#BusinessCardQandA – James de Vries

With the current coronavirus pandemic and community lockdown in place, while we are all stuck at home, it’s been a great opportunity to tackle those time-consuming and tedious projects we’ve been putting off for years. In my case, one of these was cleaning out and reorganising my office, which had more than 20 years’ worth of accumulated clutter. In the process, I found hundreds of business cards that had been filed away. Looking at these again for the first time in years, old business cards are a great moment in time in a career and a life, so I’ve picked out a selection of cards to spark some questions for their original owners.

James de Vries

James and I first worked together in 1999, with de Luxe & Associates chosen as the agency for the overall event branding and design for Com Tech Communications’ Forum 9 conference (there’s still an article about the previous year’s event by Mark Jones, up on ARN’s website!)

That project included the creation of a large format, printed invitation. This invitation had to have the ‘wow’ factor as it would be the first thing prospective delegates received about the event. It was complicated by the fact that there were many, many stakeholders (including event sponsors) involved in reviewing and approving content for the invitation, which included a full, four-day event schedule complete with session descriptions. As a result, James and I worked closely together for a few months producing this, and also on a range of other collateral required for the event.

While the project was at times highly stressful, the overall relationship with James and his team was really enjoyable, and the end result and outcome was something I’m still proud of today.

Traditionally we used a different design studio for every Forum, to keep the look and feel of each annual event fresh and unique. So, in 2000, the design work for ‘Forum X’ was all completed in-house, as Com Tech had a full design team as part of its e-commerce and web development business (‘Com Tech Online’).

However, Dimension Data (Com Tech had rebranded) returned to James and de Luxe for both our Forum 11 and Forum 12 events in 2002 and 2003, with even better results! The designs for these two years featured commissioned painted artworks that formed the basis for the overall event branding.

I think that was the last time James and I worked together. Forum 12 was the final conference in that format, with the event officially ‘retiring’ in 2005 (an article on this at the time from Fleur Doidge in CRN).

You always struck me as having a real love for art and design. Was this something you enjoyed doing as a kid and always wanted to do?

I'd always loved art and design as a kid. But I didn't really know what design was until the middle of high school. I thought I wanted to be an architect, because that was the only design job I knew about. Eventually an art teacher informed me, when I was doing a typographic thing at school, that there was a place where you could do Graphic Design, and it fitted me like a glove. I guess I'm lucky that my family always encouraged me to follow my energy in that area.

I still think that art and design are very fundamental human activities, and especially in this time of lockdown, we need to tap into that side of ourselves.

I imagine you did very well at uni. Given that assumption, was it difficult to break into the industry professionally?

Ha ha. I did fabulously well at Uni (which was at the time Sydney College of The Arts, and became a part of UTS). I couldn't believe how lucky I was being able to do the stuff I loved every day.

It's never been easy getting into the professional marketplace. I remember that even then it was hard to find work with a great company. There were all the cool companies about town, but they didn't think graduates were ready for them … they wanted production machines … I was eventually incredibly lucky to get three month’s work with one of my lecturers, and a brilliant mentor and gentle human being to boot, Harry Williamson. I ended up working for him for a year. It was like doing a journeyman year to launch into the business and see how to do it. I still have the utmost admiration for him.

I think the design business has always been a bit of a struggle to break into in Australia because it is so unregulated. It's easy to get churned up and spat out.

I seem to remember that fonts and typography were your thing. Did that come from the experience you had in the publishing industry, or is it something innate in your Dutch blood?

Ahhh. I don't know. I've thought about this a lot. I kind of hero-worship type designers, and of course the Dutch have an immense tradition with type and publishing. But I think it mostly came from the realisation that type carries so much meaning, both at the surface and at a cultural level; that it’s the peak of design communication. It's communication in its most distilled form. So to use it well is like being a poet.

A lot of the work you were doing at the time was for newspapers. Do you think text-based design and typography is under-appreciated and not given the recognition it deserves? Has that space fallen by the wayside now with the transition to digital content, or do you think it still has relevance?

Great question. I don't think that space has disappeared; it's probably always been under-appreciated. The truth is that there are more opportunities now to create high quality text-based typography than ever before. The tools are better. For a long time, there was a huge gap between print and web, when you had only the most rudimentary control of type for the web. It was like being a watchmaker wearing oven mitts. That's been solved in many ways with web-type formats and a proliferation of digital type. Now the technology is adding new and exciting design possibilities to bring variability and animation into fonts. So the tool set for designers, and the possibilities for great communication have grown significantly.

I think the original connection with Com Tech came through a joint project on Fairfax@Market, Fairfax’s first online classifieds site that launched in 1996 (see John Davidson’s original piece here in the AFR: https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/fairfax-ads-on-internet-site-19960716-k71js). Is that right – did de Luxe do the design work on that site? Had you been doing much online design work at the time, or were you still predominantly print-based? Was it difficult to make the transition?

