Most interviews we read in magazines are shit. It’s what inspires us to do what we do. That and other magazines that do brilliant interviews. Magazines like SneakerFreaker – Melbourne’s very own incredibly good and culturally important international publishing success. Founded, edited and owned by the original sneaker freaker himself, Woody has built SF into a global behemoth. He’s also seen his fair share of young upstarts float through his office, lived and worked overseas, moved from career to career, started a family, and even has SF translated into Spanish. Which means he has some fascinating shit to say and some incredibly crucial advice to give. As usual, over many a beer, we sat and talked for hours. Ergo, this fucker is long. But that’s cool, cause the ones who need to read it most have a lot of time on their hands. So grab a tea, put on your headphones and use this as a guide to figuring out what the hell you’re gonna do for the next twenty years.

Junior: Hey Woody. What’s your coming of age story? When were you at uni?

Woody: I spent five good years doing the Media course at RMIT in Melbourne. I was involved in a bunch of stuff and ended up becoming the co-editor of the student newspaper, Catalyst, which was literally a catalyst for me in terms of how my life panned out. I was introduced to a whole bunch of people who’d been the editors before and I ended up living with them for years, and for some reason they took me under their wing, which was weird because I was a wildman from the suburbs. Fitzroy was a very creative place then. We started a magazine from our house called Radar and had these awesome parties in the bank vault where we lived on Smith St. They were good times. I hate getting nostalgic when we’re only one question in…

Jr: Ha, man, you can do whatever you want one question in – it’s your interview. So tell me more about Catalyst; the student newspaper.

W: Oh yeah. So because we won an election to edit the newspaper, all of a sudden we had to learn how to make it; you know, write, design and create the whole thing. We were the first editors to get a Macintosh computer too. It was totally primitive before that point. We started the year with a bromide camera which we used to put screens on images for manual paste-up, as well as creating multiple tones for hand-made colour work which we did with scalpels. My memories involve a lot of sliced fingers and layouts lost in the wax machine. When we saw a scanner for the first time, we were really, really impressed. Actually my entire design career started when my friend Bert showed me how to move things around on the Mac screen. It’s hard to imagine how boring life was before the machines existed. No one I knew was a graphic designer. It was a trade, like being a plumber. People spent years learning how to do things in a really mechanical sort of way. When the computer came along, all of a sudden, you could have fun with a machine and make stuff. Straight away I really got into design which was totally unexpected. I never thought about a career in design at high school, where art classes were seen merely as a bludge. Random things can spin your life off in a whole new direction, it’s the kind of thing your mum tells you but you never believe her.

Jr: Damn straight. As long as you open yourself up to happy accidents you’ll be fine for sure. So we know you moved to London for a while after uni. What brought on the London thing?

W: I’d encourage everyone to head for the hills immediately after school finishes, because you’ll never get a better time to do it. But the real reason I left was because I almost got involved in some trouble with the fuzz after doing the O-book where we wrote the usual student articles about shoplifting and taking drugs and shoplifting while on drugs and not paying for tram tickets. All the cliches.

Jr: Ha! Wow. Really? That was you?

W: Oh yeah, it was par for the course in those days. It was a tradition to stir the pot so we just rewrote the same articles over and over every year. I think a year or two after my indiscretions they nailed the editors of Rabelais (another student newspaper) for the exact same type of content and it seriously fucked them for years – so going to London was a great move.

Jr: Sounds like it was. So what was the plan?

W: I thought I could parlay my limited experience into something design related, but all I really knew was that I didn’t want to work in a pub like every other aussie dingbat. I’m pleased to say I did one day as a street cleaner and that was enough motivation for me. I got so, so close to a design job at NME, which would have been awesome. I also made the final two for Penthouse as well. That would have been interesting for sure.

Jr: So were you into ‘The Face’ and all those types of magazines coming out of the UK at the time?

W: I was obsessed. I never felt iD so much but I loved Raygun and The Face. From a design point of view, Neville Brody’s work was great but it was the mix of content that hooked me. The Face made London seem underground and wicked cool and it had fashion and art and politics and serious stuff as well as loads of club news and even it has to be said, quite a few sneakers. It was probably the most effective marketing tool any city has ever had but you go there and you find that it’s a grey depressive shithole. But that’s only one visual side of London, the other is that it has the most vigorous youth culture – certainly it’s the top city for music in my opinion. I really regret not keeping my collection of The Face, I had years and years of them but they were too heavy to lug from house to house.

