I worked as executive editor for Know? Mag #7, which was made available for public consumption last week at the 2010 Spring/Summer Know Show. The print run was limited to 3,500 copies and isn’t available for purchase, but it’s out there – somewhere. Photos shown by Andre Pinces, Jeff Petry, The Dark and myself.

-DH

We live in the age of the “creative,” a label that can be applied to anyone even marginally interested in anything inventive. If you’re familiar with the term, you’re probably one of us. You might be a designer, a photographer pulling espresso for rent, or maybe a writer “sourcing” the service industry for inspiration. It doesn’t really matter. Anyone can self-publish on the internet and blow up globally, blurring the line between fact/content and fiction/hype. What does matter, it seems, is where one resides.

When the design intelligentsia discuss which burgs best facilitate creativity, they predictably name-drop the likes of Brooklyn, Shoreditch, and Prenzlauer. Respectable cities for aspiring creatives must host amenities that rank well on the Bobo index. For example, Austin is a mecca for the Twitterati, while Copenhagen’s clean design and good looks surely reduce the threat of creative block. Then they specify a list of adjectives: creative cities must be urban, dense, accessible, and hipster-friendly. Never on the list will you find the words “suburban” or “plenty of parking space.” Which is why, as a resident of Los Angeles suburb Atwater, super-designer and founder of Champion Graphics Geoff McFetridge is an exception to the rule.

Alumnus of the Beautiful Losers school of DIY aesthetics (so dubbed by the 2008 film of the same name featuring well-known sceney contemporaries like Shepard Fairey and Harmony Korine), McFetridge’s multidisciplinary style is all his own. The 35-year-old Calgary-born, CalArts-educated visionary has designed anything and everything. He’s the former art director for the Beastie Boys’ mag Grand Royal. He’s had a hand in apparel, making shoes for Nike, sunglasses for Aussie label Colab, prints for Marc Jacobs, and shirts for Patagonia.

Famously, he did the title credits for Adaptation and The Virgin Suicides; he also created the animation for The Whitest Boy Alive’s video for “The Golden Cage.” He’s even in the permanent collection of the MoMA in San Francisco for his “mini-poster packs,” which won an award from International Design Magazine in 2000. McFetridge’s canon presupposed the design boom of the 2000s by a good ten years. In the age of blogs, overproduced cool and an infinite sea of images, McFetridge’s work remains relevant due to his unique ability to render any sort of idea into an iconic graphic statement without sacrificing personality. The Block (remotely, but who cares, right?) took a few minutes to talk to McFetridge
about the spaces he inhabits physically and creatively.

What’s Atwater like?

It’s nowheresville. We have two nice Vietnamese restaurants, a café, and a Starbucks, but when I first moved here there was just a bakery that had gas station coffee, a nail salon, and a cheque-cashing place. The reality of living in a place like LA is
really surprising. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t live here – but my life here, I’ve made it kind of exactly how I wanted it to be, and other people have made theirs exactly how they want it to be, and I’ve never really lived anywhere else.

Yeah, you don’t often hear great things about LA, but you seem to dig it.

In LA you can take this bleak, blank slate and turn it into something near to everything you want. One of the reasons I like LA is because it’s really suburban; it gives you all this space. I can live urban, I did for a while, but for me creatively, I can’t handle wasting my time with all the bustle using up my brain cells.

How have you designed your studio to help facilitate your creativity?

It’s in the process. There’s lots of empty space and I don’t really have furniture… There’s a lot of table space and tons of light in the upstairs. That’s where I spend most of my time, drawing and coming up with ideas. Downstairs has a front office for a wallpaper company I do called Pontiac. We’ve got two large sliding doors, and it becomes an indoor/outdoor workspace with tablesaws, silkscreen equipment and things like that.

Does your studio incorporate a lot of outdoor space?
It’s got a parking lot, which is very important [for] installations. I’ve always wanted to own a parking lot. It’s been a dreams since being a skateboarder. It’s amazing.

[originally published in The Block magazine]