I think that's right. Those were the heady days when somebody at Fairfax said to us that they weren't investing much in the classifieds because “Fairfax is number one in Cars, Jobs, and Real Estate classifieds”, so…nothing to worry about. We had done a little web work; we had designed the first-ever AFR website, which was called a web 'home-page' then, with nothing but six buttons. But we were coming at it from a very visual, and classical design perspective – we didn't know anything about coding, and soon after the work we did on Fairfax@Market, the new breed of specialist web design professionals started inhabiting the space. I remember we were doing a project with Com Tech (with Eugene King) for Westpac, and the client shut it down because they'd had their head turned by an 'interface design' company, and thus a new era of digital specialisation began.

So, interestingly enough, I've spent many years transitioning to a much wider role that covers print, digital and everything else. A lot of the things that were difficult, and highly specialised then, have become totally commodified now. My ability to think strategically and systematically across media and platforms is a valuable skill that is important to clients, who have to look at a multifaceted profile in the marketplace.

You ran your own design business pretty successfully for nearly 20 years, and then moved to the US to take up a role as Creative Director at Harvard Business Review. That’s a big change on two fronts! What brought about the decision, and did it take a lot of time to adjust to the way of life (professionally and personally) over there? How different was the experience working for a US firm compared to working here in Australia?

Well. It was a fantastic opportunity for one. That was a big factor. We had competed in, and won a global design competition to redesign HBR, and they loved what we did and asked me to come across. But of course, I had the team, and needed to think about that. But the truth is, that projects to work on major publications were getting more challenging. The projects we were doing were further away, and would have necessitated more travel and being away from family. Also, the projects closer to home were getting demoralising; we were more often asked to do a redesign to help a product shrink or to help a publisher make it work with fewer staff. And we were working with tired, stressed and demoralised clients. So, as a company, we needed to pivot anyway, and my fabulous staff were at life-stages where they weren't attracted by taking over the company. So it went on ice in a very civilized way, and I took the job in Boston! And I have to say I'm very lucky that my wife Nicky was up for the adventure. Our three kids all loved it and went along for the ride. It was much harder bringing children back who had seven year under their belts in Boston.

It was terrific working for an organisation like Harvard Business Publishing. My colleagues were generous and smart, and the organisation allowed me to push the belief in design. 

It took a lot of adjusting. I think whenever you make a big move, the adjustment isn't linear at all, it's far more meandering. But in the end, I felt totally professionally at home in America.

When you say the adjustment to life in the US was more meandering than linear, can you explain what you mean by that?

I think the emotional, financial and community integration into a new place is really uneven. Especially as a family of five, and especially with a culture that appears similar, like the USA, but has profound differences. Everybody adjusts at a different pace, and the question of "is this for a short time – or a long time – or forever?" keeps coming back depending on work, kids' schooling, housing, etc. We wanted to jump into our situation boots and all and really integrate for the time we were there, and we made profound friendships and professional connections. But the period for becoming truly comfortable in a place, as a family, is more like two years than three months. And, to be honest, it's equally challenging coming back after seven years to Australia, after having been profoundly changed by the experience.

You’re back in Australia now, and you’ve fired up de Luxe & Associates again. What’s changed in the business this time around, and how are you doing things differently?

So. A lot has changed. There's no work in Australia like that which we used to do, and I love magazines, but that industry in Australia is moribund at best and miserably exploitative at worst. I still rely on my deep professional background as a practising designer, but I have moved into strategy-design and design-strategy, especially after my experience at HBR in the Business, Strategy and Management spaces. I worked for a year at 2nd Road (which is an Accenture Strategy company) up until a year ago, but I think my natural space is to be part of a smaller consultancy. Also, the way design companies can effectively operate is to be far less monolithic; it's more about pulling teams together, more like the film industry model. I'm still rebuilding a network and finding my ideal role back here in Australia, where I can help clients create a lot of value. 

What have been the biggest changes that you’ve seen in the branding and design industry since you first started working in it 30 years ago?

Interesting changes. I think there are still brilliant designers around, but they need to offer more portmanteau services across a number of disciplines. Branding used to be the Hot Ticket. I think it's still just as relevant, but it seems companies are coming into it more through Strategy, or Human Centredness, or Placemaking. The talent stays the same, but the trends and language are always changing.

What have been your career highlights from …

The early years at de Luxe?

Leading the major redesigns of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age when newspapers were beloved by citizens and highly profitable.

Your time at HBR?

I think building and leading a great design team to help deliver a new and viable business model for publishing, which created a digital/print/events ecosystem of experiences for subscribers. And being able to prove the strategic value of design in an organisation (and lobbying for it to be a component of our content).

More recently, now you are back in Australia?

I'm still working on that one!