Jr: Ha, awesome. What year did you go?

W: 1993 or something.

Jr: OK, here’s a good question: For a lot of fresh faced uni kids that go overseas, the ‘big break’ rarely comes. They haven’t got any contacts, they haven’t done any work yet, so they’re not even that good.

W: Well the thing is they’re pretty much unemployable. Sorry to break it to you kids but it’s the truth, no matter how cocky you are. I think bullshitting is perfectly acceptable in order to get a break, just be sure you can do what you say you can do. I was fortunate enough to get picked up by a freelance agency. I also went to the UK at a time when no one really had the skills that I thought I had, so it was a bit easier in hindsight. My big break was to learn on the job at someone’s expense even if I taught myself.

Jr: What were the skills?

W: Well, I mean, desktop design as it used to be called. At that time it was Quark Express, a very early version of Photoshop and Illustrator – so the programs are still the same, but at that time no one knew how to use them. You couldn’t learn it anywhere. It wasn’t in the tertiary system. So I turned up to London expecting them to be high tech and super advanced but then realised I was one of maybe a few hundred people in the city at the time who knew anything at all about Macs.The advertising agency I worked for had no computers except for the receptionist’s PC. Everything in the creative department was done by hand and illustrators did all the mock ups with Yoken markers. It was seriously like the Dark Ages.

Jr: So who picked you up?

W: I started working for a few freelance agencies. I bought a suit to wear to big banks to create flow charts which I did for about three or four months.

Jr: Did you make much money?

W: I think I earned ten pounds an hour or something like that, which was pretty sharp in those days, certainly better than pulling pints. Luckily my agency really liked me and they gave me a crack at a job that was going at a small advertising agency in SoHo.

Jr: How long were you in London all up?

W: Quite a while. I developed a really bodgy English accent that got me through. I guess you could say I was slightly overstaying my welcome, officially speaking.

Jr: Ha, yeah we know the one. Did you make friends when you were there?

W: Yeah. I made all my friends, still ten or more years later, based on this time.

Jr: Really?

W: Yeah. All my closest English friends except one have emigrated here to Melbourne.

Jr: Wow! Really? Why?

W: It’s a great place to live. To come here from London and have sunshine and space and freedom and this ‘Neighbours’ lifestyle dare I say it, it gets more and more attractive as you get into your 30s. One of my oldest friends even had his mum emigrate. I think going back to London now would be pretty devastating from a lifestyle point of view. Melbourne has its weaknesses, but the lifestyle isn’t one, although with the price of houses now, we’re in danger of it becoming unaffordable for anyone creative or less than committed to the corporate grind.

Jr: A lot of people think the same way I suppose. Although London has all the culture and so on.

W: When you’re in your twenties and you’re mad for it, for sure. If you’re going out all night, every night, it’s a great place to live. It was absolutely brilliant, there was always something entertaining to do.

Jr: Did you do that? Did you go out all night, every night, while you were working?

W: I gave it a good nudge!

Jr: What happened when you came home?

W: After the usual case of mild post-travelling blues, I worked in advertising for a year at Patterson Bates (GPY&R). It wasn’t a great time for the company; I think they lost a lot of pitches. It was ok. I wasn’t excited about what I was doing. It wasn’t that creative. Maybe I should have been pushier and tried to get into writing TV ads or something. But my priorities were elsewhere, I was DJ’ing and organizing events at night and doing other stuff that was a lot more fun.

Jr: Did you like the advertising industry?

W: Yes and no. I was a little disenchanted creating junkmail which to be honest, which is what I did. In the 80s, it must have been a wild scene with so much money floating about. In London I arrived at the tail end of that and they were all misty eyed about these crazy times when, you know, ‘Steve rode his Harley down the hallway and crashed, knocking himself out on the photocopier’ or one classic I remember was when a new guy called Nobby joined the firm. The story was on his first day he managed to spill a Flaming Lamborghini on the boss and set his shirt on fire at dinner. In Australia it was much more conservative. I had green hair. It wasn’t going to end well and I wasn’t thinking about a career. I never have really.

Jr: The employment prospects haven’t always been great for school leavers have they?

