The other day I had lunch with a former Frankfurt Balkind employee who was experiencing the highs and lows of having his own design firm. He seemed incredulous when I laughed, “Every August for the first twenty years, Aubrey Balkind [my business partner and husband] was in total despair that the firm—“this year most definitely!”—was going under. It was the same with our friends who’d founded their own computer animation, film editing and music businesses. We actually looked forward to sharing each week’s not-so-hilarious disaster tales in our ongoing one-upmanship of who would fail first and worst. Yet, each company, R/GA, Dennis Hayes Editorial, Elias Arts, went on to become bigger and better and more prestigious. It never occurred to me that the people in our own company didn’t recognize the day-to-day pressures we were under.

Which brings me to the original purpose of this column. It was conceived as an ode to getting older, wiser and, now, gleefully freer, after more than 25 years in the business. Having sold our business to Interpublic and with our buyout contracts reaching an end, I was curious to find out what was ahead through the experiences of other design firm founders who had moved on. Instead, like many design projects which start down one path and finish on another, my conversations took an unexpected turn.

I was looking for entrepreneurs who had created unique and admired cultures; who had gained international reputations and garnered scores of awards with the most coveted of clients; yet who had still chosen to take an exit route after eating and sleeping design for decades. Colin Forbes (Pentagram), Bruce Burdick (The Burdick Group), Clement Mok (StudioArchetype), Aubrey Balkind (Frankfurt Balkind). Respectively from England, California, Canada and South Africa. That I couldn’t think of a retired female in this league, and that most of these fellows aren’t American-born, tells you something about how far the profession has evolved from two-plus decades ago when this group started.

Were these in-the-know, marvelously talented guys still jubilant about the world of design? Hmmmmm. Words like passionate, intellectually challenging, meaningful, expansive, rewarding and exciting were frequently used. But, then, so were frustrating, insular, narrow, misunderstood and burned out.

Ignorance really is bliss. You make your own luck.
While I wasn’t expecting humility, ignorance and luck seemed to come up quite a bit. For some, their early naïveté and inexperience allowed them to make (what turned out to be) good decisions which they might clearly have never made if they’d known more.

Bruce Burdick mentioned that early on you have time to make a lot of false starts. It’s only later when you’ve built something that you realize how lucky you were “to step between the stones of projects and clients.” To Burdick, this was happenstance: “If I hadn’t known this person or done that, the business might never have developed...I moved The Burdick Group from LA to San Francisco based on one major project without realizing that projects start and, sometimes, stop before they’re completed.”

Colin Forbes reminisced that: “Pentagram was lucky with a series of accidents.” He and his partners were doing well in London and had all just turned 30. They had complementary strengths and ambitions when they decided to open an office in New York—“in retrospect, a huge risk.” Arriving without clients, they set-up in George Nelson’s office and soon realized they’d been overconfident, and that all their friends and contacts were actually their competitors. “We underestimated the possibility of going down, and it took us much longer to build than we ever thought.”

Aubrey Balkind, the only one of my “interviewees” who was not formally trained as a designer but with an MBA from Columbia University, started in the field based upon a verbal agreement with his first partner and mentor, designer Phil Gips. The idea was that Balkind would run the business and Gips would teach him design. With his left-brain/right-brain mentality, Balkind had a clear “vision” from the start, a company that: “understood the operations and language of business combined with the power of design.” Sounded good, but “it took five years and lots of mistakes before the company made a profit.” And luck? “If clients like MCI, Time Warner and Adobe hadn’t been attracted to us, some other innovative companies would have been, because we were positioned in the right place at the right time—at the juncture of technology, entertainment and communication.”

Clement Mok agrees that you make your own luck, but adds: “Luck is a combination of being in the right place at the right time and seeing the opportunity, because you can have the first two yet still not know how to take advantage of the situation they offer.”

Graphic designers are their own worst enemies.
Graphic designers frequently speak about themselves as communicators. Yet, has the design profession ever clearly defined exactly what it is that they do? Do their clients understand the value they bring? Are designers too ego-driven and in the business too much for love without a focus on money? Answer these questions and then ask yourself, do designers actually hurt rather than help their own profession?

Both Mok and Balkind are adamant that the world of design needs to change.

Mok points to three key problems. One, there’s the very definition of what design is: “Tools and palettes can differ, but I think of design as creating order out of chaos...we need to look beyond our current purview of visual communications—of what we’re designing to what it is we are trying to solve.” Two, there is a “problem with design organizations.” They focus too little on the business of design and too much on design competitions. Awards are often won “for self-indulgent wackiness rather than appropriateness for the client.” Mok adds this “is indicative of our own insularness.” Three, the educational curriculum needs to be rethought as “most undergrad schools teach you the skill of design, but not how to think more broadly...”

Balkind highlights the lack of practicality in the graphic designers’ approach to business. “The focus is too much on the art of design and not enough on the dynamics of a client’s business needs. When clients don’t pay enough for what you’re doing, they don’t feel it’s valuable; and then you lose the ability to affect real change—not to mention the ability to achieve the profitability required for your business to grow.” Emblematic of this he asks: “Management consultants, advertising executives, lawyers, operations and financial people all become heads of major corporations because business respects what they bring to the table. Why not designers?”

If there is a need to change, are our design organizations a help or a hindrance? Given the dynamics of today, is our premier institution, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) up to the challenge?