Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Marian Bantjes
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast. We have a design legend on today, and I’ll describe her briefly. She’s a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator, working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada near Vancouver. She’s a member of the AGI and regular speaks regularly, speaks about her work and thoughts at conferences and events worldwide, who is joining me in welcoming and honoring Marion banshees. Welcome. Hi.
Unknown Speaker 0:33
How are you? I’m great. We have a set of unique questions for you today. Are you ready for the questions I am ready. Are they unique?
Unknown Speaker 0:43
Yeah, we have a select number. Okay.
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Okay. So question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
Unknown Speaker 0:54
This is always a hard question for me to answer, because every time I answer it, I feel like I got it wrong, or I took too long in answering it, which is what I’m doing now, um, what do I do? I
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I’m I’m a sort of a cross between a designer, although I haven’t worked as a designer in a little while, and a and an artist, although I have,
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let’s see,
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aspirations to be a fine artist, I I’m not represented by a gallery, so I don’t know if that counts.
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And a type
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typographer, if you will, which takes a number of different forms, from type setting to lettering, lettering being not typography, but lettering and
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um. And I’m also a writer and
Unknown Speaker 2:04
I guess that kind of covers it. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 2:10
great. You know, just a note for our audience. I consider this to be one of our big episodes. If you’re interested in the big episodes, check out John Maeda, Debbie Millman and Eric speakerman. So we’ll move to question three. So why this? Of all things? Why do you do what you do?
Unknown Speaker 2:26
Um,
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I, because I, I kind of because I have to, like, if I wasn’t, if I wasn’t doing the things I’m doing, I’d probably just be lying around thinking about doing the things I’m doing.
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So my mind is constantly, almost constantly, occupied with
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visual ideas,
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with visual imperatives, sometimes,
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and I’m not, I’m not even close to being able to execute all of them, because I the ideas just keep coming and and I usually just have to write them down, um,
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and then, and then, you know, hopefully go back to them at some later date, which I almost never do, Because just keep getting more new ideas. But I’m, I’m always, I’m always looking at things visually and thinking about
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ways of representing things and
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and so, yeah, I just, I just, kind of, I just kind of have to do this. I
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I can’t, I can’t really imagine life without it. Sometimes I think about, you know, retiring and just reading books and magazines. But I actually don’t think that that’s possible. I just kind of have to, I have to make stuff. I have to represent things. I have to get down what’s in my head all the time.
Unknown Speaker 4:09
Great. Okay, so we’re going to move to question six. So if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self,
Unknown Speaker 4:19
looking back into the past and thinking essentially about what one would do differently is always difficult, because the path that got me to here,
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as flawed as it was,
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you know, gave me, gave me something very unique in terms of this combination of
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typography and art, and
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I don’t know that another path would have given me that. However, my.
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Tendency is to think if I could go back and do it over again. My tendency is to think
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that I should have continued in art school. I’m an art school dropout,
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so I think maybe I should have done the four years.
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If money had been no object, I would have told myself to get my ass to New York ASAP. But money was always an object for me. I come from.
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I mean, our family was, quite poor growing up,
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and
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at the very least, I think I would have told myself to spend less time in the various stages that I was in. So I was a typesetter for 10 years. I think I could have done with six. I was a straight up graphic designer for 10 years. I think I could have done with six.
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So that would be an extra eight years,
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and put me into the design scene, maybe a bit earlier, maybe get out a bit earlier. I don’t really know. It’s impossible to know, because you just you know, like if, if, if you do that, I might have missed being in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, which is what happened to me in in about 2004 so,
Unknown Speaker 6:35
yeah, it’s difficult. I you know, of course, we all think about what would I have done differently? But I think you also have to recognize the accidents
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that come along the way, or the even the missteps that come along the way that put you in a situation that
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that otherwise you wouldn’t have been in. So yeah,
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I love that. Okay, number eight, lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 7:08
Up to date. I don’t stay up to date.
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I stay
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I stay informed on various subjects of which I have an interest. I
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I tend to,
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I tend to mine more from the past than the present, I think maybe. But I also,
Unknown Speaker 7:37
I don’t know, I, you know, I find things that interest me. I don’t have a particular interest in staying up to date, but I did fall into working with AI, which is very up to date, and that was, you know, that was sort of just partly by accident, and that has been very interesting for me. So I’m very interested in AI
Unknown Speaker 8:03
in terms of what other people are doing, or, you know, what are they? So called Trends. I couldn’t care less. I don’t pay any attention to that. I’ve stopped reading all design magazines,
Unknown Speaker 8:17
although I just wrote for I magazine, but haven’t read it in years. Don’t tell John Walters,
Unknown Speaker 8:29
I keep an eye on art. So I keep an eye on art through Instagram, and by this, I mean fine art, and that’s both old and new. So I do that. I keep an eye on it through Instagram and through a site called artsy, where I sort of collect works that I like,
Unknown Speaker 8:50
and I read, I read things that interest me, but it’s all in just sort of pursuit of random interests and not not any kind of
Unknown Speaker 9:04
program to stay abreast of, you know, current, whatevers
Unknown Speaker 9:12
Great. That sounds good. Just another note for the audience. John Mehta is now heading up AI at Microsoft, so definitely check out that episode if you want to hear more about AI. So now we’re going to a kind of string of questions here with number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
Unknown Speaker 9:34
I think, like my second love is fashion. I’ve always, you know, I’ve always had a pension to go into fashion
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from when I was a little kid, I would,
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you know, I used to make my own clothes, or, you know, drape fabrics around myself. I
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I made all the clothes for my Barbie dolls
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and.