W: Nope. When I left Uni, there was nothing going on. I think a lot of kids leaving university are facing a similar sort of situation. The pressure is to get a break somehow, but beyond that, if you are useful and you can justify your own existence at a company they will always find room for you. The hard thing is when you have no experience and you can’t prove that you can or can’t do something. You have to make yourself valuable.

Jr: Is that something that you had to work on? Making yourself valuable? Or were you just like that?

W: I wouldn’t say I ‘worked on it’. I just worked. The harder you work, the luckier you get. I was annoying, quite frankly. I got into radio by annoying people, and ended up working at various radio stations while at Uni. I bugged people til they let me have a go. I think that just being super keen is all you can really expect from somebody at a young age.Think about it, you can do whatever you want with your life but only if you have a crack. However, I think there are some things you can teach people and some things you can’t. An understanding of the world and how things interrelate – you can’t teach anyone that. It’s an instinctive thing. If you are going to work in fashion, you need to ‘get it’. There’s no point just trying to be in that industry because you think it’s glamorous or you’ll get to root models. You’ll be chewed up by someone who’d climb over your dead body for a job.

Jr: Have you gone through your fair share of young people who aren’t diligent at Sneaker Freaker?

W: We’ve had a pretty good track record. A few times I’ve tried to advertise and get someone out of college but never really found the right person. We’re a really small outfit and I don’t have time to teach someone from scratch. It’s frustrating for me but I learned that you can’t expect too much initially, you have to be patient and let them work it out. I’ve had some pretty funny experiences. One kid trying out for a job told me that I couldn’t teach him anything about Photoshop, and he’d probably been using it for two years. He was actually quite skilled, but I think his attitude alone rang bells for a potential employer. You want a little bit of cockiness but you don’t want someone who doesn’t listen and doesn’t think that they can’t learn. You mainly want accuracy and speed, that’s super important. That is one thing that the school environment doesn’t seem to promote in my experience. Young kids get tired and need a little nap to get back on track. It’s a grind. You’ve got to be productive 8 or 9 hours a day.

Jr: There’s a lot of talent going around, but not a lot of work ethic. I suppose there’s always going to be someone more talented than you, but it’s about how passionate you are and how hard you work.

W: True. I gotta say, the work ethic of Gen Y kids is a hot topic amongst my peers right now. I think that’s because they are now managing staff for the first time, but there’s definitely a sense that the GFC could be a good thing as it might take a few uppity kids down a peg or two. I’m not so sure this generation’s work ethic is that much different from my own Gen X clique… just a little more distracted by the overdose of technology.

Jr: What’s the most valuable skill to have aside from being keen?

W: A knack for networking. It’s a shit name for it but it is what it is. You can’t teach someone how to do it, though you might learn the secret someday through observation. It’s a vague business. Some people just have a knack at making friends with other people who can help them. That’s why starting a mag or writing a blog can become so universally useful. You meet people. Forget about the rest of it, meeting people and connecting the dots is crucial. You can base an entire career on knowing people.

Jr: Oh god, don’t get me started on social media and ‘networking’. I think we’ve got to be careful, you know. Everyone seems to get so caught up in the conversation and being part of the technology that they actually forget to do stuff. Everyone is talking about it, making comments, but not actually creating anything.

W: No shit! I picked up a biz card recently where this kid had over 12 ways of contacting them and I wondered how the hell he gets anything done? People get obsessed with Twitter, but six months ago something different was happening. I’ve seen it with trends, and in footwear, certain things have come and gone so fast I’m still scratching my head. I must admit the pace of change recently has really kicked up a gear. We’re now facing a world where TV, newspapers, magazines and even radio are no longer the foundation of our media diet. The porn industry is on its knees! Books are on the way out as well, at least in a printed sense. I’m really intrigued as to whether this new Kindle could really do for books what the iPod has done for music.

Jr: That’s an interesting point. Sneaker Freaker is kinda like a book. It’s a bit nicer than the usual magazine really. You must sell a few more older issues than any other magazine. Do you think the content goes out of date?

W: It does and it doesn’t. You can’t buy those shoes anymore, but every magazine becomes a document of its time so you can go back and still enjoy them as a snapshot of the years they were made. We sell a lot of our old issues, more than most magazines perhaps. Magazines are a good barometer of style and opinion and when you go back you do get a good insight into the times. We’ve been going about seven years or so and really the first one was pretty raw when you look at it. I have to say it was actually designed that way on purpose, but still, it was pretty loose. I wish I could have seen into the future.

