Read an Excerpt

INTRO 


 “Where do you find inspiration?” We get asked that a lot. Honestly, we never really thought about it much; we just made things up as we went along, relying on our instincts and intuition. But when the opportunity to write this book came along, we decided it was time to give the question a little more consideration and try to answer it. So we played the last twenty-five years backwards and deconstructed our work, figuring if we were going to mow down enough trees for a couple hundred pages, we should cook up something a bit more meaningful than a simple monograph.

As convenient as it would be to trace our inspiration to a single source, we can’t do that. What we do know is that inspiration can’t be boiled down to one thing, be it a cool flea market find, an influential book, a personal hero, or a eureka moment. Our inspiration comes from a combination of factors—elements that are already part of the way we look at things and, consequently, part of the way we work. When we took a closer look at it, our process revealed itself as a mash up of personal interests, skills, working habits, relationships, and storytelling, not necessarily in that order.

Bring your hobbies to work. Sweat the technique. Get your hands dirty. Make friends. Tell it like it was. Embrace chaos. These chapter titles are short sentences, but at the same time, they are complete ideas that define the philosophy of our working process and form the core of this book. We illustrate each idea with case studies about specific projects, chronicling the backstories, artifacts, and memories that shaped them, warts and all. Each narrative shows how we applied these concepts so that you can benefit from our mistakes or maybe even steal a few ideas to spark inspiration in your own process.

We hope this book will help you navigate the tricky intersection between art and commerce in a way that satisfies the definitions of both—quite simply by finding some creative fulfillment while paying the bills. There’s an element of art in everything you do. To us, though, art itself is not the final product; art lies in the process of making that product. And that’s where we find our inspiration.