Speaker 1:
Rick Griffith is a graphic designer who specializes in letterpress printmaking. In 2020, he was PRINT Magazine’s first artist-in-residence, and his work is in the permanent collections of several American museums. Griffith lives in Denver where he co-owns and operates MATTER, which is simultaneously a design studio, a typography laboratory, and a bookstore. He spoke with Debbie at the HOW Design Live conference in Denver back in September.
Debbie Millman:
Rick Griffith, welcome to the HOW Design Stage.
Rick Griffith:
Hi.
Debbie Millman:
This is my first question.
Rick Griffith:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
I want to take you back to a moment in time. You’ve eight years old. You discover screwdrivers and their ability to unlock and reveal. What happens next?
Rick Griffith:
My brother and I are 360 days apart. I am the second born child. My brother was raised in South America in my father’s homeland called British Guyana, and I was raised as an only child in London. I can put on the accent if you like. It doesn’t matter to me, but I found a screwdriver, I found a cassette deck, and I took it completely apart, and to the point where I could just see all the bits moving and I could accidentally zap myself with a little bit of electricity and everything. I mean, it was really just one of the greatest early experiences and memories of my young life, so yeah, I took apart the tape deck. That was really my kind of weird recording memory device in my young analog childhood. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that you were born in London. You were born and raised in Southeast London where your parents instilled a real love of reading and literature. You were introduced to Chaucer, the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and more. They also insisted, if I’m correct here, that you read the complete works of Shakespeare and Brontë before you were 12.
Rick Griffith:
Shakespeare, Brontë, Dickens, and Chaucer.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, so why?
Rick Griffith:
My parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from the British colonies, and they had a sense that education was transformative and that they wanted to educate their children. They weren’t a hundred percent sure that I was going to get everything that I needed, so they bought a fireplace that had these tissue paper editions of all of those authors. It was like a one-piece fireplace with books in it. That’s pretty much what it… and it was a gas fireplace with glowing logs and pretend heat. It was one of those, and whenever I said I was bored, they said, “Go read that book or go read that book.”
Debbie Millman:
You were bored a lot?
Rick Griffith:
Well, I didn’t have my brother and I was a young kid who was fairly sheltered and my parents believed that any downtime was going to be spent studying for entrance exams so that I could go to a private school because they couldn’t afford to send me to a private school, so I had to study for a scholarship.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you also included Dickens in this list.
Rick Griffith:
Yes, very much so.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve also described your childhood as a bit like a Dickensian novel. Which one?
Rick Griffith:
Even my adulthood.
Debbie Millman:
Oh really?
Rick Griffith:
Even my adulthood. I still have this resonance with The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby, and most recently, I don’t know if anyone’s seen it, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend it, there is a Dev Patel version of David Copperfield, which is a very play-like adaptation of the book. It’s really beautiful, it’s multicultural, and that is my anchor. The thing is is that over time, if you live long enough, you take off to the city for your fortune, you escape tyranny. If you live long enough, sometimes you outlive your spouse. All sorts of things happen, and having this anchor in literature, particularly in Dickens, this Victorian novelist, it really felt like I could put myself safely into a Dickensian plot and I would come out the other side with a tiny bit of triumph. That’s my hope.
Debbie Millman:
I sort of felt that way through my experience reading Jane Eyre as a young teenager. My family, for a very brief moment in time, did some family therapy and we weren’t all together in the family therapy. We’d go one at a time, and so when my mother was in there or my brother was in there, I would be in the waiting room and I discovered Jane Eyre. I remember there’s a scene at the very end of Jane Eyre where she’s talking to Mr. Rochester over the ocean. I felt like if I could do that, I could bring my world out into a bigger place that maybe I could be saved, too. It’s interesting how books give you that sense of hope.
