Kim: Here we go. Welcome to our new conversation series!

Sam: So nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
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K: So the purpose of these conversations is to explore people's creative paths and the different meandering ways we have gotten to where we're at and where you're at right now. So, let's start with an easy question. Do you eat breakfast?
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S: Yes, I eat breakfast. I am the father of three small children, so I don't have much control over when I wake up in the morning. I usually wake up anywhere between 4:30 and 6:30 on a given day. Louis the middle child is usually up first and he is born in the year of the pig and very much loves food. So the first thing on his mind in the morning is, “Daddy, can we have breakfast?!” So we're usually in the kitchen making food and it's a really lovely part of the day, honestly. Just spending time cooking in the morning and hanging out with the kids and eating, but I don't eat a big heavy breakfast, there's usually a coffee and a little bite.

K:  All right, let's talk about where your path starts. Where did you grow up?
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S: So I grew up in Wellington, New Zealand. My dad lived in Australia and New York when I was growing up, so I would spend a lot of time in Sydney and the surroundings and then in New York City in the sort of winter of New York because it was the summer holidays of New Zealand, which is our long holidays over Christmas. Which was great because he was very busy, I would spend a lot of time just exploring New York on my own as a teenager, which was very exciting.
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K: What was your creative outlet as a child?
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S: So I did a lot of drawing, always drawing. I grew up with my mum in Wellington and she is a documentary filmmaker, that's her art and craft, but she has worked in lots of different things over the years and a lot around healthcare. So like she worked for the AIDS Foundation, doing lots of outreach and communication and making films around, you know, safe sex practices and sex workers, trying to normalize it. Yeah, very cool mum, also very busy mum, and so I would go with her on all of her excursions. I spent a lot of time as a kid in a room full of grown-ups listening and drawing. Like I would just sort of find a corner and draw and listen. Because of the nature of my mum's world and all that sort of stuff, I felt like I was exposed to like lots of really interesting different perspectives and like people and creative expressions and it was really cool. Looking back on it, I really value that exposure. And because mum herself was very creative, a lot of her friends were artists and writers and poets and like just people of all different kinds of things like nurses.
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K: So you were soaking up the creative environment through osmosis.
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S: Yeah. So that was really cool. Drawing has always been there for me. It's always been a tool, a sort of comfort but also expression.

K: And then did you go to school for art or design?
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S: I didn't, not really, not explicitly. I focused very heavily on the arts in high school. Like in the final couple of years of high school, I focused on photography, sculpture, design, and managed to switch around classes so that I was just always in the art department. I felt very passionate about art. I just wanted to do art all the time and make things. And I feel like I just always wanted to be a maker, you know, my mum being the sort of maker and having that influence and then my dad as an architect. So I think there was just like always a sort of creative influence and just had that impulse forever. But I didn't really know what shape that took, you know, I was interested in all of these subjects, and there wasn't really a clear focus. And so when it came time, like high school's over and it's university time folks, like "time to choose the thing." And at that time in life, it always feels very final. People are talking to you about these expectations and you have to sort of know what you want so you can choose "the thing."
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K: Why don't they tell you this doesn't have to be this forever?! You can do this for a little bit.
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S: Do it for a bit and try something else.
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K: It's such an old way of thinking.
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S: And if I could go back and tell myself "just go to art school and see what happens, and don't don't put so much pressure on it." But instead I was like, "Nah, that's not for me." The pressure part was just too much to bear, I think. And so I went and I got a job at the miniatures unit for Peter Jackson's King Kong movie, because that was all made in Wellington... "Wellywood." Peter Jackson's from Wellington, and there's just like lots of really cool film production stuff that's come up out of the university he's created. Also Taika Waititi or Taika Cohen. He's a really great New Zealand filmmaker, one of our great exports, and he was a big character around town when I was coming up. He's one of my great influences.

