I met Louis Fishauf in Toronto in 1980 when he commissioned me to do a spot illustration for Saturday Night magazine. He encouraged me to have fun with it. Louis is someone who knows and appreciates artistic freedom. He has good taste. He has managed to negotiate a varied and successful career through the uneven times of our industry. He’s a bit of an alchemist in the way he puts people and ideas and art and technologies together. In many ways he personifies (the buzzword) convergence. Here’s our interview:

CA: You began your career in 1972 after graduating from the Ontario College of Art. Your first job was operating a typositor machine (photomechanical typesetting), starting your long association with design and technology. What do you still carry from that experience?

Fishauf: My eight months at Typsettra working under the late Les Usherwood gave me a tremendous grounding in typography and the appreciation of letterforms and letterspacing.

For those unfamiliar with this now-antiquated technology, the typositor was a machine for photographically setting display type. It worked much like a photo-enlarger—a strip of film containing all the characters of a particular font was loaded, then the required letters were projected one at a time onto a strip of photographic paper. The operator controlled the precise size and positioning of each letter.

This meant that as I was setting the headline, I was looking at the negative space between each character and making minute spacing adjustments. I had to determine which letter pairs required ligatures, which fonts could be set extra-tight (the fashion in those days), and generally how to move the reader’s eye along a line of text so that the words came alive instead of simply sitting on the page.

Four years of art college had not really prepared me for this task, and Usherwood was an exacting taskmaster. Every headline I set had to be approved by him before it went out the door, and for the first few months I worked there, he often made me go back to the typositor two or even three times before he was satisfied.

This character-by-character attention to letter-spacing is very different from the experience of designers who have come into the profession since the digital revolution, and never known anything but the ease of setting type on a Mac. Unfortunately, ease often leads to laziness and I’m afraid that many designers today don’t really pay much attention to the finer points, or even know what they are.

Aside from typography, I also gained invaluable studio skills, another area where my college training had been woefully lacking. Mastering the tools of the trade—T-square set square, Rapidograph pen, X-Acto knife, stat camera, waxer—allowed me to maintain a very hands-on work ethic throughout my career. Even years later when I ran my own studio and had assembly artists working for me, I always preferred to do my own mechanicals. I think this hands-on approach also facilitated my transition to the computer.

CA: You began a series of stints as art director of various Canadian publications like Chatelaine (1973) and Saturday Night (1982). I realize a job comes with its own unique set of design problems to solve. What did you learn from those experiences?

Fishauf: Working in magazine design allowed me to develop my layout and art direction skills. At Chatelaine I first commissioned and art directed photography and illustration, and began to develop some of the professional relationships (e.g., Anita Kunz, Nigel Dickson) that have lasted until today. I also learned that in magazines, the design and art were ultimately at the service of the editorial content, and needed to support and enhance the words. I learned about visual pacing, how to draw readers into a story, and how to create a visual tone or style that was appropriate to the publication and its readership.

At Saturday Night I expanded my art-directorial horizons by moving beyond the local (Toronto) talent pool and commissioning work from some of my favorite artists and photographers in the U.S, and Europe. Some of the connections that were initially made in commissioning assignments for SN developed into long-term repping relationships with Reactor. These include Jean Tuttle, Henrik Drescher, James Marsh and Steven Guarnaccia.

CA: Does typography still have its appeal?

Fishauf: Typography is still the basis of most of the design work I do, especially on the print side. Designing for the Web required developing a whole new typographic aesthetic, due to the technical limitations of the medium, and the lack of control over the end-user’s viewing experience (due to differences in browsers and platforms). However as the technology improves, and monitor resolutions increase, it’s becoming possible to do equally sophisticated typographic design for online delivery, with the added dimensions of sound, motion and interactivity.

CA: In 1982, you and Bill Grisgby created Reactor Art and Design in Toronto. It was at various times an agency, a repping business, an art gallery, a publishing house, etc. Was there an overriding principle in its creation? Was there a desire to create a community?

Fishauf: Actually, Reactor was all those things at once.

For my part, Reactor came about because after ten years in the magazine business, I felt I had run out of new editorial horizons in Toronto, and the thought of relocating to New York City simply to repeat myself with bigger budgets and a larger circulation wasn’t that attractive. I wanted to get into other areas of graphic design, and in those (pre-digital) times, that meant creating the studio infrastructure that was necessary to attract clients and execute large projects.

Bill Grigsby and I had met through Rene Zamic, an art college friend of mine who Bill had begun repping. We developed a friendly relationship, and from time to time when I saw a portfolio that I thought was particularly good, I would send the artist to Bill, who ended up repping many of them (e.g., Blair Drawson, Jerzy Kolacz, Jeff Jackson). As the stable of artists grew, Bill and I began to talk about potentially joining forces. My father’s retirement at the end of 1981, and the availability of his old factory space in Toronto’s garment district was the impetus we needed to form our partnership. We cleaned up the old space, put up some drywall partitions, and opened for business in May 1982.

At college, and in the early years of my career, I was a big fan of the work of Push Pin Studios. I had no real idea how Push Pin functioned, but I admired the way [Milton] Glaser and [Seymour] Chwast seemed to be able to take the work of a bunch of diverse talents, and put them through the “Push Pin filter” to create a cohesive graphic style. I aspired to do the same with Reactor and the collection of artistic talent I had helped Bill assemble.