Brendan Harrison

Uppercase magazine - Aaron Draplin profile

Aaron Draplin is an American archetype, a kid from a small town in Michigan who moved west to become a self-made man. His pursuit of happiness led him to the American dream after his search for good times and deep powder put him on a path to becoming one of the best-known graphic designers of our time.

His love affair with thick line logos and Futura Bold began while he was still living hand to mouth in Bend, Oregon. His first design job was a graphic for Solid snowboards, but he was soon picking up work lettering café signs and designing logos for local businesses. This early taste of design success spurred him on to see if he had the chops to play with the big boys. To find out, he signed on for a degree in graphic design from the Minneapolis College of Art + Design. After graduating in 2000, he started to make his mark in the design world, doing a stint art directing Snowboarder Magazine before taking a senior design role at a big studio in Portland.

Throughout it all, he continued to design personal projects that were close to his heart. In August 2004, he quit his full-time job and hung his shingle as the Draplin Design Co. In the years since, he's worked for clients as large as Nike and the Obama administration and as small as the Cobra Dogs hotdog cart. And while a lesser designer would have enjoyed some much needed rest, Draplin co-founded Field Notes and transformed the way hipsters everywhere scribble down their ideas.

The phrase larger-than-life comes to mind when talking about Draplin, not because of his imposing physique but because of his oversize personality. On his recent Tall Tales from a Large Man speaking tour, he travelled the country holding audiences captive for hours with little more than a profane PowerPoint presentation and a gift for the gab.

On the day of his visit to Calgary, I pick him up from the lobby of a Best Western. He's been working in his room all morning. We pile into my truck and drive to a diner on the outskirts of downtown, a place with taxidermy on the wall, ashtrays in the washroom and golden oldies on the jukebox. It's the kind of place where Draplin seems right at home.

We sidle into a booth and order breakfast. I turn on my recorder and plant it in front of him, opening my notebook to a page of questions I'd jotted down the night before. I ask him where we should start. "Wherever you want man, wherever you want. I can talk, man. So don't be afraid to be like, hey, chill out a little bit."

I do no such thing. I'm happy to play the part of passive participant in our conversation, sitting back to enjoy his rambling replies. His stories meander and digress in the most enjoyable way, revealing plainspoken wisdom and insight into the life of a creative professional. Throughout our discussion, Draplin comes across as something of a cultural magpie, a life-long junker who figured out a way to incorporate his love for old memo books and ration tins into a signature visual style.

"As a designer, I always had an appreciation for old stuff," he says. "Not in the sense of it's like a movie prop – because I get a lot of that too. Kids are like, what are you, some kind of sentimentalist or something? I'll take that word and run with it, no problem. I mean, what are you, a futurist? I'd rather look back at the restraint and try to use that in my new work. Using one colour effectively. Making a killer logo… There's just a sense of like, that stuff's on the way out and I don't want it to go away."

I ask him if he's always had this appreciation for cultural ephemera.

"Maybe?" he replies. "We grew up 250 miles away from Detroit, so when you'd go down to Detroit, it was a trip, right? You'd have to plan it out, be smart about it. Back then you would get a couple of records – that was your little take. You'd go see the concert that night, some Fugazi or Butthole Surfers or something and then you would drive all the way back home with your little artifacts. So it's like, you cherish that stuff. And if we had access to all that stuff all the time, I don't know if that would have been the same. Part of that distance that we had as kids, we learned to cherish the noise that other people made."

After graduating high school, Draplin got an Associate Degree in visual communications from the Northwestern Michigan Community College. Then he got the hell out of dodge, moving west to go snowboard during the winter and wash dishes in Alaska during the summer. He stayed for 5 years, eventually deciding it was time to pursue higher education. He's convinced that going back to school in his mid-twenties gave him an edge over his classmates.

"Some kids get right out of high school into college and then to a design shop. And with that comes the 'e word' – entitlement," he says. "Because first of all, they went right into college and they didn't really work. And then right into some design shop where it's like they've got this big degree and they're expecting a lot of things: money and cool projects and all this kind of stuff. I made a choice to roll the dice on what we love first, which was to go snowboarding… That put me into a different category.

"By the time it was my chance to go to art school and see if I was even close to being official, I felt I had to over-exceed to just get my foot in the door," he explains. "Once I realized what a racket art school is, it really blew up for me. It was incredible. But it wasn't just about logos, it was about learning how to weld and play with interactive tools, just having a taste of all these things. It just opened up that many more doors for me, you know?"

Like many creative folks, Draplin graduated with a degree in design and a crippling student debt. He had a lead on a position at an agency in Minneapolis that he'd grown up admiring, but soon realized it wasn't going to be the right fit for him.

"I had a shot to go work at an agency," he says. "I met the guy I'd actually be under the thumb of and he was a fucking turd. I wouldn't even hang out with him… I got to see what it was like, and I was like, are you guys kidding me? That's when I left to work for Snowboarder magazine. A lot of people said, I should have stayed, but I just got to see that I was going to have a faster trajectory going to a snowboard magazine where it's just me at the helm."

After two years at Snowboarder, Draplin picked up an Art Director of the year award and helped push forward the visual vocabulary of the fledgling sport. He left California and returned to Portland, landing a job at a Cinco Design studio, where he went to work for clients like Nixon watches, Gravis shoes and Helly Hansen. He applied the same hustle to his work there that he had at the magazine and learned some valuable lessons about working in the agency world.

"I would sit in a meeting and I would leave it knowing what I was going to do. I was ready to go make it right then, or at least get it rolling," he recalls. "The problem is, you've got an account manager sort of partitioning it. 'You've got that done?' 'Yeah, I'm done man.' 'Well, we don't want to give them too much, because then they're going to expect it all the time. You can play Ping Pong all afternoon. You're done.' I'd just sit and work on my own shit."

The more he worked on the side, the more he started to wonder if there was some way he could shift his way of thinking about work and go full-time doing his own stuff.

"You know, people say, 'I don't get to do fun stuff at my job.' You work at a goddamned community college, what do you think? Make it cool. That's your job. Then go home and make a poster for your buddy's band or some neat little thing so that you can maybe quit your job in six months. They made the model for us and then we plop ourselves in it and go, 'God, it sucks.' Go build your own model, your own mode for how you do this. That's what I tried to do. And it's still in progress. I'm going to be working all night tonight. So is it working? I don't know. I don't care. I love it."

His talk about working all night isn't hypothetical. As soon as we're done with our interview, he asks me if I can drive him to the airport so he can spend a few more hours pounding out work before flying back to Portland and pulling a weekend of all-nighters. But you never get a sense that he wishes it were any other way.

"Can you get away with it?" he asks. "That's what the whole thing here is. Can you get away with loving what you do? Make enough money? I've made a ton of money. I don't know what that means. It's a lot to me. I lived off of fifteen grand a year for a lot of years. You add a zero to that and shit changes. Your life changes… No one told me that was going to happen. I thought you'd just get enough to make a living and you'd just go to the next pay cheque and you'd suffer… No. You go work a bunch of stuff and a bunch of things called pay cheques show up. Pretty kick-ass."