Anyway, so I got this job at the miniatures unit, and that was awesome because I love film, I love practical art making. I got a job in the art department, and I was the only art department trainee, which was fun. And I just got to help everybody. So I helped the grips and lighting people and the special effects people in the art department. I just became this sort of funny kid, like "What's he doing here? Give him a job to do."
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K: And it turns out you're doing a little bit of everything, which is also what you do now.
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S: Yeah, totally. And I think that's kind of been the thread. Even in high school, I didn't want to just focus on photography. I didn't want to focus on just painting. I liked all of the things. I'm not particularly interested in becoming a master at anything. I like to learn a thing until I can kind of wield it to the extent that I need to get my idea out. It's more like, the ideas are there and they need a way to come out, and I need another tool or another method for allowing it to arise.
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K: Yeah. The value of being an amateur in many different facets.
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‍S: Yeah, and I really am comfortable not knowing. I actually really love those first little moments where you're kind of stumbling around a new thing. And you're like, "I don't know how this works. How is it going to work?" And you kind of break it and then you kind of put it back together, you know, metaphorically, or maybe sometimes literally. And then you get it. And that's the pleasure for me. Learning new skills is just like, "Wow, I didn't know this thing even existed."  And then I'm like, "Look, I'm kind of doing it!" And that's really gratifying, I think. And then just how as you keep doing that, they all start to inform each other, and it just expands your capability set a bit, and what you're able to sort of say or express, which is really exciting.
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So yeah, the film was great, but it was also very exhausting and trying. It was 14 hour days, six days a week. And I was just young, I was only 19. There was this whole sort of path ahead of me. The way film works, it just sort of rolls into the next one, they take on the next crew. So I had the opportunity to go into the next film, but I was so exhausted, emotionally, physically, I was like, "I can't do it."
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So I went and I got a diploma in digital media. I moved to Auckland, which is the big smoke in New Zealand. It's the biggest city. It's where the most people live and where lots of opportunities are. Media Design School was this really cool school that was really focused on industry skills and connecting you to industry pathways. They had really good connections with a lot of the local agencies, so it was a bit of a pipeline. But they were really practical in the way that they educated. It was technically a postgraduate program, so it was for people who have already studied or are already working to build up their skills or transition to a different area. So I was able to get in on the merits of the work I'd done at school and my experience in the film. It was an eight month program, and I learned all the coding stuff, like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and then at the time, ActionScript, which is the flash coding language.
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I think going into it, coming from the very physical art making world, I was really interested. Because as a digital native to a certain extent, I do definitely remember a time before the internet, but me and my generation have come into the world and have been maturing alongside the internet. Like the internet is a millennial, right?
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K: Yeah, you're a couple years younger than me, and I definitely remember time before the internet, but I also was 18 or 19 by the time I was in it.
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S: Yeah, totally. So I was familiar with computers and played around with them a lot and was interested in animation and all that stuff. So I had been tinkering, but I just kind of wanted to learn how to really do it, how to really talk to the computer and all that sort of stuff. And we did really cool stuff and learned how to do really interactive experiences online and longer form and shorter form animation skills. It was cool because I was really interested in that intersection of "how does digital meet physical?" And I think I still am. With a lot of the stuff that I do, I really love to still start with making something in the real world and see how does it go from the real world into the digital and feedback?
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K: Yeah, you do that a lot in our projects now. I find you'll start with cutting out letters or making things out of bread and then photographing them and then bringing them into the digital space. It's always a very fun process to follow.
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S: Yeah, I love that process. I want to refine it more. Especially in this exercise of OMFGCO and the higher-end branding stuff we do. It's not quite a pitch perfect process yet, but I still love having the connection to the physical world and making things because I do still have a little bit of cynicism around the digital world. And I think I've come at it from a very physical art making place. I came into it being like, "Okay, what does this medium have to offer that the real world doesn't?" I think that it's always good when making digital things to always remember what it's referencing. When we think about making things for the digital world, it's always important to remember we are in the physical world experiencing this digital thing, and so how does it connect back to the human experience? The most interesting digital experiences I've encountered are ones that are having a conversation with the human experience, not trying to ignore it.

