I love oxymoron in the springtime

Warm perfume of sycamores this time of year always makes me wistful and not a little sorry.

Their sweet-butter aroma triggers memories of madness, long hours awash in stress — and loving every hateful minute. It's a wonder I associate the sweet smell because I don't remember taking time to stop and enjoy it. I was too busy helping run the Art Directors and Artists Club annual conference showcasing the best in design.

It was a lifetime ago. My children were just learning to walk.

(ADAC's demise is a sore subject about which I've talked on and on and on. Read if you really must.)

Volunteer run, ADAC put on an annual miracle producing the conference, tricking the best in visual arts to come to our humble spaces and talk to us of their greatness.

The secret: We worked our butts off through constant collective events known as the "work party." It was the best thing ever for me, whose definition of "party" is rather parochial. Provide pizza and soda, and that's a party in my book.

In the early days, work and pizza and soda held equal balance, dozens and dozens of artists and designers all volunteering to stage ADAC events and talk about their craft as they worked and tried not to drip grease on the brilliant work of famous people.

As the club winnowed awa, teetering against the growing competition of other conferences as the nature of visual art changed, the work parties became WORK parties, emphasis on the former. Pizza all but disappeared. The work had to get done, by fewer and fewer people.

Someone less enthralled than I with the nirvana of working alongside actual designers and illustrators, pointed out the irony — nay, the stupidity! — of calling these events work parties.

While the club was beating its last, we tried to make lemonade from this oxymoronic lemon. These stencils are for a promotion calling members to yet another work party. I doubt pizza was gotten for the event. I just tried to appeal to members' visceral visual sense, to act for the commonweal.

At one point toward the end we turned the phrase into our badge of honor, with T-shirts designed by my friend Will Suckow, with the corporate sounding slogan:

Work. Party. ADAC

Memories.

Getting the weirdness over with

Be careful what you wish for.

I sure got it, asking a publisher if I could experiment with the next illustration.

What emerged was the weirdest illustration I ever attempted, and the single largest trading day for the X-Acto®©™ company.

I had been inspired by an illustrator who showed his work at one of the Art Directors and Artists Club's annual Envision conferences in Sacramento, where I once posed as president.

I think the illustrator's name is Eddie Guy, can't be certain. I remember he did one distinct illustration style under another name and persona, and this cut-and-paste style under his own name and real persona. Or vice versa. I can't remember. I don't know if he still does this.

It was interesting and aggravating to meet someone getting work as two distinct people, when I was struggling with my single milquetoast personality.

I riffed off the illustrator's style to illuminate a story for Brew Your Own Magazine about the pleasures and pitfalls of providing entertainment with your meals and brews.

Step 1: Go to the library, buy an armload of magazines, 25 cents apiece. Fashion magazines — Vogue, Mademoiselle — held the greatest potential, or so I thought.

Step 2: Clothespin my nose so I can browse the magazines with minimum aerosol poisoning from the perfume ads.

Step 3: Buy X-Acto®© blades. Lots and lots of X-Acto™© blades.

Step 4: Forsake all else save the numbing turn of pages as you search for something you don't know you're looking for.

Step 5: Cut out hundreds of precise shapes in the wild hope they'll come in handy.

Step 6: Store them somehow in a manila envelope.

Step 7: Try to sort them, but give up in disheartening futility. Cram the cut shapes into the envelope, hoping you find them again.

Step 8: Do not sneeze.

Step 9: Buy glue sticks. Lots and lots of glue sticks.

Step 10: Glue the exact shapes you need to your elbows, where you won't find them until you go to wash your hands and accidentally see them in the mirror.

Step 11: Get smudgy, gluey fingerprints all over everything. It can't be helped.

Step 12: Despair that this is how you'll spend the rest of your life, and that you will be found comatose in a cascade of tiny cut-out eyeballs and hands.

Step 13: Somehow, some way, finish, resolving never to do it again.

Thirteen steps seems about right.

I had the basic sketch worked out, even the goofy Brü Oyster Cult name for this fictitious joint. Everything else depended on whether I could find what I was looking for — and how willing I was to shift on the fly.

Lots and lots of shifting on the fly.

After following all the steps religiously, and looping through steps 5 through 8 a couple of times, I managed what you see here. Completely. Bizarre.

I had trouble finding the pearlescent texture for my oyster. I think the result came from my wife's scrapbooking papers.

