Last year my buddy Stef Sagmeister and I were set to give a couple of talks together: first in Dallas and then at the Creative Summit at Texas State University in San Marcos, near Austin. A few days before we left, I called Stefan and asked him if he’d mind if I filmed him with my video camera while we were down there. I had just bought the camera—an improvement over my last—and had been playing around with an idea for a documentary series based on my favorite designers. I imagined an ongoing series of short-form docs made specifically for the web.

So I started a list of all the designers who had somehow directly influenced me. Stefan was near the top of the list, right below Neville Brody, Paula Scher, Pablo Ferro, and Tibor Kalman. I also had Milton Glaser, Bruce Mau, Bill Cahan, and Kyle Cooper, among others. I decided the series would be a personal rather than commercial project, and therefore should not stray from my original concept, best summed up by the series title, My Favorite Designers.

Stefan agreed to be my first subject and I started preplanning for the shoot, which entailed little more than charging the camera’s batteries, buying three blank DV tapes, and for those hot Texas nights, a cowboy hat and a see-through mesh tank top.

The afternoon before we were to leave for Texas, I got a call from my friend and client Karen Tennenbaum, at Adobe. She was interested in having me help out with some page design for Adobe.com. The job wasn’t right for my studio but we started talking and I told her about the documentary series. I mentioned the shoot with Stefan in Texas and shared my list of designers with her. A few hours later she called back to tell me Adobe would be interested in sponsoring the series.

FIRST SHOOT: ON THE ROAD
Stefan and I flew down to Texas, gave the talks in Dallas, and then rented a red Mustang convertible and headed to the Creative Summit. While he drove, I started shooting and asked him to tell his “story,” how he’d become a designer, what school he’d gone to, his early break into the field, and so on. The shots were great with Stefan at the wheel while the flat Texas landscape sped by. But as I began the editing process back in New York, I realized that as cool as the shots were, his past wasn’t what interested me. I wanted to know what he is doing now, what his creative philosophy is, what makes him tick. Luckily, Stefan’s a friend and lives eight blocks from me, so I called him and told him I needed more footage. I showed up at his studio one evening at dusk, sat across from him and asked more relevant design questions. Those are the shots where he’s sitting and talking to the camera. I learned to ask what it was I myself most wanted to know about, which wasn’t the past, but the present and future.

Through that first shoot I began to develop a process. I enjoyed the intimacy we shared at his studio … it was just him and me. No crew, no producer, no assistants. So I decided this would be my process. I would show up alone at the featured designer’s studio about an hour before the shoot, quickly survey the physical space to find a good place to shoot a portrait, and conduct the main body of the interview. I’d bring my one camera, a good tripod, and a microphone. I knew I’d sacrifice some degree of certainty on the technical end since I wouldn’t have a cameraperson making sure the shot remained in focus or that the sound levels were balanced, but it was a chance I was willing to take.