‍K: That's interesting, because I don't know if social media has that.
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S: That's one of the examples, I think, where it's trying to replace a real world experience, and that's why it's caused so many problems. It should be an extension or something that can support our human experience, not something to replace it.
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K: Coming back to our meandering path, it sounds to me like yours was quite varied. Can you just take us on a little journey from that moment of being in that program to where you are now?
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S: I never really set out to be a designer. It's kind of interesting to find myself here now as a brand designer, with a really high end execution group of people.
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K: That's why we hired you. Because when you applied, you gave us a wooden box that you made and painted and drew type on, that's right here. And then you put some work samples and things inside of it, and it really stood out in relation to what we normally get for applications. That really caught our attention. We love working with people that aren't trained designers, you know, there's a real value in that like amateurism and that non-specialty.
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S: I think that's part of maybe what drew me to OMFGCO is that tenet of being the outsider. That really resonated with me because I've always felt that way forever, and never particularly wanted to be something that was really well defined, because I think I'd get bored.

K: Yeah!
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S: So yeah, I finish this program and had a bunch of different experiences from there. I worked at an animation studio for a little while doing a bit of digital work and helping do asset design for the animation, designing the signs and the posters and all the little bits and pieces that are in the animations. And then I moved to Montreal and I was really just traveling. It was the sort of "getting out of New Zealand" thing. I was young, like 21, 22.

I was in Montreal kind of just freelancing, just doing whatever could with whoever I met, basically. So I met this one woman who was in an arts and culture magazine, like literary stuff, and wanted to create a digital platform for it. So I helped her to create the website for that. That was really cool exposure to the scene and through her I met some writers and I met David McKinnon, who is this writer that has been a long time collaborator of mine. I've helped him with illustrations for his books and digital experiences for his performances and things like that.
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K: So like kind of a focus on digital stuff in Montreal?
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S: At that time, yeah, definitely more on the digital because I was still sort of coming out of the program and being kind of excited by all of that. And then I moved to New York for a minute and then flipped the coin between San Francisco and New Orleans.
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K: You gotta tell that story a little bit.
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S: Okay, well, due to emotional circumstances of the dire variety...a big break up. I was in Montreal with my high school sweetheart and moved to New York, which was always my plan. I only went to Canada because I was waiting for my green card and I just wanted to be closer so that it would come through because my dad lived in New York and I just wanted to be in New York. And I wanted to get into film in New York, I wanted to go to film school. But then all those plans kind of fell to pieces when the break up happened. I was in New York and I was alone and I was staying with some friends. New York was like, "Okay, you're gonna get it together." And I was like, "No, I'm not."
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K: Yeah, it's not a place to sit idle.
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S: Yeah, so that's when I went down to Penn Station and flipped the coin.
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K: And that coin was going to decide your fate, either to move to New Orleans or to San Francisco.
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S: That's it. Yeah. And so yeah, 86 hours later, I was in the beautiful Bay Area, which then became my home for the next seven years. And it was great. I loved the Bay Area. It was really a wonderful place and very exciting and welcoming and much easier at the time than New York and much easier than it is now. So then when I was there, my creative journey sort of continued in that kind of hodgepodge way.
I had started a project with my old tutor from the digital media program, Colin Williams. And we had become friends during the thing. I was basically just in his office bugging him all the time, so 'friends' might be loose. ‍

‍K: Like a fly.
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S: Most people who know me at OMFGCO will know I'm always chatting, making meetings go too long. But we started this project together called Planet Builder, which was a game built on the Facebook game platform. It was sort of a Sims-like game where you build the world and it was all about sustainability practices, and there was a charitable arm too where you could play for certain charities and as you play you generate real-world money for real-world charities. But that all fell apart because the CEO who helped us with going from prototype to proper company, ended up embezzling all that money and running off to China.
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K: Oh my gosh...
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S: That was a bummer. But we kind of moved on. It was definitely jading, and we put a lot of emotional and intellectual and creative energy into this project.
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K: What a turkey of a person!
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S: Big turkey! Who steals money from people who are trying to educate children about sustainability and charities?
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K: Yeah, that's insane. That guy's not sleeping well at night.
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S: I'm sure he is. He's probably somewhere taking advantage of orphans or something.
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K: Oh, god! You're a bad man wherever you are!
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S: Bad turkey! So I moved on and just started picking up odd things. I did some work for the Bay Area Video Coalition, helping local filmmakers make websites and things for their films. I started another company with a woman, Jean, who wanted to create a more refined version of learning arts and crafts online. At the time it was just YouTube, that was the only way you could really learn anything. Now we have Skillshare and Domestika and Masterclass and all these things. But at the time they didn't exist, and this was really the wave where a lot of those things were just coming out. So we were, I suppose, a part of that first push and Creative Bug still exists today. So I helped Jean develop that from the ideas into an actual website and then building the company, hiring the people and finding the space and doing all that stuff together.