Jr: Ha, I totally have that copy. How many people were working on it then?

W: The magazine didn’t have any staff for probably the first four years. Hans DC came to work with me part time helping in various ways. I wish I’d ramped it up earlier but I just didn’t have the foresight to go for it. I was also still working on my label called Wankuss (with my friend Alasdair McKinnon), as well as doing design work for films like Ned Kelly and Queen of the Damned and other stuff. I liked to keep my options open.

Jr: Really? It was just you? Wow. Back then a lot of clever people put out free magazines. I used to read Stu Magazine and Large whenever I could get my hands on them.

W: Stu was good. Vice came along. And Lucky. There were about seven free magazines floating around. Our first edition was free then I decided to charge for it. People still think it’s free.

Jr: Yeah it seemed to be the heyday of free magazines.

W: Yep. Not sure we’ll see too many new ones open up for business. But I have a killer idea for a new magazine that would be awesome which only proves how out of touch I really am.

Jr: Haha. Maybe. Maybe not. You’d probably be surprised. I’m sure that’s what people said when you came up with an idea So why sneakers?

W: I thought that I was one of the few people who were into sneakers, but then I could see it was bigger than I thought – there were a lot of guys like me who had 50 or 60 shoes in their closet but we didn’t know each other. Sneakers are one of those things that men can talk animatedly, dudes are really into their feet. It used to be about Air Max and chunky runners but it’s flipped on its head now. Pointer and Clae and Gourmet are doing very well, brands with simple things, not super jacked-up runners. Trends are definitely changing. You can’t stop progress, but it’s easy to feel like a dinosaur.

Jr: Was it difficult starting up a magazine?

W: Not really, because I only needed a few thousand dollars to get it printed. Then by issue two people wanted to buy it. Our first international customer was a very well known store in Paris.

Jr: Wow! How did they find you?

W: Through our website. We were one of the first online sneaker sites. The reason they are so renowned is because they find out about something before anyone else. They’re the top of their game. I was in there last week and it was mental how many people go in there. It’s like a tourist attraction! Once we went international I also had to learn about things like international shipping, which became crucial to the business growing. Boring things like this are so important and can be the difference between survival and death.

Jr: That’s the thing with publishing in Australia. You can print it here but then you’ve gotta ship all those heavy issues overseas. Some magazines print overseas and distribute it that way. Do you ever do that?

W: Once about five years ago we sold out of an issue in about a week and we got another order of 2000 copies. The reprint quote locally was nuts, so I found a printer in China and got them shipped straight out of there. I haven’t done it since. We’re still printed in Melbourne, five blocks from my house. It’s just too stressful to not know where your job and therefore your whole life is at. I remember all too well a launch party in Sydney where the magazines were still on a truck locked in the warehouse as a result of a snap industrial action.

Jr: Can you raise a family on a niche publication?

W: I can now. In the first few years I never had staff to pay so the overheads were low. I learned over time how to make money from a variety of sources. You can sell magazines, advertising, online banners, syndicate your content and do marketing for brands and product development. I have to say in every respect, I learned the hard way. Piece by piece. I learned a lot from watching other people and making mistakes. I also had to learn to trust people in other countries. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I’ve been pretty lucky in that department.

Jr: And I guess you have that giant monolith Nike to buoy you up.

W: Nike has always been good to me, right from the start. But we are also supported by nearly every other brand in the footwear biz. If you wanna start a niche magazine, make sure what you do is invaluable to the marketing managers of multinational companies or you’ll forever be pushing shit uphill.

Jr: How would someone who really wants to work in big brand sneakers approach getting a job at a company like that? How do they go about it?

W: Actually we did a feature about how to get into the business a while back. There’s a few simple things. Every brand needs accountants and pen pushers but if you’re talking about shoe design, a lot of the guys at Nike and other brands are originally architects or sculptors, in other words they had an idea of three-dimensional space that could be translated to footwear. Shoe design school didn’t really exist til recently. Doing research on any company that you want to work for is a must. Knowing everything about them, but also having an understanding of how they hire is essential. If you want to work for adidas, find out how to get in contact with their HR department. Start on the phones or in their factory outlet and build your way up. There are plenty of CEOs who started in the mailroom. It’s also thinking strategically. Working for Sneaker Freaker could be a good way to get in as it’s an insight into the industry. Foot Locker wouldn’t hurt either. You need to know what you’re talking about and have a foundation of knowledge.