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, it’s your imagination does a lot, and if you have literature stories in your mind and sort of moving around your psyche and your heart, what happens is you feel safe inside of those stories as if you’re not alone. I really feel like that was one of the things that was like, “Well, things are pretty shitty, like objectively bad right now, but there are so many amazing plots that take a twist for the positive and some benefactor shows up.” You’re like-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Rick Griffith:
… and so in the client world even, as a designer, every now and then I would bump into an amazing client that would last 20 years. Those clients are not just clients, they’re benefactors, they’re trusted collaborators, and that kind of stuff gives you hope, and also employees that would stick around for five years.
Debbie Millman:
Well, that makes sense to me because I can only imagine that you’d be a good employer. What are the tenets of a 20-year relationship with a client that you might be able to share some best practices for the people in the audience that would also like to have a 20-year relationship with a client?
Rick Griffith:
It’s hard. I couldn’t tell you if it’s entirely possible given the kind of atmosphere that we’re in right now, which has a certain reliable quotient of acrimony and greed and things like this that kind of get in the way, but being able to carry a deep conversation in the area of expertise that your client has should be a thing of great joy. Every client that came to me when I was a young person that said, “Oh, we want you to work for the Chamber Music Association of America,” I was like, “Great.” I became a method designer. I started listening to chamber music. I had an opinion about chamber music. I had an opinion about 20th century composers. All of these things developed quite naturally because I enjoy these relationships so much. They would throw tickets at me to Carnegie Hall or to other venues, Symphony Space, or some tiny little 30-seat theater downtown and say, “Tell me what you think. Tell me what’s up with that.” The 20-year-long relationships look like you caring enough about them to know what they’re into and what they’re working with, and then them trusting you to continue to grow with them over time. Neither person resists the value of each other, and that’s just the beauty of those things. They can last longer. 20 years is something, but my partner, Deborah Johnson, she also brought to the practice clients who were with her for 20 years as well, so it’s not an uncommon thing, but-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I think it’s an uncommon thing.
Rick Griffith:
Oh, you do?
Debbie Millman:
I do.
Rick Griffith:
Okay, so that’s the kind of people we are-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think [inaudible 00:09:11].
Rick Griffith:
… I guess is what’s going on. We really love being method designers, if you like.
Debbie Millman:
Your family moved to D.C. when you were still quite a young chap-
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, teenager, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… and at that point you began to develop a number of different passions. You got involved in the graphic design scene while working at a local record store. You were really drawn to punk rock. Talk a little bit about that formative period and what you were imagining your life was going to be at that point.
Rick Griffith:
Oh my goodness. For context, it’s like London in the ’70s, Washington, D.C., in the ’80s, New York in the ’90s, and Colorado since the mid-’90s, and if anybody here knows what was going on in 1984 in Washington, D.C., it blew my mind. I mean, I still resonate with the punk DIY ethos of the ’80s. My family imploded. That helped a lot. My family completely imploded. I had no like-
Debbie Millman:
As it often does.
Rick Griffith:
… I had no actual family in the ’80s. My parents went through a terrible breakup. I went through a terrible experience with my father, and I found myself leaning into communities of punk rockers in the Fairfax County/Suburban D.C. Area, which includes Dave Grohl and other punk rockers of the time. We had the best time ever being in community, being in difficult questions, and being in the center of it all, being against Reagan, being traumatized by the AIDS epidemic, really being in the center of America at a time when various types of neoconservative perspectives were being formed that we would be experiencing right now in its its fullest state if you ask me. It was a great place to get articulate about the struggle, about the truth of what was going on.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting that you just chose the word “articulate” because I was thinking every now and then when I do my research before an interview, I’ll find something out that really surprises me about that person. With you, it was that you dropped out of high school-
Rick Griffith:
Oh yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… and you are the most articulate, erudite designers in the world as far as I’m concerned, so to learn that you dropped out of high school to go to punk, Queer New York in the East Village-
Rick Griffith:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… to get your first big job in design, which was at Kinko’s, was a real surprise.
