This is the sec­ond part of the inter­view with Adrian Shaugh­nessy. The first part was here.

What sort of designer had you become at this point?
Well, I’m not a very good designer; I’m an OK designer. I’m OK when it comes to com­plex things like grids. I like maths. I like geom­e­try. I like mul­ti­ples. How things are arranged on the page. I like that because it’s all about dis­ci­pline. I learnt about type through doing hot-metal type­set­ting. So I know that what is between the black marks is as impor­tant as the black marks them­selves. With metal type­set­ting you have to touch it, it’s not just the return key. So that’s my dis­ci­pline. I’m an art his­to­rian by trade; I’m slightly intel­lec­tual, maybe too intel­lec­tual. When it comes to visu­al­iz­ing things I’m too intel­lec­tual, it becomes too obvi­ous. Neville Brody’s the exact oppo­site of me. We’ve worked together suc­cess­fully. Neville’s a dig­i­tal painter. He just throws it on the page and it looks great, but he can’t repeat it. I’m the other way round. I pro­vide the skele­ton, I make sure things don’t fall down. And he makes it look good, and I’m very happy with that.

When I set up my stu­dio some­body said to me, ‘always employ peo­ple bet­ter then you’. It was the best advice any­one gave me. But I resisted it for a long time. It was hard to accept.
As a mediocre designer, I real­ized that I could look much bet­ter if I had good peo­ple. And because I’m good at cer­tain things (I’m pretty good at type, espe­cially the mechan­i­cal part of type, and I have a good knowl­edge of the his­tor­i­cal), I can afford to hire good peo­ple. Some peo­ple are afraid of hir­ing bet­ter peo­ple but I’ve never been like that because actu­ally it makes me look good. So the sys­tem was always that I’d hire really, really good peo­ple and let them do their shit.

That’s the good thing about a large stu­dio. If you had two or three peo­ple it is dif­fi­cult because then you have the egos. When you have 20 or 30 peo­ple that evens things out. Also, the one thing I like about hav­ing more than 100 peo­ple, or more than 70 peo­ple, is you sud­denly have this lit­tle grey area where you can hire two or three peo­ple who haven’t really got a job descrip­tion because it doesn’t really mat­ter. I hired this Amer­i­can pro­gram­mer who I never told my part­ners about. He was doing data­base pro­gram­ming and C++ in the late 1990s before that really became a neces­sity, before we had PHP. I hired him because we could afford to.

I had another guy who was a con­cep­tual per­son. He had no train­ing what­so­ever but he was just bright in a slightly weird way. You couldn’t put him in a group of peo­ple. But you could feed him shit and he’d come out with this amaz­ing stuff. Never to a sched­ule, never within a group, but I loved the lux­ury of hav­ing these guys who just prance about with bells on their caps. In a small stu­dio you can’t afford that.

Design­ers want to be cred­ited for their best work. What is your view on cred­its?
I always give every­one a credit and make sure that every­body is in the bylines. I know how impor­tant it is to be able to say ‘I worked on this’. I don’t mind list­ing ten names in a credit. If the client lets me, I’d put Eden­spiek­er­mann, and then list the five or six peo­ple who worked on the team. Those peo­ple can put this work in their port­fo­lios with­out lying, or pre­tend­ing. I’ve seen port­fo­lios that peo­ple have pre­sented to me con­tain­ing work done by me. They weren’t even there. Forgery has become so easy, so if you give some­body a credit, it’s out in the open. Of course, a lot of clients won’t let you. We have quite a few clients who will not allow any cred­its what­so­ever, which I find very, very dif­fi­cult. Also cred­its are not only there for your CV, it’s like applause. Design­ers need applause, they need to be praised and I like prais­ing people.

What do you look for when hir­ing a designer?
They have to know some­thing really, really well. Some­thing they’re really good at. If somebody’s good at C++, or someone’s really good at draw­ing, it doesn’t mat­ter what it is, they just have to have one spe­cial­ity. Also, they have to have gen­eral knowl­edge. I hate peo­ple who don’t read. I hate peo­ple who don’t cook, or don’t know any­thing about music.

I couldn’t work with any­one who only goes to McDon­alds. I want peo­ple who know movies, who know music, who read books. As you know, not all graphic design­ers are ‘mul­ti­di­men­sional’. They don’t read, they don’t do any­thing else, and I couldn’t work with those peo­ple. I need team peo­ple who have gen­eral knowl­edge because that’s what we do, and I want those freaks who can do one thing
that nobody else can do.

You touched on the impor­tance of phys­i­cal space with your dia­gram. What about inter­nal details — does the fur­ni­ture, the mon­i­tors, the shelv­ing have an impact on cre­ativ­ity and effi­ciency?
Oh yeah. There are three or four major issues. The first is how you feel while you are work­ing. I spend a lot of money on chairs. We couldn’t save any­thing there because we spend 10 – 12 hours a day at work, and it’s our health. At my age, I know what a bad chair can be like. Best chairs, best light­ing, best desk, best equip­ment. I won’t buy crap and I won’t buy ille­gal soft­ware. I couldn’t always afford the best fur­ni­ture, but as soon as I could, I bought the best for my peo­ple. It doesn’t have to look chic. I don’t mind Ikea tables. They’re fine as long as the y’re the right height and they have the right sur­face. I want to have best tools, which for me always included great espresso machine, clean toi­lets, good drink, decent water, that sort of stuff.