So that was over a course of a year. At the end of that I just kind of parted ways and it is still going and it's very cool and made some really great friends through that. So after that year, I got a bit of a payout from the company because I sort of took some shares instead of salary and so I got some money and I was able to take some time.
So I returned to just making things and that's when I had a bunch of art shows that year and I made a bunch of sculptures and my friend came out and we just we just made art like solely for like four months.
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K: Wow, a dream.
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S: Yeah, it was great. It was a really good time. It was kind of recentering and through that period I did a little bit of freelance. Just as I started coming out of that period where it was like "I just want to make stuff."  I started having the desire to make stuff for people, making stuff for a purpose rather than just making things. I think that's where the field of design provides that opportunity to collaborate with non-creative people to try to bring something to life. It's someone else's vision through your creativity. I think that's what's really exciting about design. I just started working with everyone who was in my community basically. Like the local coffee shop needed menus and I painted their signs. I got really into hand-painted signs. My friend who was a baker, I helped her brand her whole business. I made her a big kiosk thing for farmers markets, it was this table-cart thing and it all came apart so it could fit in the back of her Honda fit, so she could go to and from. I think that's where my inclinations for design sort of started to emerge naturally. That problem solving was really interesting. I was like, "Okay here's my friend, she's a baker, and she needs to get to farmers markets, and she needs to have a thing, and  she needs to be cool looking because it needs to attract people's eyes, and how do you want to do it? How do you feel like you want to express it? So it was a very one to one level of my collaborations with people. It was the coffee shops and bakers and it was really centered around hospitality at the time.
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K: Funny, that's a lot of what we do now.
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S: Exactly, yeah.
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K: Did you just teach yourself sign writing?
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S: Yeah, so I had a friend in Indiana who I met through the Bloomington print collective and he introduced me to it. I just started working with people who I met, like a tattoo shop and a Vietnamese pop-up restaurant, and it just sort of went from thing to thing and I really loved that that it was sort of about building relationships with people personally and then helping them form an extension of their passion that they're already doing. Helping them to really realize it to its fullest extent was really rewarding.
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K: Yeah, that's the best part of this work, an opportunity to collaborate with people on a really personal level. Of course, once projects get bigger and there's more stakeholders that gets harder and harder.
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S: Totally. That was a really great year though for building a foundation for sort of reconnecting with my art making, because I was getting really drained and burnt out on the digital world. I couldn't find a way to integrate my art making, so it was sort of like I had to do this full switch before it could come back in and slowly integrate digital pieces back into my practice.
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K: Balance is hard to find. Do you remember the first time you noticed design as a thing and what captured you about that?
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S: My dad is an architect and we had a design program at my high school, and my design teacher was amazing, Louise Wycherley. It was definitely intriguing to me but honestly I think I've been a little cynical of it, like maybe forever.
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K: What makes you cynical about it?
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S: I think it's the tension I have between art making and creative expression and the commodification of that. But I think that's the thing that's allowed me to live a creative life, is design. I've been able to be creative, be collaborative, and make a living. You can make a living as an artist if you work hard at it, but I think for me, there is something really integral about the collaboration piece in design.
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K: The client that you're working with, what is it that they're putting out into the world? Are they passionate about it? Is there an interesting vision there? Is it helping people in some way or giving them something that they don't have access to? Or are these clients just trying to make a buck? It's that piece to me is the rub where something feels good or doesn't feel good.
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S: Yeah, I wouldn't have lasted very long here if it were a turnkey design place, just churning things out.
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K: Yeah, I’ve worked at big corporations and it's harder because it's like, "Do we need all of this product?" A lot of this is going to go live in the dumpster and it's just about selling more things and making more money and keeping the machine going and it's not necessarily about doing things that people need or want or will inspire them or create meaningful connection. But also, everybody has different experiences and with those jobs, you'll make more money and people have circumstances where they need to make more money. So whatever you need to do to live your life and hopefully feel good about what you're helping put out into the world.
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But you hadn't worked at a branding studio before, what made you apply to this one?
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S: I was working at Fitbit just before the pandemic. I got this contract with them that was supposed to be like three months long doing motion stuff. Basically a real world practical crash course in After Effects. I was basically just learning After Effects on the job. I had animation experience, and I had done some stuff for Good Fortune Coffee Company, who I've been working with since 2016, and I've been doing experimental animation things and my friend was the Creative Director there at the time she was like, "You've been doing cool motion things, can you come and do this?" And I was like, "Yeah, I can do it!"
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K: I love that about you! First of all you just learn everything, like you're very self taught and motivated in that way. And I don't feel like you have imposter syndrome, like you're just like, "Yeah, I can do it." And then you just learn it.
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S: I mean, I think maybe my imposter syndrome comes up in other deeper ways or something. But I think when it comes to making things, it doesn't get in the way because that's really what I want to do. I want to make more things and any opportunity I can to like expand those horizons, I take. I think a lot of the time people will get a job because they are willing to do it, rather than necessarily being the most skilled at the job or the best possible applicant.

