Go and do that in advertising, that’s what you can do.”
‍
B: Yeah, so it was cool. I was like, "This is great." I love making merch and making t-shirts, and I realized that there was a career path there. I made some connections through Reebok, and at the time they were owned by Adidas, and so I had made some relationships with people at Adidas and figured out that I was going to go out to Portland for an internship after I graduated. So I came out to Portland for an internship with Adidas, doing similar type of work doing graphic tees. And then I spent the next probably five years or so working in different parts of the company. So and more like performance side of things, more on the lifestyle, sportswear, collaboration stuff, but always making apparel graphics and just really kind of fell in love with making something, putting it out into the world and then like seeing people live their lives in it. Like something as simple as just like a t-shirt or a hoodie, seeing people at the grocery store wearing a hoodie that you made—that's cool. They're just going about their day, doing their thing, whatever they got to do.
‍
K: And you helped give them some style!
‍
B: Yeah, like something about the t-shirt like made them happy and they wanted to wear it that day. I've always loved making like physical things for that reason. They're little bridges to other people. They don't know you and you don't know them, and that's fine. But you have a connection through this object.
‍
K: Yeah, a silent connection. Have you ever gone up to them and been like “Hey, I made that shirt!”?
‍
B: Never. No. Because, it'd be weird, like “…great?” But it's always a delight to see.
‍
K: So you're at Adidas for many years and then…
‍
B: Yeah, as fun as making merch is and as much as I still love it, it did feel just a bit repetitive. So I was feeling the itch to explore other things and I was just always aware of OMFGCO’s work since moving to Portland. The work is super fun and it's kind of like everywhere in the city. Like a lot of places I would go, I liked the branding and I would look up who did it and it was always an OMFGCO project. So I was like, “Okay, there's something to the studio.” So I saw that there was an open position for a designer at the time. And I was like, “You know what? I think I want to try branding.” I had no experience in it.

As you know, my project that I applied with was supposed to show a branding case study, and I didn't have that at all. So I was like, “Well, here's an illustration project that I did.” but I think the the spirit of OMFGCO and the thoughtfulness that the studio has is kind of what drew me to it. It seemed like a place where if I was going to explore something new, I wanted to do it in a place that I resonated with on a values level. And I think the physicality of the work that we do also drew me there. It wasn't digital design, that just doesn't hit me the same.
‍
K: It's hard to find that— a place where you're like, “Oh, this really resonates with me, and also they get my humor. I remember when we were interviewing for that position and I very clearly remember your interview. But it was funny because we liked you so much, and we were like, “He doesn't have any branding experience. Is this weird? Ehhh, fuck it, he's amazing. I think his skills will be like really transferable, let's give it a shot and see what happens.” And it was the best decision ever. I mean, honestly, the way that you've grown into this branding master. You're so good at writing and of course illustration, but also just thinking through concepts and building stories and worlds. And it definitely was a good decision on our part to hire you. Also, just the fact that it's super fun to hang out!
‍
B: Yeah, definitely! Well, I've always been thankful for the opportunity to learn and to grow. But I think one of my favorite things coming to the studio is getting back in touch with the creative writing side, because all through high school I wrote songs and I was really into poetry and I just loved words. I've always been just kind of captivated by them and how you can play with them, how you can be clever, how you can make things rhyme and mess with people's expectations and do this with language, it’s always been so interesting to me.
‍
K: Yeah, it was a big surprise for us—a very exciting surprise! And you're very good at it.
‍
B: Thank you!
‍
K: I'm glad we gave you a platform to expand that world. But I'm wondering, you were talking before about how you like doing merch and graphics and things like that because of the immediacy of it. That is definitely not really part of our jobs of branding. Our projects are often quite long and layered. So how you how do you feel about that?
‍
B: It's nice. It pushes me out of my comfort zone, which I think is always a good thing. Like anything that challenges you or that seems like it might not be how you would normally want something to go is like is probably teaching you something. It's caused me to think through things a bit more holistically. I like the slow build now of a brand where it's like really like creating a story and a vibe and thinking like, “Okay, what are all the different ways that this can manifest itself? How will all of these things come together?”

