Aaron Draplin

The Pied Piper of Good Design and Making Things Awesome

Succinctly summarizing Aaron Draplin is both impossible and insufficient. Alternatively submitted for your approval, a list of descriptors that merely skim the hairy surface of one of the design world’s Great Weirdoes: Prolific, loud, anachronistic, profuse, profane, aesthetically rigorous, zealous, subversive, adamant, and very, very talented. He is a testament to the power of the Internet to create a cult of personality around just about anyone with a good story to tell. Draplin’s particular fields of expertise – for which he has a growing legion of admirers – include dachshunds, the Futura font set, agricultural memo books, snowboard bindings and flea markets.

Draplin is proprietor of the Portland-based Draplin Design Company, a graphic design shop, but he’s more than that. His Field Notes brand, proffering memo books and related items, is blazing a nostalgic trail back to an era when manual labor meant getting the crops in on time, not the ability to update your Twitter status with one hand while populating cells in Excel with the other. Draplin is an aesthetician, one who longs for the days of pre-corporate typography and classic Americana and can rant about what constitutes good taste longer, and almost as colorfully, as George Carlin sounding off about Catholicism and conservatives.

Famed Midwesterner Garrison Keillor once called the pun the “lowest form of humor.” The Detroit-born Draplin’s got a heavily Midwestern, pragmatic sensibility, and while he undoubtedly appreciates a good pun, appreciating his wit requires buying into his way of thinking. Do that and you’ll enjoy not only design inspiration, but frequent satisfying belly laughs of the deep variety. In fact, you may become a fan for life.

How do you account for your success and why do you think you resonate with people?
When I think of success, I think of some fuckin’ actor who’s made like – I read today that (comic actor) Patton Oswalt has like $14 million in the bank. Now, that’s success, right?  What I would hope people would see, when they look at my thing, is a certain determination or independence or a ‘do whatever it takes to make it cool and fun’ spirit. And maybe they’re looking at how I try like hell and – I don’t know – maybe people are into that.  I’ve got people coming to my site every day, and that’s cool, but often I don’t really know why [they come]. I don’t concern myself with being anything other than a graphic designer who gets to get away with some fun shit. 

My definition right now, of success, at 37 years old: I make a good living, and I’m very lucky to live in a cool town and sock away a shit-ton of money and be able to see the nation. [I’m lucky to be sorta] healthy, have a caring lady watching over me, and to be able to see my Mom and Dad every few months. Every day I get to work on a mountain of good, bad and ugly. Not everything’s awesome… but I love the ugly as much as I love the fun stuff. Because I’m not selling insurance, you know? I’m making graphic arts, and it’s pretty cool.

So, to answer your question, in a really long-winded way, I’m not posting shit on my site so that kids like it, I’m just posting what I want. Sometimes, it’s just for me or my friends.

The problem with success is that some of these guys let it go to their heads. I have the equivalent of a small town reading my site every day and that’s really cool. Those numbers are growing, but I’m watching other guys who are a little cleaner and a little more articulate growing by leaps and bounds – and that’s fine. I don’t really care. Some of this [graphic design] stuff comes out really hot and fast and suddenly people are listening to your perspective. The fact that I can pay a mortgage by selling a bunch of t-shirts and hats, I mean, it brings tears to my eyes. For years and years and years, I had a following of buddies and colleagues but really, it was just for the hell of it. And it still is. That’s the whole thing. 

Can we get away with a life and a working style… can we get away with it and not take ourselves too crazy-seriously, make enough to have a cool life and just kinda enjoy it? I meet enough of these guys that work these big jobs and they don’t really enjoy it. I mean, not every day is perfect, but 90 percent of what I get to do is so fucking awesome. I get to work with my friends. I get to work on snowboarding stuff.  I get to work on that stuff. 

I’m getting recognized when I go out now. Like in the airport. And it’s really fun because I think I scare the shit out of [people] when [they realize] I’ll actually talk to them and be like ‘Hey! Where you from? What do you do?’ It’s no different to me than what I do with the guys I love. I’ll walk right up to some actor, because he’s just a person, and it’s my litmus test. Because I’m just this asshole from Portland and it’s like, “Can you talk to me? No? Okay, I’ll remember that shit, Motherfucker!” You can talk to me?  That’s cool.  Like Michael Moore? I love him that much more now because he took the time to talk to my girlfriend and I, you know?

You’ve become something of digital Pied Piper, showing the way to a better life through graphic design, and there’s a nerdy community out there that sees value in that. What do you make of it?

Man, you see some of the stuff out there – and this is where I get myself in trouble – but you see some stuff out there that seems so coy and articulated, so thought-out. I don’t want to do anything like that. I just want to let the stuff go, let it get out there. There’s really no business strategy, there’s no real plan. If you like the stuff, buy a fuckin’ poster.

Some of these design powerhouse guys out there, they’re really good businessmen and they’re really impressive. I just like to keep it a little loose, just kinda wing it, and let that be the spirit. We don’t have to take ourselves so seriously. You don’t want to show up to your job and just hate work. I don’t ever want to do that, I’m afraid of that. I want to love my job. I mean, I can’t wait to get down here every day.  There’s just too much cool shit to look at and do and enjoy and freak out about, you know what I mean?

We asked Sam Valenti from (boutique record label/art company) Ghostly International what he thought constituted good taste, whether it’s his or someone else’s.  What do you think?
Sam came up to me on a plane, dressed to the nines – that’s a good lookin’ dude – he knows how to dress! He kinda freaked me out. He said, “Hey, are you the guy from the video?” And I thought he was in the “weird fan” category, thinking he remembered me with this medicine-ball head, from that stupid video. That’s how we became buddies. You can just tell… by the way that guy carries himself, how he’s articulate and really considerate in everything he does, how he wears his clothes, the way he runs that record label, the way that he sends an e-mail – everything he does, probably down to the way he puts the groceries away in his refrigerator. That, to me, is a sign of good taste: Someone who’s thinking about the big, the little, and being cognizant of all of it. 

Taste comes and goes. A year ago, it was kinda hot-shit to look like a fuckin’ lumberjack. It’s like fake revival of the blue-collar thing… Whatever man, it’s fuckin’ fashion. Is it good taste? No! It’s fashion, and it’ll fade away and those same guys will be dressed like Interpol in a year. Me, I wear the stuff because I’m big. It’s a functional situation. I wear a flannel because there are pockets on the front and I can put shit in them, and I wear a black sweatshirt because I spill food on myself. Ha!

What am I even talking about again?  Good taste... Good taste is someone who uses something and wears it out. Like holes in jeans. That makes sense. People who are simple and reasonable about using things and procuring things. Frivolity is bad taste. The whimsy of that, the attitude of, “I want more, more, more,” that’s bad taste. Good taste is being reasonable. In my life, I mean, I’m doing alright.  I’m saving like a motherfucker, but I don’t have that whimsy to go buy dumb shit. I try to be smart about it. I buy a pair of Levi’s 501s and I wear the fuck out of those things.