Rick Griffith:
Let’s not get carried away. Kinko’s is not a big job in design, but I was a graveyard shift worker at Kinko’s of Georgetown University. I was also a bike messenger and a part-time DJ. Just ever so briefly, I worked as a DJ at the original 9:30 Club at 930 F Street, and when I left Washington, D.C., I went to beautiful, Queer New York. I somehow in the transcript from Kinko’s of Washington, D.C., and Georgetown University, I went to Columbia University’s Kinko’s and somewhere in the transcript, I became the graveyard shift manager, which meant that I was earning a full like $10 more an hour for the first time in my life. That would mean that for the second time in my life, I could afford to go to therapy, which was amazing. Yeah, I know, the giggle, the therapy giggle. You got it. It is a real thing. I trust therapy, I believe in therapy, and I’ve been in therapy many times, and this is why I’m here is because I have, yes, I dropped out of high school. I took a couple of college courses. I’m matriculated at Cooper Union and at the new school, Parsons at the time, and one at CU Boulder here in printmaking, but mostly I’m self-taught because I have incredible curiosity about the world that we have inherited or the world that we’re created, or the things that help us thrive in a creative atmosphere, which means that everything that my creative collaborators are interested in, I automatically want to become interested in, too.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that your biggest skill in design is not design, but your ability to interrogate.
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, that sounds a little like I can be the person who canceled fun, so it sounds a little bit like that’s what I just did was canceled fun. Interrogate is true, but there’s also this notion of I have a great sense of when to develop a question, and that’s what’s brought me forward as an intellectual or as a person that’s not afraid of reading and studying and getting involved in my own education. That is that I trust that what college is for, I sent both my daughters to great colleges, what college is for is for framing the questions, and if you take responsibility for your education, you find the answers in a number of different directed ways. I knew my own questions and still do. I have a burning question today that I’m trying to get answered.
Debbie Millman:
What is that question?
Rick Griffith:
The question is this, because of the post-caste movement of Sikhism from Hinduism, how many creation mythologies live in Hinduism that makes the caste movement in Southeast Asia so prevalent outside of the religious framework of Hinduism? How does it continue to create oppression inside of a Muslim minority country or in a Sikh minority country and so forth? I really want to know more about creation mythology, and to that end, whenever I teach, I try and tell my students, “If you’re interested in being in creative work, you should have at least one or two or three if you can find them creative mythologies to draw from. You don’t have to just use the one that you were raised with. You could find out more about various religions and their concept of how magic happens, how creation happens.”
Debbie Millman:
How does this fuel your practice? How does this fuel your design work?
Rick Griffith:
Quite recently, we swore off collaborative projects that were largely concerned with capitalism.
Debbie Millman:
What else is there?
Rick Griffith:
I said largely concerned with. We have to draw-
Debbie Millman:
I mean, that’s the time-
Rick Griffith:
… the balance.
Debbie Millman:
… we’re in, but yes.
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, exactly. It’s baked in the cake. I don’t know how many other ways to just kind of in some way surrender to the presence of capital. I mean, we have a bookstore right outside the doors. Come on. I think it’s quite real, but when we swore off a number of different relationships and different types of projects, I started to treat the bookstore like it was my biggest client.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Rick Griffith:
… and that is now part of what I’m continuing to interrogate. The bookstore absolutely cares about graphic design and it cares about design and it cares about art, and it cares about creative thinking. We carry the Rick Rubin book and we carry Debbie’s books. We carry lots and lots of creative people who we trust and enjoy. We carry their products, but we also carry the products of Black, feminist, Queer intellectuals who are writing about their circumstance and what they believe is going to pull the communities that are Black and Queer and women or Black and Queer and Asian or just Asian. Pull them out of a negative circumstance or pull them into more unity with other groups of people so that we could survive this together because our sort of general philosophy is that we need to share strategies to either cope or flee.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s interesting that you bring up the word strategy as well because having spent a couple of hours in your store on Sunday, it feels very intentional. Every single decision about how you and Deborah, who’s your partner in life as well as your partner in business, have created this environment. I read a very funny anecdote about somebody that had come into the store asking about the latest Agatha Christie book.