The entertainer's face is Bruce Willis', I think. I gave him two left hands on the fretboard. I was high on glue stick fumes by this time.

The proprietor's face is Nancy Reagan, and attached to the black-and-white lower jaw it came out looking like Alan Alda. The hand holding the gentleman's cigar is Bill Cosby's. The superstructure holding the sign is a bridge arch.

The original art is probably still glued to the back of something else, lost forever.

I don't know how this Eddie Guy did this and still stayed sane. It looks like he still does a variation, and I hope he does it digitally.

When I attempted a similar style recently, it was so much easier to find patterns and images online, and re-purpose them to a new image. I have probably violated copyright protections that haven't even been conjured yet. Here's how I begat Huell Howser, for example (above).

I don't even know where my X-Acto®™ knife is anymore.

Halcyon days

Thumbnail for a postcard to promote one
of the many business workshops ADAC
conducted for its members. I was a wannabe
designer trapped in a copywriter's body.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.

Halcyon days, I called them earlier this week. Days in the Art Directors and Artists Club, long gone and irretrievable.

My first experience with this remarkable club was late one night. At least a hundred people, loud in laughter and discussion, lined the ringing shiny concrete-and-cinderblock second-floor hallway of a re-purposed elementary school near downtown Sacramento. It was ADAC headquarters, and at the time it was the 800-pound gorilla of the resurrected art center, with access to rooms on both floors.

Everyone was at work measuring and cutting great slabs of foamboard or spraying adhesive glue to the backs of artwork — sometimes accidentally to the front of artwork — or scarfing pizza. Paper and pizza boxes covered the concrete floor from end to end, the space as loud and chaotic as the floor of a stock exchange.

I was in heaven, a place of odd belonging. Someone introduced herself, handed me an X-acto®© knife and told me to start cutting foamboard.

Never mind I was barely competent to wield a knife. It was all hands on deck.

At one point I helped chair the workshops program. These are thumbnails
for a series of breakfast workshops on business issues, designed to let
designers get a little information and nosh before going into work. Yes, those
are naked butts in the bottom thumbnails: I was really pushing "Feed
your bottom line" as the workshops' name. I may actually have succeeded,
but I lack printed evidence.

Though I was a reporter-turned-copywriter at this point, a status that served me well in business amid a multitude of graphic designers, I wanted to be like all these designers who were now elbow to elbow in a feverish race to set up ADAC's big three-day design conference known as Envision.

The conference was the annual and spiritual culmination of the club, which a group of designers had begun some 20 years before with a barely sustainable big idea: Let's celebrate design. Let's talk about it, share it, elevate it. Let's see if we can cajole the best designers in the world to come here to little ol' Sacramento and inspire us to be great.

Somehow the idea grew and blossomed and worked, solely because its membership wanted it to. Fees were extremely affordable, so many joined. Volunteers did all the work on shoestring budgets, afforded from the conference fees which were also reasonable. Speakers came to the conference for airfare and a hotel room and adulation.

In the early days graphic design came out of shops — 12 maybe? 15? — each with a principal or two and a staff of junior designers, almost in apprenticeship, back when they worked with technical pens and T-squares and rubylith and photo wheels. Back when cut-and-paste meant a No. 11 blade and hot wax and a knot between the shoulderblades from constant repositioning.

Many of the principals had started ADAC, nurturing their idea with borrowed meeting spaces and slide projectors, and strung-together extension cords and guerrilla marketing. The principals sent their staffs to ADAC to inspire and be inspired.

Computers had landed on designers' desks not 10 years before I showed up at ADAC, launching the democratization — or balkanization, take your pick — of design. The good news — everybody can be a designer now! — was also the bad news. None really knew its implications, certainly not me.

I could not know I had joined the club at the crest of its great wave, and that in the succeeding years it would weaken under competition from design publications' conferences, from an ability to look inward and on screen for inspiration, and from a flat lack of members' time and money.

We had become doers without dreams.

(It reminded me of my first days as a news reporter at a small newspaper. The managing editor gathered us reporters around his desk after deadline and we talked about the craft of writing, and what inspired us. If the editor had been a drinking man, we might have had tumblers in hand. Norman Rockwell could have painted us. But soon the editor left for another job out of state and his replacement decided we didn't have time for that crap, just get to work. We didn't know until then how good we had it.)

A study for announcing how I accepted nomination as ADAC president.
Time has eliminated any explanation why I chose this bizarre way to do it.
One version is my disembodied head, vertebrae exposed, rolling down the alley.
Maybe it was a premonition.