K: So willingness really is the strategy here.
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S: I think so, yeah. I think that's been my approach. There's a certain amount of capability you need to bring along with it, or just a willingness to fail but learn from it. Because you want to do the job, you're not just trying to get the job to get the paycheck and then not do the work. I saw this as an opportunity. I was getting excited about motion and I wanted to learn more about it. I also needed work, so it was like two birds with one stone and so I just jumped in and started learning as much as I could. It was really a lifeline through the pandemic to be able to continue to do work, but at the end of that period I was like, "I can't just keep doing this, it's getting so boring, I want to do something else." I actually just didn't want to work at all and so I quit. I had a bit of money saved up from it and I went did that thing again where I'm just gonna make stuff.
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I wanted to make a thing that was the expression of all the things I'm interested in right now, and so I did this thing over here. "Sam O'Leary—Art and Design" I went and found some cool old test screen graphics from Leica and other film things and I kind of created my own brand language around it and created all these weird little icons and illustrations and motion test patterns. I designed them all then I recreated them, so I built it as this physical painting and it's real like mixed media, like cardboard and wood and bits of paper and it's all hand painted and then it has this kind of like the the circle bit that spins. Then I animated a bunch of the pieces, filmed it, and did a stop motion animation of the actual physical piece, then I comped them all together. So it was a really cool way for me to experiment with stop motion animation and digital motion design and filmmaking and hand painted signs and digital illustration. It was a way for me to put it all together in one weird thing.
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K: And then it was a digital file?
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S: Yeah! Now it's this animation on my website and I used it as the basis of my design for my CV and my resume and all that sort of stuff. There's a whole digital version of it which then became my materials for invoices and all that sort of thing.
So I spent time doing that and I was just enjoying making things again and not being on the computer all the time.

Then my friend sent me the post that you guys had done for brand designer and I was like, "Okay, maybe I'll apply for a job." I really wanted to connect with Portland more, because I've been working remotely with no one here, and I wanted more excuses to connect with the creative scene here. I thought, "Oh well, if nothing else I'll meet some cool like creators." I had a look at the work and I really loved a lot of the work and I was like, "These guys will never hire me, look at this stuff! This is so polished!" but I was like, "I'll make them a thing."

