Hi,
I'm Sean Adams.
I'm a graphic designer, educator, and author.
In this lesson, I'll discuss my life and how my career began,
when it worked, and when it hit the wall and changed
a few times.
I
was born in Reno, Nevada,
back when it was really just a sleepy cow town.
Ranchers would come in on the weekends and there wasn't much to do.
Learned how to ski
and go hiking and,
you know, just hang out.
Now, I didn't know anything about graphic design
until I got into high school.
Now,
in high school, I
thought it would be fun to design some posters for some plays,
and eventually ended up designing sort of everything for the school,
from homecoming posters to, I don't know, the school letterhead.
Unfortunately, there was only one book in the
library about graphic design,
and that was about Nazi propaganda,
which was not the best source for inspiration, but I
knew it's what I wanted to do.
Now, the problem, of course, was that my family didn't want me to do that.
They were kind of set on me going into government.
My father's side goes back several generations in politics,
and my mother's side does too.
And in fact, the last person in our family to run for anything was
Lay Stevenson, who ran for president in 1952 and 1956.
So
my whole life growing up,
I kept hearing, well, we haven't had a senator in the family for a while,
or we haven't had a governor in the family for a while.
So they were a little surprised when I said,
I'm not going to Harvard.
I'm going to go to CalArts,
and I'm going to be a graphic designer.
My
first project
was something my dad asked me to do when I was 15 years old.
He came home one day and said he had a friend at this little company called Apple,
and they needed an
in-house newsletter.
Could I design the masthead for this?
So I sat down and did it with a bunch of lines,
and the only tool I had,
which seemed to be a rapidograph pen,
if you remember what those were,
and put it together.
Very
proud of it.
And I got paid $50 for it,
which back then, in the late 70s,
early 80s, seemed like a lot of money if you're 15 years old.
When
it was time to decide where to go to college,
my family expected me to go to Harvard.
That's where people had gone to school since the early
1600s.
I didn't want to do that.
I wanted to go to CalArts.
It was sunny.
There was a swimming pool.
It looked a lot more fun than Cambridge in the winter.
So
I went to CalArts,
which was a kind of a wild place back then.
It was a great experience.
Back then, the only way to design seemed to be this new wave style,
and I was sort of stuck in that.
I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
Now,
move forward to my senior year,
and it got to be about time to graduate,
and I remember going to the head of our
program, Lorraine Wild, and asking, what am I supposed to do?
Do I have to get a resume together or something like that?
I think I need to get a job.
And Lorraine had mentioned that one of the visiting artists had come and seen one of our type classes,
and unbeknownst to me,
she was impressed by the work I was doing.
Lorraine said, no, Katie's gone.
Katie's from New York,
and she went back,
and she's talked to several people about you.
So you have
several companies
that are interested in
hiring you.
I was very lucky.
They were good companies.
I think it was Massimo Vignelli and Shmaith and Geismar and Pentagram.
And
one
of the companies that I was really interested in working with,
which was the New York Public Library,
I liked the idea that I would have access to almost any resource in the world, and
I would be my own designer.
There was no creative director above me.
It was basically like,
here you go.
Here's the work.
Go for it.
I
graduated,
on a Friday, and
on Monday morning, I was working in New York.
I
loved working in New York.
It was a great experience.
I loved working at the library.
We had access to almost any resource in the world.
I remember I was working on a poster for Truman Capote,
the author, and I needed an image.
So my coordinator said,
call this guy Dick.
He has some really good photos.
So I called him up,
and he said, come on over to my studio.
I'll give you a print.
Well, it turned out to be Richard Avedon.
The legendary photographer.
And I still have that print to this day.
I
loved working there.
It was amazing.
I would have stayed the rest of my life,
but it gets cold in New York.
They don't like being cold,
and it stayed cold all the time.
Now, I was used to Los Angeles,
where you could go to the beach in April,
so this didn't make any sense to me.
I moved back to Los Angeles.
I liked to be warm.
When
I came back to Los Angeles,
I was hired by April Griman,
an incredible, amazing designer.
And I worked with April for several years.
I learned so much from her.
And one of the most important things I learned from April was to be bold,
to have courage, and do what you think is the right thing to do,
to not play it safe.
April never played it safe.