I became ADAC president during its waning days, and at the same time one of the chairs for the annual conference, blowing out the Peter Principle by several strata. I was way out of my league and ability.

The Old Guard had left by then, and I understood. I'm old enough to have walked away from several endeavors — hell, I walked away from ADAC! — brain baked and bones tired. One or two of the club's creators would show up at events and tell me about the old days, which I had a hard time taking as advice; their presence felt more like audits. Occasionally I would hear through back channels how some of the Old Guard thought we were— I was — ruining the club, which was also hard to take.

I loved and hated every minute of helping run ADAC. I stretched and grew and got to do everything, from budgeting and planning to designing promotional pieces to bolting in floor-to-ceiling shelves for years and years of posters and archived materials. In short time ADAC lost its run of the resurrected school … first the upper floor classrooms, then one classroom on the first floor, then the closet where the archived materials were kept (I don't know if those materials still exist), then the executive director's office. ADAC became a phone number.

At one point during my presidency we entertained a takeover by a national design organization, which would have quadrupled membership prices and squeezed many of us out of our own club. We turned down the offer, but we still didn't know how to adjust to the changing market, or didn't want to.

ADAC carried on, smaller, leaner, local, lectures by some of the original members, little art shows. Sometime in the last year even that ceased except for an email address. I wonder if anyone would respond to it.

We'd live the life we choose. We'd fight and never lose, for we were young and sure to have our way.

What's going on here?

Book clubs befuddle me, but I'd join a sketchbook club in the next heartbeat.

Groucho got it right: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. The corollary trumps it: No book club would have me as a member — sitting snarky and sullen in the corner, muttering imprecations about why we're reading the same book at the same time and telling our synchronous thoughts in real time.

Besides, not three people in an hour's drive would read what I read, all how-to books and historical nonfiction. What's more, I'm a slow reader. A monthly book club would kill me. I'm not built for a book club.

A sketchbook club would be different. Instead of one book about which a group discusses, a sketchbook club would embrace each participant's book, and others would peruse your work as you discussed it with them.

It would have to have rules, mainly for me:

• No judging. The mission of a sketchbook club would be for members to come away from each meeting inspired and encourage by each other.
  
  For a brief while, the defunct Art Directors and Artists Club in Sacramento tried an illustrator's guild which quickly became the Vito Corleone School, its motto: "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." It comprised illustrators from a wide range of experiences and backgrounds, from hobby scribblers to commissioned painters. The latter kept tabs on the former, decided they had nothing to worry about, and the guild soon collapsed.
  
  I'm aware of Sketch Bombs, and that Sacramento has one, but I prejudge them by not quite knowing what they are and whether I'd be intimidated, the resident old guy who needs validation. Somebody take me by the hand.
• Meet at least one new person each time. No cliques here; community.
• You could draw too, but draw with someone else drawing, and talk about what you're drawing, your media and method and madness. 
• Start the conversation. Our purpose would be clear: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

So we'd sit on comfortable chairs or couches or at nice old dining room tables with a lot of warm lighting. We'd swap one of your sketchbooks — I recommend an old random one — and take turns looking at and talking over pages.

Just a few pages. You wouldn't have to go through the whole portfolio. Simply open up a few pages and ask:

What's going on here?

There would begin a conversation about process and creativity and failure and change of mind and more creativity. It's not your thinking, it's someone else's, but it would inspire you to think different and new about your next project and problem. Maybe someone else's creative process is so alien to yours you can't relate. That's OK; it would cause you to sharpen your own process.

All of this came to mind stumbling across the page above while looking for something else.

It's from an early, early sketchbook, a touchstone of transition in my life. I had not yet cut the tether of working for someone else, but I was close, doing small writing and design and illustration jobs, getting my name out there.

Soon I would be loosed from the security of a full-time job and go through a full-on "What the hell have I done?!" phase, driving the town without aim, watching with longing the delivery trucks whizzing past, thinking that might be a good occupation instead.

At this point and on this page, all was warm and safe. So much going on here:

• A dentist whose initials are W.M. wanted an identity and possibly a business system (card, letterhead, envelope).
  
  Here I'm playing with the letterforms as molars — even as fangs. Ultimately the solution evoked the architecture of his office, no teeth.
  
  It wasn't until sketches were made, solutions were approved, cards printed and paid for, that the dentist decided he didn't want it after all.
  
  Some clients are like that.