The sec­ond issue is that it is not nec­es­sary to set out to impress clients. We don’t need to show off. We don’t need mar­ble stair­cases; we don’t need recep­tion­ists who con­stantly file their nails. But we need to show that we care.

The third part is the com­mu­nal part of it. I want a space where peo­ple know what’s going on. I want trans­parency and if we have a meet­ing room like the one we are in right now, with glass walls, we have trans­parency. But it’s still sound-proof. You do cer­tain things that need to be con­ducted out of earshot. Someone’s review, for instance.
So pri­vacy is nec­es­sary, but you want peo­ple to see that essen­tially you have your hands on the table.

Does loca­tion mat­ter?
That’s the fourth fac­tor. It’s impor­tant that the space is some­where every­one has an easy time get­ting to. Here in Lon­don you could prob­a­bly get cheap office space out of the cen­tre, but if you want peo­ple to get to it eas­ily, it has got to be in the mid­dle of the city. The pre­cise area is impor­tant too. Peo­ple need to get out. They need to buy lunch for three or four pounds/dollars/euros, or what­ever, and they also need to see other peo­ple. That’s really impor­tant, that’s why we get stuck in fairly expen­sive places. We need to be where it buzzes. You also need to bump into peers and col­leagues. Wher­ever I go, even in Lon­don where I haven’t lived for almost 20 years prop­erly, I still bump into peo­ple I know. If I go to a book­shop I bump into peo­ple I know. I go to a pub or a restau­rant and I bump into peo­ple I know. This is important.

So — a stu­dio with good fur­ni­ture, in a good urban loca­tion, near the cen­tre of things. Any­thing else?
I always go round try­ing to tidy things. I’m not tidy myself. I’d like to be, but I fall behind like all of us and end up get­ting piles of paper on my desk. Then I get pan­icky and I file things into fold­ers. I hate messy offices. I want clean toi­lets. I won’t have posters all over the place. I won’t have crappy notices next to the toi­lets; that annoys me. We don’t print out stuff in Comic Sans, and even our office peo­ple in Berlin know that when they print out a notice they must use our stu­dio typeface.

Should every stu­dio have its own type­face?
I’ve always designed the type­face for every stu­dio I’ve had. Always. It’s eas­ier for them to remem­ber which one to use. I designed Unit for United Design­ers and now we have Espi for Eden­spiek­er­mann, and of course Meta had Meta, which I designed for them.

Do you think it’s nec­es­sary for stu­dios to social­ize?
Yes, very impor­tant. We have a major cri­sis in Berlin at the moment; there’s hardly any work. Some of the free­lancers know they prob­a­bly will have to go soon. The employ­ees, the peo­ple on pay­roll, also know that it’s get­ting tough. Everyone’s get­ting cut down by 30%, and you can’t just send peo­ple an email telling them this. You’ve got to have a get-together.

We have a tra­di­tion, when some­body has a birth­day they bake a cake or they bring in a cake. Some buy it, some bake it. Now that we have 30 peo­ple, that’s a birth­day every other week. So there’s a lit­tle email say­ing ‘cake in the kitchen’. Every­body knows, ‘oh it’s somebody’s birth­day’. These things are impor­tant for team-building and loyalty-building. We have our Christ­mas par­ties, and we have our sum­mer par­ties in between our pic­nics. We don’t go over the top. We don’t hire peo­ple to plan our par­ties. But I think they are important.

You’ve worked in and vis­ited stu­dios all over the world. Do stu­dios exhibit national char­ac­ter­is­tics?
I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by how stu­dios look dif­fer­ent in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Every­body in Lon­don works in spaces that we wouldn’t even go into. Where British stu­dios have eight peo­ple, we’d have two. You work in spaces that are incred­i­bly small. My design­ers in Ger­many would just say ‘you gotta be jok­ing, there’s no way we’ll work there.’ And they’d prob­a­bly call some Office of Envi­ron­ment Admin­is­tra­tion and they’d come and close you down because you are treat­ing peo­ple like bat­tery hens. Or you go to Tokyo and they work stand­ing up. Why do Amer­i­cans love par­ti­tions? They love their recep­tion areas, and hav­ing their work on the walls. You walk into a lot of Amer­i­can con­sul­tan­cies — design stu­dios or what­ever you want to call them — and they look like adver­tis­ing agen­cies. And in our case — in Ger­many — it’s much more clin­i­cal. It’s much more like indus­trial design. In the UK a lot of stu­dios look more like artist’s stu­dios; Britain is still very art-based. British design stu­dios never have a recep­tion area. You always walk straight into the studio.

The full ver­sion of this inter­view can be found in the book Stu­dio Cul­ture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Stu­dio, edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaugh­nessy, pub­lished by Unit Edi­tions. The book is avail­able to AGDA mem­bers at www.uniteditions.com