Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Debbie Millman
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast I’ve got an icon on today. She is a writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant, and iconically the host of the podcast design matters. She’s also the chair of the master of branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and the author of why design matters. Conversations with the world’s most creative people, please join me in welcoming Debbie Millman, welcome Debbie, Hi, Thomas. It’s very, very nice to be here. So glad to have you. Are you ready for 20 questions? I am indeed Okay. Question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
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Well, you, I think, summarized it really well. I’m a designer. A long time designer. I’ve been working for almost 40 years now. 1983 is when I graduated college.
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I became very involved in branding about 10 or so years into my career, and I’ve been doing that ever since I founded the world’s first master’s program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where I teach. I run this long running podcast called design matters, which I started in 2005
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the editorial director of print magazine, and I’ve been working with the folks at print, and now as one of the owners of last two years, one of the owners prior to that, I’ve been working with print since 2004
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I’m on the board of a couple of really, really cool organizations, the Joyful Heart Foundation, which actress Marishka Hargitay started, she’s the star of Law and Order SVU, and she started the foundation after she started getting letters from people that watch the show
Unknown Speaker 1:54
about sexual assault, and the show is about it’s called Special Victims Unit, and it’s about stories of people that are have have undergone some sort of crime of that nature. And so she started a foundation, and now we’re working to eradicate the rape kit backlog, which is something I feel is really important. So that’s a brief overview.
Unknown Speaker 2:19
Great. You know, I’ve been, I was early on kind of sharing with my students design matters, and making them listen to it and saying, you know, this is kind of the best of it.
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Question two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different? A
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key piece of knowledge that makes me different? Well, I mean, I think that we’re all different. I think every human being is different, but then again, we’re also all the same. So I think a key piece of information that makes me different is that
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I see the world in a in a very unique way, which, again, may be very similar to the way other people think, or maybe very different, but it’s uniquely me.
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I love it. Number three is, why this of all things? Why do you do what
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you do? Ooh, why do I do what I do? Well,
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some of what I do, I started to do because I didn’t think I had much of a choice doing anything else. So I started working, first and foremost, as a designer, because I didn’t think I had the talent or ability to be a fine artist. But that changed over the years, and I became really grateful that I was a designer, so that was something that happened more over time and organically.
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As far as some of the other things that I do, I am
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very involved in the, as I mentioned the effort to eradicate the rape kit backlog and to try to eradicate sexual violence in our time, and that is really because of my background, having survived some really heinous stuff when I was a little girl, and so I think that that’s The reason I do that, and then everything else has been accumulated over time because of opportunity or timing or luck or the result of hard work. And they’re all things that I do now, mostly because I love them. It’s
Unknown Speaker 4:36
interesting, right? Because I know a lot of my students first encountered you because of design matters. But then through that, you’re able to kind of amplify the kind of values that that need to be, need to be in place, which is, which is super great. Not everyone has that platform.
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Number four is, what does your future look like?
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My future looks.
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Like
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a time when I can feel really good just being me without any accomplishment or productivity or projects or anything like that. That’s a goal.
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It also is probably going to be changing coasts from the east coast to the west coast at some point, and may or may not include more pets.
Unknown Speaker 5:35
That segues nice into the next question, which is, I think it’s unique to this podcast. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do? Oh, Thomas, it’s played a major, major, major role in in everything that I do. I’m a native New Yorker, and I’ve lived in four of the five boroughs. I’ve lived in Manhattan for the last nearly 40 years. I lived on Staten Island when I was growing up. I lived in Brooklyn when I was born. I lived in Howard Beach when I was in elementary school. And so I My whole life has been very informed by sort of timbre of the city, and I have it embedded in me. It’s, it’s such a huge, huge part of who I am and when I was growing up. And, you know, first coming out of college, my main goal was to live in Manhattan. That was a goal in the way that some people have goals about the kind of job they want. So, so that played a huge part in how I set up my life. When I met my now wife in 2018 she lived in Los Angeles because of her film and television work. It’s a very important place for her to be. It’s also the first place that she owned her own home. So it’s super important to her in terms of her evolution as a person. And so now we go back and forth. And so now I have two homes. I have one in New York, and I have one in Los Angeles. And initially I thought I hated Los Angeles, and I do hate the traffic, but I also love the light and the weather and the peace and the sort of overall atmosphere. I love gardening and I love being outdoors, and so this is a place very conducive to that. So my whole world is sort of changing in that regard. That’s
Unknown Speaker 7:38
interesting. You know, we have all sorts of responses to place, the geographic place, of course, with you is playing a huge role. Some people think of a kind of conceptual place or the kind of pandemic place, but for you, yeah, it does make sense this way.
