Maybe it’s just another stupid whale poster: an interview with Mike King

Mike King is Crash America.

You might be surprised to learn, as I was, that two of the most successful poster designers in America share a small studio in the industrial part of Southeast Portland. Mike King and Guy Burwell have designed iconic posters for every popular band and festival you could think of. They share materials like screenprinting presses and drying racks, but otherwise they work independently. They each have a small workspace with a divider in between them, like how you would imagine the Brill Building composers working in the fifties: not collaborating necessarily, but somehow benefitting by being in close proximity to each other. Guy Burwell is a brilliant designer on his own, but this day I took a left at the divider to talk to Mike King.

I first met Mike years ago when I started designing posters for the Doug Fir Lounge. I had a few drinks in me and I jokingly told him that he was my rival and I was the new poster designer in town who was going to overtake him. In reality, I wasn’t even that serious about being a poster designer. But nonetheless, he didn’t talk to me for five years after that, giving me dirty looks whenever I saw him.

However, on a recent sunny fall day all resentments were put aside as he welcomed me into his studio. He is a very funny guy and he has a way of being honest in a very humble and self-effacing way. He knows his place in the world of music. He says that his job is to make rock stars look like more interesting people than they really are. Lots of people have that job description, but not many people turn it into such a beautiful art-form the way Mike King does.

Drying racks live among walls covered in posters by both Burwell and King.

I assume you sometimes have to design posters for bands you don’t necessarily love, is it hard to do that?

A lot of times I try not to even listen to the music. I’m really more interested in, if someone says, “Make something for this band,” and I don’t really know about the band, I’d rather look at the t-shirts that they sell. That tells me more about what they think of themselves visually than how they actually sound. I try not to get caught up in how a band sounds because almost all bands are terrible. Just the sheer glut, the odds are against any band being good. I definitely subscribe to the “99 percent of all music is shit” rule.

99 percent? Really?

Some days that’s probably being pretty generous. But that’s a standard you can apply across all culture. Most books are terrible, most movies are terrible…

I usually think it’s 75 percent, but then again I’m constantly disappointed…

Across the board almost all of it is crap. Most books I don’t want to read, most bands I don’t want to hear. And I have worked on projects where I say, “Okay, yeah I’ll check this out,” and then you hear it and you go “Oh no” and you have to trick yourself into staying interested, and that’s a lot of extra work. So I’d rather go off of how people describe themselves. I finished a project a few weeks ago for some band, where I know how they’re supposed to sound, but I have no idea how they actually sound. And I’m more than pleased to not have heard them.

But I’m a whore, you know. My job is my job. It’s all well and good if you only have to work on things that you like. But that doesn’t seem very professional to me. Despite all my bristle and bluster, I’m a professional designer. This is my job. In order to make a living, I have to work on some things that are not necessarily the greatest.

When it is something that you DO love, does that make it easier?

Sometimes it makes it harder because the pressure is on. You can get sort of caught up in it. You start to second guess yourself, whereas with stuff that doesn’t really matter it’s easier to go with your instincts. Sometimes when there’s no pressure involved it’s easier to slap something together. Although, I labor over stuff a lot more than it looks like and that’s kind of a problem.

If you’re such a harsh critic of other people’s work, are you as harsh a critic of your own?

I would say that 99 percent of my work easily falls into that as well. One of the nice things about making a flyer or something is that even if I’ve put a ridiculous amount of time into it – and sometimes I’m making four dollars an hour because I get caught up in one thing or another – even the most complicated flyer you ever made still doesn’t take as long as the simplest screen print you’ve ever put together. The more time you put in, the regrets seem to grow exponentially. Three colors into the screenprint you’re saying, “Oh I’m sick of this thing…” Most of the time it’s done and I go, “I don’t know if it’s good.”

An eclectic library of clip art.

Does it have to do with factoring in your head, “Oh now I’ve spent this long and I’m only making five dollars an hour or four dollars an hour…”?

No. And part of that is because I’m a terrible businessman. I would love to be able to just punch the clock on something and just go, “Hello Mr. Client, you’ve got your ninety minutes worth, give me a hundred bucks,” but it never really works that way. If you could be like the lawyers who say, “Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about your case which is 19 minutes of billable time…” I can’t charge for all the stuff that rattles around in my brain before I even get to the paper. It’s a severely flawed business model and not thinking about it begets MORE not thinking about it, because if I start thinking about it then I go, “What am I doing? This is bullshit! How do I even survive?” And part of it too is that I hate the idea of slapping things together. I hate the idea of, “This is good enough, this is fine.” I try to give my best all the time, for whatever it is. Even in situations with clients where I grow to hate them, I try to reserve all of that until the project is done. Even if they’re totally terrible, that doesn’t give me permission to be terrible. So for better or worse, that’s how it ends up, and almost no one ever really pays you what you’re worth. Except for Pink Martini.

When a record that King designed goes platinum, he'll hang it in the screen washout room.

Because they can?

Because they care. I am a big fan of how they do business. They give me a lot of latitude. They are kind of an indie music dynasty. I think Spoon probably wishes they could have as much control as Pink Martini, which is kind of strange. They own their record company, they do it all. They treat me well.

A book showcasing Flatstock, an annual poster gathering. Mike King takes part each year and is included in this publication.

Could you go through a typical process of how you would design a poster? Do you always generate your own stuff or do you work off of photographs…?