I really wanted to learn how to bend plywood and this was a great opportunity, so I looked at the post and I was like, "What are the design elements and how can I turn them into something physical?" So the box shape is actually informed by Brandon's design with the pills and all that sort of stuff. So I made this box and documented the whole process on Instagram, and then delivered it and no one was there. It was really funny and kind of a little bit of an anti-climactic moment. It was again, how can the digital inform the physical, inform the digital and I really love when things sort of go through those little feedback loops and inform each other. So that was cool and then you guys were like, "Yeah! That's great!"
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K: We were intrigued! I have some more questions. What are the tools that you love using the most?
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S: My banjo!
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*Vibey banjo strumming*
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Well, I have this giant coffee tin from Cafe du Monde in New New Orleans, right here next to my desk that's just full of paint brushes and pens and colored pencils and various making things. I've just always been into drawing and everything always starts with drawing.
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In the digital toolkit, Figma is awesome. We've made the switch to Figma recently and I really have enjoyed living in that world for collaboration especially. You know all the Adobe suite I have here in my dock. The classics, Photoshop, Illustrator, for my motion design I have After Effects and then for 3D stuff there's Dimension and Blender.
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K: What do you do when you feel stuck?
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S: Go outside. Honestly, whenever I'm stuck it's because I've been thinking about it for too long. I go do something else unrelated for sure, nature if possible, but just even the other room if you can't get nature.
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K: Luckily we live in the Pacific Northwest, so it's pretty easy to find nature. What would you be doing if you weren't doing this?
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S: We kind of touched on earlier, like how can we use where we are now as a platform to explore things? Like the things we want to do and the areas that we want to go? There are possible alternate realities where I'm a filmmaker or doing just art and I think that's very fine probable alternate future, but the reality is I'm here and it's more about, "How can I explore the things I'm interested in within this framework of where I am now?" We just went through it all, there's all this time and experience that got me to where I am, and I can't change any of that, so how can I integrate other areas of interest into this this moment?
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K: Okay, last question, where do you find inspiration?
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S: Oh man, everywhere! Maybe in the multitudes of life. I find inspiration everywhere, which I think might be a little bit different. I am not particularly interested in any one thing, like we were saying with my skill acquisition, I love everything and I think that kind of limits me from ever becoming exceptionally good at anything. Which is something I have to kind of let go of. I could never be a a master craftsman of anything because I'm too flighty. I'd be like, "Okay, that's done. Ready to move on." But it means that I have a really wide array of interests, like that thing I showed you. My interest is like this ginormous wheel of all these different things. I love reading, I love books, I love going to bookstores and the library is like my happy place because it's just a place that's full of ideas.

I mean aesthetically, you could probably say that I have a lot of pretty specific, influences but I think when it comes to my work, I'm able to move around. I don't feel particularly limited when we have to design for someone. But I love handmade things and folk art and like the sort of untrained. Maybe it's because where I've come from.
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I love maps, I love weird ephemera and strange books, like this great one, "Buckland's book of Gypsy Magic" But it's right next to Joseph Alber's "Interaction of Color" you know like this this strange collection of "Selected Essays from the Public Domain Review" is like right next to like "Just My Type."
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K: It's very reflective of you, like a mixture of things and this maximalist take on everything, which you very much bring to your design practice and the space and the way you move through the world.
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You mentioned your particular influences who or what are they?
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S: The whole sort of Beautiful Losers movement was a big influence, you know Margaret Kilgallen, but I also love, from the design realm, Bruno Munari and his whole way of thinking. Christoph Neiman is awesome, but then he's right next to Patty Smith here. Music and writing are also really big influences. Annie Atkins is one of my heroes, she's a graphic designer for props and filmmaking, she's sort of like the pre-eminent person in that realm. She did a lot of a lot of stuff for Wes Anderson. I love filmmakers in general just the way they can build worlds and explore them so thoroughly visually is so inspiring to me. I love Michelle Gondry, he’s a huge influence on me, like all the crazy cardboard stuff I make, like the giant robot in the corner over there is definitely like a direct Michelle Gondry influence. I think "Be Kind, Rewind" had a huge effect on my visual aesthetic development. Do you remember that movie, with Jack Black and Mos Def? Just the themes in it too, like the sort of making art in community and the strength of collaboration is really compelling.

Kim: Well that is all very insightful! Thank you so much, Sam. We'll talk again soon.
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Sam: Fabulous.