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, I’m afraid we don’t carry that. It’s like top of shelf for Barnes & Noble or the Tattered Cover, whichever words you’d like to use to describe our largest bookstore chain in Denver, it’s top of shelf for them. They’ll be happy to get it for you. The thing that we carry that is mysterious and magical and strange might be Paul’s autobiography.
Debbie Millman:
Paul Sears?
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, Paul Sears. Or Rick Rubin’s book on creativity. There’s magic and there is really interesting language inside of that for us to grow from as a community. So we just lean into that slightly more rare object and we basically want to be known for that slightly more rare object. Or for any of the super uber nerds out there, we have Vision in Motion on a shelf in the reading room, which is the sort of posthumously published book from László Moholy-Nagy from the Bauhaus whose wife, Sibyl, wrote and compiled this book after his death became the kind of unofficial curriculum for the founding of IIT in the Illinois Institute of Technology. We have those design documents that if we go back far enough into these documents, we find absolutely magical concepts of how we could perform our function with our skills, with our attitudes about design and do it in a way that is big and interesting and challenging, and that’s where we want to play.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I actually think having spent a good amount of time there, that there is a sort of palpable energy of magic there. Now, it’s not just your bookstore and it’s not just your practice that is all situated there, it is also your letterpress printing environment that is incredible. You said that your activism really showed up when you got your first printing press in 1997. Now, I’ve taken a full tour of your entire space and you have many printing presses now and have been printing for many decades. Talk about the evolution of that. What first drew you to letterpress printing? How did that fuel your activism? How has it extended your activism?
Rick Griffith:
Okay. I’m going to go really fast, okay, guys, stay with me. When I was young… I was so much younger than today. When I was younger, I wanted to be the best graphic designer in the world. Anyone share that? Yeah, it’s a dumb idea to try and be that, especially if you’re studying it and you’re like, “That’s really, really good. That’s really, really good. That person’s really…” Especially if you want to identify other people’s talent, it’s a greedy concept. So eventually, I was like, “I don’t want to be the best graphic designer in the world.” Catch this. I changed my mind and I said, “I just want to be in the best conversations about design that I can find.” So thank you for this.
Debbie Millman:
Anytime.
Rick Griffith:
But I did want to specialize, and I specialize on type. When I specialize on type, I kind of hit a wall and I was like 26 years old and I was just jamming hard. I hit a wall and I was like, “I know as much as I can know about type, this is a digital era.” I was in Fontographer 1.0. I was in all this hardware-software stuff, and then I realized that I was accidentally in a conversation with these guys who were letterpress printers who were 20 years older than me, if not more. And what they were doing was stuff I had no idea about and it was all type. So instead of going forward into digital type, which wasn’t going very far very fast, I went backwards into analog type and I realized that with a couple of really great mentors and gifts from really super generous people in our community, Tom Parson is one of them, and Jason Wedekind is one of them, and also this guy, Brian Allen, was the first person to stick their hand out and say, “It looks like you might be interested in this.” So I studied letterpress printing with these guys and they taught me and continue to teach me, John Finch is the latest guy, and he’s 81, they continue to teach me about type through the analog letterpress community and the analog letterpress tools. So I’m constantly learning. Now I’m simultaneously learning how to run a slug typecasting machine in my garage, and I’m also in a Python class with the letterpress archive.
Debbie Millman:
That’s range.
Rick Griffith:
That’s range. And I’m so excited to still specialize or still have a specialty in type, but the activism is what comes with an awareness of your circumstance, which means that I experienced in my young life less racism because I had less ambition. The moment I started to express ambition, I experienced more racism. Anyone feel like that, or sexism, anyone else? Right? The minute you want something, that’s when the walls start to show up. So that awareness and that activism that held the circumstance of people of color and the circumstance of women and queer people and anyone that in any way had a prejudicial experience, that became very interesting and important for me because what else would you use a printing press to do, except for say, “That’s fucked up. That’s objectively fucked up.” Because everything else was being printed. So then I was like, “That’s cool, I’ll do that.” So I started using that, but I also decided what I wanted to do was learn how to be a better writer, which is a very big struggle.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that such a struggle?