Jr: Loving sneakers isn’t enough at the end of the day; you have to have some sort of skill or craft.

W: Correct. Loving something can actually be a handicap, if you wanna be a hardass about it. When you love something too much, your opinion and judgment can be clouded by sentiment. But if it was me, I’d go for the passion every time. I think one of the biggest things that kids could learn is to be persistent. Some kids expect to start as a junior and take over the company in two years. Or if you start your own thing, that you’ll be rich overnight. The reality is that businesses mature over a few years and it takes you time to work out what you are actually doing, unless you are super advanced or lucky. It’s human nature that is probably exacerbated by this frantic model we’ve built up. Everyone wants everything yesterday. If only it was that easy… whatever happened to paying your dues?

Jr: I think that’s a wonderful point to make. Persistence is something we’re big on. But sometimes persistence isn’t even enough. You know, it’s really hard to do something big in such a small market place like Australia. Take publishing for example: If you want to get distribution of your magazines, you’ve got to be in a bigger market.

W: That’s true, but I don’t think that’s a reason not to do anything. It’s like procrastinators who never do anything because they’re too cool to put themselves out there or they think it’ll never work so why bother. Melbourne is full of creative people, the only problem is that most of them are, like anywhere else, mildly talented at best. The most talented ones find it a struggle to attract the same benefactors they’d find in Europe or the US. Look how many talented Australians have to leave? We are a nation of 22 million, the same size as greater New York. So to answer your question, you def need to be in a bigger market, but it’s not going to happen sitting on your date in Fitzroy drinking Chai and smoking rollies. You have to work your ass off. In my own world, I realised that if I wanted to succeed beyond Australia, I learned from others that staying home in my office wasn’t gonna make it happen. I’m on the road a lot.

Jr: Isn’t Sneaker Freaker translated into Spanish?

W: Yeah, it has been for the past two years. It’s been going really well and we have a great partner running the office over in Barcelona. I’m pretty sure we are the first Aussie magazine to be translated into a foreign language.

Jr: Do you ever think about moving it all overseas?

W: I have at different times, but this is where I’m from and this is where I’m staying. The footwear industry in Australia is in Melbourne. But I think I do regret not moving a bit. Maybe I’m just not the personality type to really take it to the max… Either way, we have been successful on our own terms which is just part of the story.

Jr: Maybe because you married and had kids. Was that the plan? To settle down?

W: I think that cycle of life is inevitable. I wish I’d had a family earlier in hindsight, but we can all look back and say that. Luckily I have a very understanding wife who encouraged me to go for it, even if she recently confided that she thought the magazine was a crazy idea and would be lucky to last six months.

Jr: Any plans to expand your team?

W: I would like to find an Editor to take over next year so I can spend some time working on different ideas. We are always looking for writers. But it’s hard to find anyone who can write these days, as well as have a command of sneakers. If anyone is interested they can email info@sneakerfreaker.com.

Jr: So that means that you could focus on running the business.

W: Absolutely, I could move to the Bahamas and sit under a palm tree with my blackberry.

Jr: And a cocktail! Any final advice for the kids who wanna start a magazine and make a living out of it?

W: My advice is go for it. What the hell. What’s the worst that can happen? You might go bankrupt and have to flee to Brazil…  just don’t let anyone tell you something can’t be done or you’ve got a stupid idea. I had that plenty of times. How many people get rich from stupid ideas?

David Racchi is a designer. David Racchi is from Melbourne. David Racchi has spent most of his working life in Spain. David Racchi just won a Gold Lion. Which smiley faced runabout in the image above is he? Could he be the middle guy? How cool is the middle guy!? Ha! No! He’s the brooding character over there on the far right! Hello David! How are you? Wait, don’t answer. We’ll do the question thing soon. First we’ll do the intro. David started an agency in the Spanish city of Murcia just a few years ago. Its name is F33. They did some work, lots of cool stuff actually, and eventually won a Gold Lion at Cannes for a particularly cool piggy bank. So we sat down with his good self on his return to Melbourne, drank many Spanish beers, and discovered that your career doesn’t finish with a Gold Lion. It starts with one.

Jr: Where did it all start for you? Obviously in Melbourne, we know that much. Give us your best nutshell.