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Number six, if you had to start from scratch, what advice would you give your former younger self?
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Moisturize,
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use sunscreen,
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and most importantly,
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don’t compromise, because you could do pretty much anything you put your mind to, if you want it badly enough, and try not to worry so much and then maybe come out a little bit sooner than 50 years old.
Unknown Speaker 8:30
That’s awesome. Number seven, what’s a day in your life like
Unknown Speaker 8:35
it depends on where I am and what I’m doing. So if I’m going to school, it would be, I would be in New York, where I run my graduate program. I would likely wake up round between, like around nine, wake up around nine, have a slow morning, doing meetings at home or through zoom on at home, or working on different art projects, and then make my way over to the School of Visual Arts. I walk there. It’s very close to where I live. And then I’d spend several hours either meeting with students or faculty or having meetings there on zoom with other folks, and then possibly teaching, possibly doing a podcast. I can do my podcast in the studio at SVA or in my either of my homes where I have studios, both in New York and Los Angeles, and could do at either place. If I’m in Los Angeles, I would get up and kind of have the same routine, but just not as much school oriented work. I still might be teaching if I’m teaching online, but more of it would be personal work. I do a lot of consulting now, and I have a couple of consulting projects that I am working on, so I would work on those as well.
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Great.
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Eight is lifelong. Learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
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Well, my students keep me on my toes. Have to stay very current in order to be able to
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have conversations with them that are interesting to them, and use real world examples of all sorts. So they keep me very, very engaged in contemporary culture. I also read a great deal. I love television, I love movies, I love theater, I love reading, and so I think all of those things keep me very engaged in in the sort of moment that we’re living in.
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Number nine is a good one for you, I think, because maybe your illustration work. But what tools do you use? Are you both digital and analog? Yes, I love working with fabric and textures and textiles and paper and so I do, I do quite a bit of work in an analog manner, but I also love the iPad, and so I do a lot of work digitally with my drawing now and my lettering.
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Great. 10 is, how do you deal with work life? Balance? Badly. But I also
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kind of bristle at the term, as if they should be two segmented categories of a person’s life. And for me, they’re not. You know, a lot of my life’s efforts sort of blur into each other, so my branding will blur into my teaching, and my teaching will blur into my podcast. My podcast will blur into artistic work or writing. So I I should probably work less, because I think some of it, as I mentioned, I think in the first question, is around feeling worthy and feeling like I’m contributing to society in some meaningful way, but I think that it comes from insecurity as well. But I also have worked really, really hard for a really, really long time to get certain opportunities, and now that they have presented themselves, of course, I want to work on them and work hard on them, and so I sort of straddle the the balance in in terms of feeling like my work is my life in a lot of ways, but one way that I have tried to combat that is by traveling. And so I have been very, very engaged in trying to see as much of the world as possible. And I made this decision about, I don’t know, eight or 10 years ago where I thought, You know what, I want to see as much of the planet as possible before I die. I’ve gone on a number of National Geographic expeditions, and those are the kinds of trips where I’m continually learning and challenging myself physically, but also needing to get offline and not be as engaged in my professional life. Great,
Unknown Speaker 13:20
great, good, great. Okay, so we’re just past halfway here, number 11. If you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
Unknown Speaker 13:29
Oh, what would I be doing? I have different fantasies of what I would be doing, and so, you know, I can share those. One might be working as a fine artist in a studio painting all day.