• The next Envision conference, Envision 22, was coming up and I was helping organize it; we'd eventually enlist a real designer to come up with the identity, but this is me, wonderng what I'd do with the opportunity.
  
  Envision was a lovely event run by a lovely club, the aforementioned Art Directors and Artists Club, which were halcyon days for me but dying days, it turns out, for the club.
  
  Leading design publications stormed their way into the design conference market, crushing our little club and our shoestring efforts (though we made an amazing much out of frightening scarcity), and the graphic design industry fragmented and democratized into what it is now, with no real center.
  
  I checked the ADAC Website in search of information for this post, and learned the club of which I had been president is now no more than the Website page announcing its board's decision to dissolve.
  
  Few traces remain of anything ADAC, which is a great sadness. It would be nice to have an online archive of ADAC Envision and workshop posters, to mark a time when the club made strides in advancing visual communication. At one time the club had a physical archive of shelves I helped build, heaped with a great history of material.

• A subsidiary where I worked at the time hired me to make line-art illustrations of agricultural safety practices, including demonstrations of the consequences for unsafe work.
  
  I think that's what's going on with this sketch of feet on a ladder rung. It's the only such sketch on this page, and more detailed drawings didn't show up until many many pages later in the book.

• I was still working on a name for my upcoming business, which became somerset words and pictures co. Among options such as Tyrant Design and Industrial Cumquat, I liked the idea of Banana Bone. This is as far as I got on that.

• The rest of the sketchbook page is a guess. I played with the word "exhibitionist," and the only reason I can think of is that for a couple of years I ran ADAC Envision's Exhibition, our word for the conference trade show; maybe I thought it would be cool to brand the event separately.
  
  I was designing some kind of portfolio, with a hunky Tab A for Slot A thingie. It never came to pass, whatever it was.
  
  Now with the miracle of the Internet I can see a lot of illustrators' sketchbooks in the isolation of my office … sketchbooks that in themselves are works of great art, some with fully formed illustrations that spill from page to page like sequential art — nothing like my randomness.

But it's not the same as a club, a time and place every rare often to share and think aloud and dislodge, person to person.

If you're nearby and have a sketchbook or two, let's talk. 

Shaded is the head that wears the hat

Ghost-white face, lobster legs …

Idealized self-portrait (left) of the artist as a young man, at the helm of the Art Directors and Artists Club, a visual communications organization for Sacramento-area creatives.

They were halcyon, heady days, being part of a group that at the time had a nationwide and even international reputation as a showcase for graphic design. ADAC staged a three-day conference each spring, Envision, and for a long time it was the only such conference west of the Rockies, and somehow the club was able to attract the best among graphic design to do elaborate show-and-tells for us for airfare and a hotel room.

A key example of those halcyon days: ADAC could afford to rent Asilomar, a state-run conference center near Pacific Grove on the coast, and gather the officers to relax and imagine the coming year. I'm dressed (left) for the beach, wearing a shirt Will Suckow designed just for the retreat.

A naif, I had no idea I was merely riding ADAC to its doom as the great curator of what was current in design. How Magazine, among others, eventually took over the conference business and we had no way to compete (I'm not linking to How Magazine; find it on your own).

It was sad watching ADAC transmogrify into a small local group, but I loved every minute of being part of ADAC, from inhaling Spra-Mount fumes with dozens of Envision volunteers as we prepared speakers' work for display, to fuming over a renowned graphic designer who publicly denigrated a volunteer during an Envision presentation. I learned so much from every triumph and tribulation.

As president, I tried but couldn't wield much power: One of my ideas for Envision 21 was to invite as many of the giants of graphic design to speak; people such as Bradbury Thompson and Milton Glaser. I almost had ADAC's board convinced to pursue the idea, until I wrapped up my pitch with, "It'll be a sort of 'Hear Them Before They Die" Tour. It was a joke, but it really cooled ADAC to the idea. Live and learn.

A year after my presidency, invited to Asilomar as the emeritus chief, I rented a cheerleader costume to rally officers.

Things happened, I stepped away from ADAC (though I'm happy to say I'm a member again, and the club has changed focus and operations) and didn't attend an ADAC event for a while. When I did and an old friend introduced me to someone new, her face lit up. Of course, past president, Envision co-chair, who wouldn't recognize me and be delighted for my contributions to graphic design?!

"Awesome," she said. "You're the one who dressed up as a cheerleader!"

I guess I could have a worse reputation.