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is I’ve been drawing a lot more than I used to. I started out before the dawn of time wanting to be an illustrator and draw comic books. I grew disenchanted with comic books as I became more enchanted with punk rock. I went from trying to do comics and illustrations to doing flyers and fanzines and cut and paste. It went from drawing to, you know, the cut and paste of the 70′s and 80′s was literally cut and paste, before it was just computer commands. But because of that, starting with drawing and moving on to a Xerox machine, instead of making the leap from drawing to computer, I was able to make the leap from Xerox to computer, so a lot of the cut and paste, I still do a lot of it, but it’s done on computer. But I’m becoming a less reluctant drawer. I was pretty reluctant for a while.

Detail from a Devandra Banhart poster; Mike King with a poster he "actually likes."

It’s also very difficult when you share studio space [motions at the divider] with someone like this jackass over here, who can seemingly with very little thought put more emotion and action… [sighs] Burwell is a true illustrator and I’m not sure that I am. I’m not sure that I’m nearly as close to competent as he is. So it has been intimidating at times. But I take great solace in the notion that Burwell is a genius but he couldn’t lay out a line of type if his life depended on it. [laughs] I’m kidding, but that’s why we can share space because we both occupy different aspects of the design-illustration realm. But it also drives me crazy that he’s considerably more successful than I am, that the world at large has much more appreciation for him than me. That’s okay. I think he’s beloved by the public, where I think I’m liked by other designers. Other people who do the same crap that I do. He makes posters and sells tons of them and makes a lot of money. And I have an apple. [picks up his lunch] A shiny apple. [laughs]

But let me show you the process for this Decemberists poster. And it’s rare that it happens in such a straight line.

I doodled this.

And then these are the actual pencil drawings.

And then I scanned those in, printed them out bigger and redrew them, then scanned them back in and started laying them out.

The illustrations are one part, and the overall layout and type are done on the computer. What’s happening really is, I don’t really draw one whole scene because I don’t feel competent enough. So I’m really just creating my own clip art. It still offers me the opportunity to move it around.

But the germ of it is doodling, or is there an idea there?

The germ is not the doodling. For the stuff that is more cut and paste… sometimes there’s an element or two elements… like, “Here’s some clip art stuff but I need this other thing…” I did this one poster that was this eagle barfing up all these appliances and consumer products all over this little chick. So this little chick and the products and stuff were cut and pasted out of different sources, but I drew the nest because I couldn’t really find it anywhere. But there’s a lot of stuff I do in Photoshop with contrast and blur, where you can take something line-drawn and blob it up so it looks like one piece. You find the happy medium with the line quality. With that you get part of it that you drew and part of it you scanned in. A lot of that is really time-consuming, trying to make all these disparate elements look cohesive. Some stuff comes from photos, some from google image search, some is drawn… it all comes from different places. It’s this cobbling together of stuff [makes cobbling motion with his hands] Franken-images, all of this other shit. A lot of that, a little of this, pound together and make this thing. That’s a big part of my deal; that’s how I do it. That’s my defense of taking other stuff and recombining it and making it into my own thing, because I’ve really worked it. I make sure that I’ve crossed that mental line in my mind where I can say, “This is mine and not something else.” Instead of, say, “Oh, take this page out of this thing and put some type on it and there you go, it’s a poster.”

So that busy work is part of the art, not just busy work?

I don’t know. It’s either part of the art or part of the busy work.

But you would never think to hire some underling to do that work for you…

Nah. Well, I don’t make enough money.

Or an intern…

I think that’s where it starts to make sense, is in the work, once you start pushing all these pieces together, then it starts to, that’s when the magic happens. Part of it too is when you’re working with existing images, you spend a lot of time looking through whatever sources trying to find things that match the image you see in your head. You know, “This is great but the angle is wrong,” so you have to adapt as you go along. I’m not going to find this thing that exactly matches the image in my head and sometimes it’s the same kind of thing from a different perspective.. A lot of times you end up in a completely different direction, you say, “I wanted to do this, but then I saw this picture of this Eames chair and that changed everything and now it’s this…”

The source book library really is massive.

With drawing it’s not quite the same thing because you’re not… well it IS the same thing because there are constraints, but they’re different constraints, The constraints are, what can I actually draw? You know, in my mind there is a Frank Frazetta-esque barbarian stabbing a polar bear, but by the time I’m done with it it’s Charlie Brown sticking a fork in a football, because I can’t draw that well. But that’s when I do the doodles and that’s when it becomes apparent what I can and cannot do. If I can’t pull it off in a doodle then I certainly can’t pull it off in an ink drawing. So then I have to rethink what I want to do. But at the same time, no I’m not going to scan in Frank Frazetta’s barbarian stabbing a polar bear and slap some type on it, because that’s too easy and it’s frowned upon by all kinds of folks.

Something like an eagle vomiting consumer products seems to have a message. Is it important for posters to have a meaning behind them?

It’s nice to have a meaning, but it’s not always apparent when you’re working on it what that meaning is. The meaning behind this Decemberists robot poster is, “Death to the whale poster,” because whales are a theme that come up in so much poster art for the Decemberists. So I thought, “It’s sort of this robot dreaming of a whale and in that dream the whale is dreaming it’s a robot destroying the robot man.” It’s sort of a silly vision of an alternate future or something. I don’t really know what it was. On the surface someone would say, “Oh yeah a whale poster, stupid. ” But my hope is that it would be a little more than that. But in the end, I don’t know, maybe it’s just another stupid whale poster.