She always took new risks,
and I've tried to do that with my career also.
After
working with April for several years,
I think about five,
kind of got to that point in life where you think,
no, I'm either going to continue on this path,
or I'm going to start my own company.
And
at
that point, I remember, and this isn't name dropping,
it's just who was around at the time,
but I remember asking Saul Bass,
when is it right to start your own company?
And Saul said, it's like getting pregnant.
There's never the right time.
You just do it,
or you don't.
So,
I did.
My business partner, Noreen Morioka, and I founded Adams Morioka.
And we opened up the studio.
Now,
right away, we started to get some really good clients.
And pretty quickly, within a couple of years, we've
made a good name for ourselves.
And I was
surprised at how quickly the business grew.
Adams Morioka was a great experience.
We had the firm for almost 25 years.
And we worked with an amazing range of clients.
I mean, almost ever wanted to work with.
And
won some good awards.
And got, you know, some really decent press.
After
about 22 years at Adams Morioka,
I'd sort of reached a lot of the milestones I wanted to reach.
I'd worked with the clients I wanted to work with.
I'd done the kind of things I always challenged myself to do.
And I found myself starting to repeat myself.
I
took a term, three months,
and I went to Berlin with several students.
Art Center has a studio in Berlin.
And I went there as the faculty member for that period.
And when I was there,
I found something really interesting.
I
was crossing the street one day,
and I thought, this is a very strange feeling I have right now.
And that feeling was being happy.
And I realized it was the first time I'd stopped worrying about payroll.
I'd stopped worrying about getting an ex-client.
I'd stopped worrying about systems that were tracking hours.
I was more concerned about
Murphy's project, and if he got the photos he needed.
Or if Alice had what she wanted in the typography.
I was more concerned about others than myself.
And
at that point, I decided maybe it was time to turn the boat.
And
switch back to focusing on others, and not myself.
I came back to Los Angeles,
and I told my business partner,
I think I'm ready for a change.
And I switched over to education.
I really felt like it was my job at that point.
To work with the next generation.
And, you know, as one person said once,
you got to send the elevator back down.
And give them a hand.
And that's how I ended up at Art Center.
And I've been happy to be there every single day since then.
The first book that I wrote was about logo design.
And soon thereafter,
I was asked to write a book about color.
Now, I thought back to my experience when I was in high school.
And the fact that there was only one book on Nazi propaganda.
And I wanted to make sure there were options out there for people that might be in some small town somewhere.
And didn't have the opportunity to meet amazing designers.
Or see great design all the time.
So,
doing the book on color seemed like a really good choice to do.
From that, it led to other books.
And since then, I've written several.
And I really enjoy the idea that,
you know, there might be someone out there who's getting some information that they didn't have previously.
And that sort of parlayed
its way into working with LinkedIn Learning.
And getting a message out,
you know, via the web.
And now with Domestika.
It's a great opportunity.
In the back of my mind,
I'm always thinking there's somewhere in the middle of nowhere where someone who's 15 years old is thinking,
gee, I'd love to be a designer.
I have no idea what that means.
And hopefully, you know, you can get them some good information that helps out a little bit.
Now,
the idea of working with color seemed obvious to me.
That was, I think that was sort of born from working in Los Angeles.
And what I mean by that is,
I found when I worked in New York,
there was a very clear idea of looking to the old world.
Like, we looked at color palettes that were historic.
We looked at, like, you know, go to the Metropolitan Museum and look at some beautiful Italian Renaissance paintings.
But in Los Angeles,
there seemed to be a point of looking a different direction.
And that was focusing on Latin America and Mexico.
And Asia and the South Pacific.
And finding colors and color palettes and combinations that came from those cultures rather than a European source.
And the idea, too, that you could do nothing wrong.
That there was a sort of this primal spirit of doing anything you wanted with color and just pushing it to the limits.
And
I sort of adjusted with that.
I was accused of being garish many,
many times on several things I did.
But as I've said before,
there's no such thing as too bright.
You know, it's our job to get attention.
And color's a great way of doing it.
Well,
now I've talked about myself a little too much.
So, you know enough about me.
In my next lesson,
I'm going to talk about my influences.
The things that inspire me and continue to inspire me.
So, let's move forward.