Rick Griffith:
Probably confidence issues. I say probably, exactly confidence issues. Confidence, anxiety, all those things, depression, all the stuff that no one should feel alone with, just so you know, no one should feel alone with that, that gets in the way of being confident about your writing, especially when you’re reading things that are really well written. You’re like, “That’s really good. I can write two sentences that could meet that, but an entire article is pretty stressful.” So the activism comes alongside my awareness and the printing comes alongside my deep desire to know more about type in analog and digital forms. And as a designer, I stopped caring as much about digital kerning pairs, which I cared a lot about at one point, and I moved into caring about acquiring wood type and figuring out how to make posters on the fly and how to make printing an extension of my writing practice. I have my bag off-stage, but I wanted to give the front row a bunch of stuff that I printed yesterday because-
Debbie Millman:
That’s really hard with this kind of space.
Rick Griffith:
I know. It’s like a gigantic gap. I would have to fling it and then someone would get a paper cut and then I’d be inflicting harm. So afterwards I will stand-
Debbie Millman:
Or maybe by the bookshelf.
Rick Griffith:
I’ll be by the bookshelf for a minute and I only have 20 of them. Be honest, care a lot about what we’re doing, and then you can have one. It’s a challenge, right? I say be honest and care a lot about us, and you can have one. I have 30.
Debbie Millman:
Well, everybody here is going to care a lot, and we all have different degrees of honesty. And I assume-
Rick Griffith:
That’s true.
Debbie Millman:
No, but I’m assuming in this like-minded community that everybody’s trying to bring their best self to a place like this. And in many ways I think designers, because we have so much empathy, have to have some sense of optimism for what’s possible. Otherwise, why would we want to be creating things in the future for the future?
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, I mean there’s that.
Debbie Millman:
You don’t believe me. We’re on stage, but I can see in Rick’s head because we’re friends that he’s like, “No, no, no, I don’t agree, Debbie.”
Rick Griffith:
I have to be honest.
Debbie Millman:
Please.
Rick Griffith:
It was hard. And I think that young people, especially if I hear them tell their stories, I feel some young people are experiencing the same, if not a worse experience than what I experienced just trying to enter into the field of design. So my heart breaks every time someone’s suffering in that way. It harms us all to be gatekeeping opportunities from people who have deep love of the magic that can be graphic design and a deep expression of creativity and joy. It breaks my heart that people aren’t having the best possible experience. So yes, as a group, we should be pretty good, but someone’s still drinking water out of a plastic bottle today. And that plastic bottle shows up in Africa. It doesn’t show up in Orange County. And if it did show up in Orange County, it would be banned from our grocery stores. We’re not doing enough to really think about other people’s circumstance. We’re not doing enough to think about the world that we’re creating. And if we’re not doing enough and we’re harming other people’s children, other people’s children could even just be the person next to you’s children. We’re just not evolving fast enough to care a lot about each other and about our relative geographies. It hurts me.
Debbie Millman:
I agree with you, Rick. And I do think that we have to think about the continuity of every single one of our actions. However, I teach both graduate and undergraduate students.
Rick Griffith:
For sure.
Debbie Millman:
I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I don’t know how young people can take care of others or take care of the future when they’re having trouble taking care of themselves.
Rick Griffith:
I 100% agree. It’s something that people have inherited. Absolutely. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I see a palpable, alarming, using that word, alarming difference in the students that I taught 15 years ago and the students that I’m teaching now.
Rick Griffith:
Yeah, I agree.
Debbie Millman:
In some ways, the reason I still teach is because I feel it keeps me young, it keeps me current.
Rick Griffith:
The same.
Debbie Millman:
I get to hear what young people are thinking about and what they’re struggling with.
Rick Griffith:
It keeps us sharp.
Debbie Millman:
But there’s a-
Rick Griffith:
Keeps us totally sharp.