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Another would be involved in musical theater and being, you know, Patti LuPone or Adina Menzel or somebody like that, just, you know, Audrey McDonald’s, if I had the talent
Unknown Speaker 13:59
I would, I would love to have been able to have that kind of talent, and I so I love the theater. Um, that’s another, uh, possible fantasy on any given month in any given month. And then another might be to be a physicist and trying to come up with a model for how the universe was created, and trying to understand string theory and black holes and everything else that’s happening in the world right now from an astronomical point of view. So, so that’s another potential.
Unknown Speaker 14:36
Yeah, that’s those are the other those are the three paths that I sometimes think about, what if I had done that path, or what if I had done that path, or what if I had done that path. The issue, one of the issues that I have with any path is that I like to do a lot of different things at once, and I
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really thrive on that blur between disciplines in any.
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Of those other things might have been too solitary for me, too single minded as well.
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Okay, number 12 is, what would you not like to do, especially in terms of your career?
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I’d never like to work for a for profit corporation again, that is doing work to help society, the planet, our culture ever again.
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13 is what’s your favorite word, quote or sentence? Well, I have a lot of different favorite words. I love the word please for lots of different reasons. I love the quote, a quote that I once got in a fortune cookie, which is,
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avoid compulsively making things worse, because I think that people have the tendency to do that, so to cut it off your nose, to spite your face. And then my favorite personal quote that I say all the time is busy as a decision, which means that when people say they’re too busy to do something, unless they’re a single parent, I think that they’re really talking about the priorities in making choices. And so if they say they’re too busy to do something, chances are it’s that that thing isn’t as interesting to them as the thing that they’re actually doing.
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Do you have a least favorite word, quote or sentence?
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Least favorite? Well, I hate the term, I’m too busy.
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I hate when somebody says, I need to talk to you. When can we talk? Because then I worry that something is wrong. And so I was like, just tell me if everything’s okay.
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And so that is
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difficult. And then I don’t like although I do respect it, but I don’t love the word no, but I do respect that no means no in all regards, and
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I also don’t really. I
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don’t like the term pro life. I think that reproductive freedom is critical to our society, and therefore that particular phrase is a bit of an oxymoron. I don’t think you can be pro life and be and believe that women
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can have autonomous control over their bodies,
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perfect 15. If you had to choose one word to describe yourself, what would you choose?
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Resilient, good one,
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what keeps you up at night? Politics.
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What’s a dream you’re chasing a dream that I’m chasing contentment.
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Final stretch number 18, what inspires you
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life living my wife, my wife, she really inspires me every day. She’s the most brilliant, interesting, creative, gorgeous person I’ve ever met, and she constantly and daily, sometimes, many times a day, inspires me,
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and she also inspires me to be a better person. So she doesn’t just inspire me, you know, with her brilliance and with my ability to observe her, she also inspires me to act and be a better person.
Unknown Speaker 18:43
Great. 19. Any advice you’d like to share?
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I would say, don’t waste time if you say to yourself that I’m going to do that someday, I would respond with, if not now, when? Why are you waiting? What are you waiting for? Life goes so much faster than I ever
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imagined it could when I was littler younger, I’m 60 now, and every day zooms by, and I find myself holding on to time as much as I can,
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so precious and
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so visceral,
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awesome. And number 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you? How do we follow you? You know, there’s so much material out there on you. Is there some specific stuff that we should look at.
Unknown Speaker 19:43
Well, my website, Debbie millman.com
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the print website, printmag.com
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my podcast, you can find on design matters, media,
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and then all the usuals, you know, the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams and all the.
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Those
Unknown Speaker 20:02
great. Okay, well, thank you so much. Debbie, you know, I’ve been listening to design matters for a long time now, and you know, can, can, can tell my guests go listen to design matters and then, and then buy the book, to to to to create that moment for yourself. But thank you so much for being on my absolute pleasure, Thomas, thank you for having me. It’s been an honor. Thanks.
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