Dig in, internet! It’s the long awaited Brad Klausen interview!!!

For most of you reading this Brad Klausen needs no introduction. But for the few of you who may not know, Brad is a Seattle based designer/illustrator best known for contributing a bulk of great design work including a ton of amazing posters for Pearl Jam. As a designer I have to say the way Brad came out of relative obscurity and hit the ground running with PJ posters when the bar had been established at a dizzying height by the Ames Bros. is pretty awesome.

When you get called up to the majors and you look like you’ve been there before, it’s a Hell of a thing. From that start with Pearl Jam(which he continues to do posters for) to posters for all kinds of bands(Built to Spill, Mogwai, MGMT, The Gossip etc.) Brad continues to be a fucking powerhouse in this screen printed, signed and numbered niche, and a super nice guy to boot.

So with all that said, let’s see if we can’t get to know the fella.

Jon: Alright let’s take it back, where you from? Montana? Idaho? Colorado? Everything east of the Cascades is all the same to me.

Brad: I am from LA basically… grew up in Santa Clarita, Newhall to be more specific, which is about 30 minutes north of LA. But I commuted to school in North Hollywood and all my friends lived in the LA area, my dad lived in Playa del Rey, so I grew up in a car stuck in traffic on the freeways of LA. But Newhall is by no means LA, over the course of years we had a variety of different animals, a couple of horses, 2 goats, 3 pigs at one point, they’ve always had chickens, there were some geese and ducks briefly,…to all my friends in LA I lived on a farm out in the sticks, and while we had farm animals here and there, it was by no means a farm. Since my folks have lived there, it’s changed drastically, the population I think has tripled. Not sure if you watch the show Weeds, but they filmed the first few seasons there, and where the show takes place in the planned community of “Agrestic” with all it’s “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same”, that’s Santa Clarita now… growing up there you could just watch the development, that’s the wrong word though,.. development implies growth or progress and to me, covering over all the hills as far as you can see with boring, lifeless cookie cutter homes and cramming as many as you possibly can into as much land as you possibly can and then naming the communities something regal similar to  “Agrestic” to make it feel like it’s a fancy area is not growth or progress. How many of the same house can we cram into one hillside over and over again until all you see is houses… but it’s not just Santa Clarita, that’s just California for ya…

Never would have pegged you for a SoCal guy…but then again most people I know around here are transplants to Seattle.

I went to the same school from kindergarten through 12th grade. A small private high school in North Hollywood.. my graduating class was I think 63 students… I got a plaque at graduation for being there 13 years. You can’t really be a loner in that environment, teachers I had in third grade I had in 10th grade, it was a small environment that little did I know had made me socially retarded when I got into the real world. Standard stuff like meeting people and introducing yourself, were not skills I had from existing in the same place for 13 years. But all in all high school was alright… looking back on it I probably thought it was way worse then it actually was because I was an ignorant teenager and that’s what teenagers do. Towards the end I had had my fill of the place and couldn’t wait to move away and get as far away from LA as possible. I was applying to schools in Maine and Vermont but only made it as far as Denver, which wasn’t the opposite coast, but it wasn’t LA so I was fine with that.

Brad: After that, I went to the University of Denver. It wasn’t an art school but they had a nice little art department. Apparently DU is known for its business school, which shows what I know, I had no idea, even when I was there. I actually didn’t know there was such a thing as art schools, I found out about those after I graduated from college, again showing how oblivious I can be… a friend of mine who graduated from The Art School in Pasadena, CA took me for a tour through the school a little after I had graduated, and it made me wish I had gone to an art school… but the more I thought about it, I was glad I had the experience I did, I had a lot of fun in college and I don’t think I would have enjoyed art school nearly as much as a regular old college. Plus the small art department at DU was bad enough with all the kids in there trying to find their identity by playing the role of “eccentric art student”… those kids drove me up the wall… a few of them, that’s who they truly genuinely were and they lived and breathed it,.. but most of them were just trying on the uniform to see if it fit. You could tell who was for real and who was just searching for their personality when it came time to put art up on the wall for critique days. So I don’t know if that would have been worse at an actual art school, my gut says it would have been much worse. Always made me giggle though, you can make art and be an artist and not be a weird eccentric character, but for some people who they are is far more important then what they make…

Got home from Europe, they flew me out for an interview and asked if I’d be willing to relocate from LA to Seattle, which I quickly replied to with “YES!” since I couldn’t wait to get out of LA once again and out of my parents house (don’t get me wrong, my Mom and step Dad are awesome, but when you go from living on your own in college to moving back home, it’s no good). I moved up to Seattle in November of 1999, right in the midst of the WTO riots… it was a quite a greeting…

Jon: Ha! Way to date yourself grandpa. I watched the WTO riots on TV in High School, Junior year. I still need to see that movie about the WTO riots, it looks kinda shitty though. Plus Michelle Rodriguez is in it and she renders all things she stars in unwatchable.

Okay we’ve talked about this before in person plenty, without getting too convoluted I think generally people think of Brad Klausen as an illustrator more than a “pure” designer although I find the more designy posters in your catalog just as impressive as the hardcore line art posters…but this is more of a technical question than a design vs. illustration question though. I want to know how often you use, and how much you like or don’t like Illustrator. How do you look at it? The approach, you know what I mean…

Brad: I use illustrator mostly to clean up my hand drawn type. I’ll draw all my letters and then scan them and bring them into illustrator and redraw them in there so that i can make things more consistent.. you know, make the spacing between things more even and make sure each letter is the same height and width where it needs it. But other than type, I don’t use Illustrator all that often. I might use it to make a pattern or a particular shape if I want to make sure that things are precise and even and symmetrical. Mostly I just draw everything in pencil then use a light table to ink the drawing and then clean or alter that in photoshop. I use photoshop far more then I use illustrator. But I like Illustrator a lot, it’s a resourceful tool in the shed.

Jon: I’m sure by the time this posts your Monsters of Folk poster will be out there for all to see and purchase. I had the pleasure of racking this print at D&L, I trust the registration held up and the there were no bugs??? Blend turned out nice?

Brad: It came out great, the graveyard shift did well as always. Blend looked good too…it’s always kinda cool to see how blends can actually start to blend away from the original idea and combine the two… there were a few in there where the brown overtook the orange and the blend went from a brown to orange to a brown to a lighter brown, but those looked cool too… I know both Steve and Cary get mad at me for using blends as frequently as I do… you might be more privy to them cursing me when the blend isn’t working right on a print run of 1500 pearl jam posters that need to be done tomorrow…

Jon: Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you, you’re targets are too big. To pinpoint the registration it’s a lot easier to work with a target that’s like 3/8″ , so I would say shrink your targets by about half of what you usually use.

Anyway, speak on the future of Brad Klausen, workwise and or personal if you got anything cool going on. I know you just moved, if you’re digging your new place/neighborhood etc.

Brad: The new place is ok. It’s on the west side of the hill of Magnolia near Discovery Park. And while it’s awesome to take the dogs for daily walks through Discovery Park, this side of Magnolia is sleepy and quiet. Mostly just old folks and families. It’s kind like living in a sleepy midwest town, there’s Magnolia VIllage, which is one or two streets of a few restaurants and shops I think there’s a pub, and on a Friday or Saturday night after 8 pm it’s a ghost town. No one comes over here. My girlfriend and I have started referring to it as “Mangolia”.