Debbie Millman:
… different level of struggle than there was. There’s a level of struggle and connection. There’s a level of construction and being able to get the kind of jobs with the kind of pay that they need. So I can’t blame young people for not caring enough about the earth. I blame my generation, which you’re a bit younger than I am, so it might include you, but I’m actually blaming my generation for not setting up structures that would better support them.
Rick Griffith:
With a handful of notable exceptions, I’m also blaming your generation.
Debbie Millman:
Bring it on.
Rick Griffith:
Exactly. And this is a gesture towards what we call power. It’s really a gesture to what we call power. Those who are hanging onto the power are basically who we’re kind of blaming. But here’s the one thing I’m so cautious to do is to alienate people in the present for stuff that we are just inheriting. I want to be really careful because the compassion that I believe in also extends to people who didn’t have the choices that we have now, and they didn’t have the well-developed psyches and sensitivities that we have now and access that we have now, and emotional framing that we have now. Imagine the conversations of parents about sex three generations ago and imagine the necessary conversations about sex, reproductive rights, about OBGYN objectives, all of those things have changed so much. This is just a dad whose proudest moment was taking his youngest daughter to her first adult OBGYN appointment and arguing with the doctor for her contraceptive objectives, and that’s true.
Debbie Millman:
I would’ve loved to have been a fly in that room.
Rick Griffith:
Right. I trust and I love my children, therefore, I’m going to treat them like they’re trustworthy and I’m going to advocate for them wherever they are.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, let’s clap for that. It’s an important one. So as we’re in this, and I see it in many ways as a Venn diagram of everything from the past and everything from the future, and we’re in this little zone, my feeling is my generation has to get the hell out of the way of the upcoming generations because there’s no student that I have, while they might be suffering, there’s no student that I have that’s like, “Yeah, we need more plastic,” or, “Yeah, we need more laws around women’s bodies.” No, they don’t. They’re the most activist, open-minded generation in history. So how do we allow for that let’s get out of their way?
Rick Griffith:
It’s not sit down and it’s not get out of their way, it’s hold hands and use the power that you have in the generation that you belong to to listen and to answer to their queries about the world that they’ve already inherited and tell them that you will try and do better with the time that you have left on the planet.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, he’s so wonderful. I love this man. We’re out of time. When I was in your studio on Sunday, you were showing me some of your recent letterpress printing posters. You showed me what seemed to me like a bit of a manifesto, and I read a little piece of it that I asked if you would share on stage today as a way to close our episode, so I’m wondering if you can do that. This is a piece that, because I know Rick struggles over every word, he has written so beautifully that I really wanted him to share that with you.
Rick Griffith:
Newsflash, I edited it about half an hour ago. I printed it in order to stop editing it, and then when I looked at it this morning, I was like, “Oh, needs a little bit more.” There is only one struggle. It is the struggle not to be colonized, lied to, not to have treaties broken, land stolen, and to survive a genocide. It is the struggle not to be manipulated by marketing in the study of human psychology. It is the struggle to avoid physical injury. The struggle not to have your body legislated. The struggle not to have your voting rights in jeopardy. The struggle to live free of the pollution that the powerful have put in your community. The struggle to name yourself and claim yourself. The struggle to be a woman everywhere. The struggle to be black anywhere. The struggle not to be characterized by the worst of the people who look like you. The struggle to survive grief, anxiety, and depression. The struggle to die without a knee on your neck or a spike in your vein. The struggle to farm the scorched earth. The struggle not to have your body or your labor exploited. The struggle to be educated and have your children educated. The struggle to belong. The struggle to know the history of your circumstance. There’s only one struggle.
Debbie Millman:
Rick Griffith. Rick-
Rick Griffith:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
… thank you so much for making so much work that matters in so many ways, and thank you for having this conversation today with me on the HOW Design Live stage about Design Matters.
Rick Griffith:
Thank you. Listen to this lady’s closer. What’s your closer? Listen closely. I know you might’ve
heard it 100 times in the podcast, but-
Debbie Millman:
We can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both.
Rick Griffith:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The
interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts
in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-
chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
The post Design Matters: Rick Griffith appeared first on PRINT Magazine.