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And,
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and despite being a tomboy, I did have Barbie dolls,
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yeah, and I, you know, I still, I have a great interest in fashion. I don’t study it. I kind of wish I had,
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but I, but I think that’s, you know, that’s probably what I would be doing, if not this. I,
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yeah, either that, or,
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you know, or or a fine artist,
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if I could have made it, which I don’t know if I could have, but
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yeah, that’s so I’m doing, yeah, I mean, I’m doing adjacent things, and I’ve been successful doing adjacent things, and
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that is good enough for most people. I think,
Unknown Speaker 11:00
great, okay, and that segues into 12. What would you not like to do with your career?
Unknown Speaker 11:07
Well, I have a funny story about this. So I was whinging to my best friend. She’s a neuroscientist, and she’s the dean of the
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dean of the vet College in in Saskatoon, and I was whinging to her about money recently, and and
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she said, Well,
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couldn’t You get a job?
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I said, a job
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like a job
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where I’d have to show up at a certain time at a certain place every day of the week and leave at a certain time. And she said, Well, that’s what I do. Listen,
Unknown Speaker 12:00
um, I suppose it is, but, oh, I’d rather get a job.
Unknown Speaker 12:09
And that is exactly what I would not be, not want to do. I mean, I just don’t think I could do it, certainly at this stage. But yeah, no, the thought of
Unknown Speaker 12:19
going to the same place every day. It doesn’t even, you know, it doesn’t even make much difference what you were doing unless I was being paid a gazillion dollars. Um, to have a job would be, would be that that’s, that’s the most horrible thing to me. That would be horrible.
Unknown Speaker 12:37
All apologies to people who have jobs, but it’s just,
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and I’ve had jobs,
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spent many years in a job, but I can no longer, I can no longer even imagine doing that.
Unknown Speaker 12:57
I love it 13. What’s your favorite word, quote or a sentence.
Unknown Speaker 13:02
My favorite word is disingenuous, and I don’t know, I don’t know why I’ve latched on to it, but I like it because it means it doesn’t just mean lying. It means
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pretending not to know something that you actually do know.
Unknown Speaker 13:25
Um, and I, and I love the, you know, sort of the subtlety of that definition, and, and I also, you know, love that there, you know, there are particular moments when you can identify it,
Unknown Speaker 13:39
um, so that’s, that’s my favorite word,
Unknown Speaker 13:44
and the least favorite, my least favorite, is gifted, or gift as a as a verb, as in, he gifted me this blanket, or I gifted him A painting. It drives me fucking nuts. The word is, give. We have a perfectly serviceable good word for that. It you give things to people. People gave things to you. They were not gifted. It’s, it makes me nuts. Um, so that is my, yeah, that is, that is my least favorite word by far at the moment,
Unknown Speaker 14:25
what keeps you up at night?
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Ideas?
Unknown Speaker 14:31
Yeah, I sometimes, sometimes I go to bed and it seems like I can be really tired. Go to bed, and it’s like the moment my head hits the pillow, these ideas start coming into my mind. And they can be ideas about writing, or about, you know, art, drawing, letter, forms, teaching,
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books, anything you know, like, well, not anything, but.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
You know, those kinds of creative ideas, and I try not to think about them, and I, you know, they just kind of like take over my brain, and one idea leads to the next, which leads to the next, the next thing, you know, you know, I’m wide awake, and I either have to, but usually what I have to do is get up and just write down the ideas, and, you know, try and get them out of my head,
Unknown Speaker 15:26
or or take a sleeping pill, because it’s just, it’s too much
Unknown Speaker 15:32
nice. And I think I know the answer to 20. But the question is, how can our listeners keep tabs on you? What should we look at now?
Unknown Speaker 15:41
Well, listeners can keep tabs on me on Instagram, which is at Banshees, and that’s probably the best way I just started. I have my my old design portfolio website, which is hideously out of date, which is banshees.com
Unknown Speaker 15:59
but I’ve just launched a new website, Marion bound cheese.com which is
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which, where I’m slowly posting my art and it’s for sale,
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and I will keep posting stuff there
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over the next few months, hopefully maybe even forever, If I manage to keep it up to date.
Unknown Speaker 16:22
But I, you know, I link all that to to Instagram. So Instagram is where to see most of, most of what I’m what I’m doing. I don’t post a lot of personal stuff to Instagram, or maybe almost none, except pictures of my dog. So with that kind of stuff, you pretty much out of luck. Oh, and well, my, I do, I do write, sometimes sporadically. I’ve got a sub stack, and that’s banshees dot sub stack.com,
Unknown Speaker 16:56
and that is also linked from my Marion banshees website under empire,
Unknown Speaker 17:04
awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on you know your your name in Vancouver is, is so so well known, and then internationally as well, so well known. So to have that combination of things is quite rare and hard to find people like you to come on the show. Thank you so much. Oh, you’re welcome. It was a pleasure. I.
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