David Racchi: Ha, OK. So I went to Tafe, studied film, and dropped out. Then I studied animation and dropped out. Then I studied illustration for a year and finally discovered a design course. I thought that was cool, so I got into design. I met Matt Quick, (then: practicing designer and teacher, now: a Melbourne artist), and he changed my way of thinking into being more concept based. Before what I learnt seemed stuck on being all about the finished product. But I soon realised the idea was important as well.

So I worked in a few small studios for short periods of time. I decided I wanted to leave Australia, just to travel. After a year of travel, a small agency in Murcia, Spain, called me after I sent them my folio and they offered me a job over the phone. I worked in Murcia for two years at this agency, and then I decided to quit. I had no folio, and had nothing to show for my time there, and I wanted to go back to Australia.When I was about to leave a friend of mine recommended me to a studio called Dfraile and said the guy there was pretty amazing. I met this guy (Eduardo del Fraile), who is now really well known in Spain. The interview was at four o’clock in the afternoon, but we got along so well the interview finished at 2 o’clock in the morning. In the end he gave me some part-time work. I started working there a lot, and over time our styles changed together, something clicked, and the kind of work that we were producing showed that.

Jr: Wow! That’s such an intense story. But maybe that’s how most careers start. So this working relationship was pretty cool for a young guy like you to have. You must have learnt a lot from each other. What did you learn?

D: Yeah I think we both just gelled. What I learnt was how to work, how to treat a client, how to persist, and how to choose what you want. He also taught me that it’s not about the big businesses, and with smaller clients you can do incredible things. Everything is a possibility, it doesn’t matter who it is.

Jr: So you were an awesome team! That’s so cool. Was it better working collaboratively like this? Would you recommend it to the kids?

D: Depends on who you work for. The hardest thing is working for people that have an ego and can’t take constructive criticism. You have to have an ability to be able to step back and listen to the person making the judgment or the criticism. I’d go and ask someone what they could see in a piece of work, and I’d say it was an elephant. They’d tell me it was a dog. So obviously it doesn’t work. I learnt to feed off of each other. If everything has a concept, the possibilities are endless.

Jr: Concepts make it easy!

D: If you do something pretty, you can only go so far.

Jr: Totally. So after you were involved in the A-team, what did you do next?

D: Well from there I wanted to set up a studio. I met some people who offered to help me set it up, so we just did it. Not little by little, but we just did it. We called it F33. (Editors note: at this point in the interview, David rolls up the arm of his shirt to reveal an F33 tattoo. Us: “Fuck yeah!” Cough. “Continue…”)

Heh. So the first six months were horrible, we had no money and no clients. Slowly we had little jobs come through, but they weren’t paying anything and I was getting worried. A gallery in Spain gave us a contact for the chance to pitch for a client. We spent two weeks doing the job and went to present it. We got through it, and they called us two days later and told us that they loved it. From one day to the next, as soon as that job came out, we got heaps of work. What we decided from the start was that we would do the best we could. A lot of times we paid for the jobs so we could get a good body of work behind us. The clients never knew. It just worked. The first year we had nothing. The second year everything happened for us. We started sending out to the three big award competitions in Spain. We sent off what we had, but we had no idea if they were any good. And we started winning; a bronze here, a silver there. It was then that we realised that we actually had some good stuff.

Jr: A little faith goes a long way. So after you started winning awards and getting all famous and stuff, did you become pretty well known in the city?

D: In Murcia we were pretty well known within two years. We became one of the top studios. Once we won the Gold Lion, we started getting a lot more work. However two weeks before we won the Lion I told the guys I was ready to move on. I didn’t expect we’d win.

Jr: Bzzzt! Hold up! You just won a Gold Lion and now you’re leaving!?

D: Heh, yeah I know.

Jr: More intense stories! So did you leave just because you wanted to move on?

D: I met a girl in Poland. But, I wanted to leave the year before. I’ve got this thing that I’m not that old yet, I’m only 34,and there are still many more things I want to see. The studio has never been a dream of mine; it’s only been a project for me. My dream is to just keep experiencing new things, and I felt that Murcia was going to hold me back. I needed something else. The last month became a huge dilemma for me, and no one in the studio actually believed that I was leaving. It’s not about my girlfriend, and it’s not about work. It’s about what you feel inside and what you are looking for. I felt like it was fantastic, but I need to do something else. So I went to a few ad agencies in Poland and had interviews. They’re really interested in me, and they all want me to be creative director. I’m not sure I want that role; I want something lower so that I can learn. I’m not a creative, I’m a designer with ideas. I lack confidence in some areas, but I’m not afraid to learn. I’m not ready for that position. It isn’t about the money to me, but about being happy where I’m working.I think that there are much more important things than making money and getting known. Things that aren’t related to design, but are related to being happy. But I’d be an idiot to say no.