And I think knowing that this is going to be a physical space, most of the time, at the end of the day that people are going to go and have experiences in and make memories in and have an actual interaction with— that makes it worth spending a year or whatever it is, building it. Because if we do our jobs well, the brand is going to be around a long time and the space is going to be around a long time.
‍
K: What do you do when you're stuck?
‍
B: I listen to music for sure, when I'm stuck. My uncle, who raised me for a lot of my childhood, was a DJ when he was younger.
‍
K: What kind of DJ?
‍
B: He DJ’d at weddings, and he DJ’d on the radio. He was out in rural Michigan playing big band music from the 20s. He DJ’d at weddings and at bars. He met my aunt, who he married. They both raised me, and he met her when he was DJ’ing  at Gabriel's Lounge. Yeah, it was a big part of his life, and he really instilled a love of music in me. I moved in with them when I was seven years old, and I remember they had stacks, this was still in the days of physical media, just towers and towers of CDs, and I got so much influence from him. He gave me Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magik. He gave me Green Day's Dookie. Give me Nirvana's Nevermind. And, like, I had not heard any of that.
‍
K: I mean, that's young for exploring that music!
‍
B: Yeah! For context, my parents and sister passed away when I was seven and I moved in with my aunt and uncle. So it was a changing of environments for sure. My aunt and uncle that raised me, they didn't have kids of their own, so it was very sudden and kind of unexpected, “We now have a kid.” And they did an absolutely incredible job.
‍
K: Bless them!
‍
B: Yeah, So great.
‍
K: I’m crying.
‍
B: I'm crying! It's not like a sad cry. It's like,  I love them so much.
‍
K: Shout out to the aunt and uncle!
‍
B: Yes. Aunt Theresa and Uncle Bill! But I think he was just like, “Well, this is the music I have. So if you want to listen to music, here's a bunch of music!” It just completely blew my mind to get all this rad rock. He was into Talking Heads and The Clash.

K: Great influences!
‍
B: And so that was like the music that I grew up with.

K: We’re you close with them already?
‍
B: Yeah. They were the fun aunt and uncle. They were the funny ones. He's hilarious. I just associated them with laughing all the time. Given the circumstances, it was a great place for me to end up for sure.
‍
K: Do you just listen in your house? Or do you like walk and listen?
‍
B: I do both. I have his record player from when he was a DJ. It's an old Technics that he used in the 80s. He gifted it to me and now I have a whole record collection. And so I really just love putting on a record and sitting in front of the speakers. And just doing that. Not looking at anything, just listening to music. So that that really, for me, is a big creative reset for sure.

‍
‍K: What would you say to someone considering going into this line of work? Any advice for the young folks?
‍
B: I would say be as much yourself as you can be. Make what interests you. Try not to make what you think people want to see. Even when I think back to my first interviews with Reebok, I showed them a portfolio of traditional tattoo flash based on Breaking Bad. Which had nothing to do with sports or anything. Like I was just like, “I like the show and made all this tattoos stuff” and showed them shirts that I did for punk bands and stuff. Like nothing that had any tie to sports or performance or shoes or anything, it just happened to be on a t-shirt. And they were like, “This is great.” because I think they recognized that it excited me. I think you can learn to adapt to different situations, but the passion, the excitement, the emotion that you feel behind creating it is very unique to you.

And so any chance you have to lean into that is good. It'll also sustain you, at least for me, if you feel connected to what you're doing, if you feel like it's an honest reflection of even the smallest part of yourself, it makes it a lot easier to keep going and to keep making work.
‍
K: And people want to be around that energy.
‍
B: Absolutely. Nobody wants fake anything.
‍
K: They want passion. They want people that are excited about what they're doing.
‍
B: Absolutely. If you have a desktop on your computer, the little folder in the corner that says “Personal Work” Do that. Show that to people. Because that's way more interesting than whatever you think they want to see.
‍
K: Last question. What would you be doing if you weren't doing this?
‍
B: Do you mean this interview or doing this work?

K: Doing this work.
‍
B: If I wasn’t doing this, I would absolutely want to be a chef. Before wanting to go to art school, I wanted to go to cooking school. I love cooking, I love it as like a creative act. It's like a meditative thing. I do it as an act of love. There's so much around food that's…I don't know. It's so rich and exciting and it's like, you have to eat anyways. Why not feel connected to it in some way? So I would 100% do something with food.

K: I love it, that's great. And I guess the other question, what would you be doing if you weren't doing this interview? Or what are you going to do right now after this?

B: I'm going to go walk and meet the rest of our studio at the boathouse, and then we're going to take a ride into Sisters, Oregon and go do some karaoke.

K: Hell yeah we are! Let's do it.

Brandon: Thank you so much, Kim!

Kim: Thanks, Brandon!