Jr: Maybe. Maybe not. So rewind a little. Tell us more about the split from F33.

D: It’s hard because you become F33. Everything is the studio and every decision you make goes through the studio. It is great, but I needed a break from it and to find myself again. The best thing is that having the studio has given me the opportunity to be where I am now. It’s the best position I’m in at the moment, where anything is possible. F33 was a decision we didn’t think out, we just did it. But it’s given me so much more working with F33. Working with my F33 partners has been an unforgettable experience and without them I don’t think I’d have the same opportunities I have now. Together we all came of age and became a great team.

Jr: Who was the team? Who are the folks in that photo?

D: There were four partners; I was designer/creative, Rodrigo Fonseca was a designer/creative, Joaquin Martinez de Salas was creative who deals with the clients as well, we had an administrator Pepe Sola, plus we had a web girl Nika, another designer Alberto Perez, and another guy who helped with production.

Jr: They all sound lovely! What was it like in the office when you won the Gold Lion? Was it fun? What happened?

D: We entered and I called to find out the results. I thought maybe we could have won a bronze. When I called, they said that they had already called the people that have won. So I thought, right, well, we haven’t won then. But I knew we were in the first eight. Then she called again, and said, “Actually, you have won.” This time Rodrigo answered and said, “What? Bronze?” She said, “No, you’ve won!” He said, “Silver?” She said, “No, you’ve won!” And he said, “The gold?” We couldn’t believe it.

Jr: Ha. That’s hilarious. Did you go to the ceremony?

D: We couldn’t go. They only called us seven hours before the ceremony and there were no tickets left to France, so there was no way for us to go. Most people usually go whether they have won or not, but we couldn’t afford that.

Jr: What about the entry itself, how did it all work?

D: It was a book to do with taxes, kind of like an annual report for the Agencia Regional de Recaudación (Regional Tax Collection Agency). We decided we wanted to put the book inside of a pig, like one of those moneyboxes. All of it is how to open the pig. The whole idea was how to make it what it isn’t – which is serious graphs. We had them specially made, and the best thing was that it was only a small client so it was very inexpensive – we only had to make 500. We couldn’t have done it if we had a big client. And we won an award from it, so anything is possible.

Jr: Did you send a sample into the awards?

D: We did, we had to send two in case it broke. We found out later that everyone, all of the judges, were waiting to smash it open. One of my favourite designers is Frost…

Jr: Yeah we like Frost too. We even interviewed him you know.

D: Great! He’s one of my favourites. Everything he does has an idea behind it. Anyway, he was one of the judges at Cannes, and for me that was amazing. My work is completely different to his, but his ideas seem so simple. They are the hardest ones of course, because they are so obvious. I’m starting to understand a little bit about how winning awards, for design, works. Basically, if you can take a piece of paper and do something incredible with it, you’ll get there. I saw this idea once for a program for a music festival. Basically the program was printed on fluorescent green paper, scrunched up into a ball, and thrown onto the street. And there were thousands of them. Everyone stopped to pick them up to see what they were. That won a pretty big award, just for an A4 piece of paper. With so little, you can do so much. It isn’t about having a million dollar budget. These guys did it with an A4 printer. A simple idea that shows a lot of thinking.

Jr: When you presented the piglet to the client, was it just the one concept?

D: Yes, and they loved it. We never presented more than one. That’s our strategy, we only present one; it’s the one we want and the one we believe in and we fight for it. It has backfired a few times, but most of the time it has gone through. I’ve worked in studios where we present three and it’s always fucked up. They want a mish mash of the ideas. The idea that we present is the best one for you, and the one we thing is going to work best for you. My thing is that If you have to explain an idea for more than half an hour, then it isn’t worth it. If they don’t get it straight away then it isn’t working.

Jr: Now that you have had your own studio, how will it be working for someone else?

D: It will be a bit of a shock. This is the interesting thing, a guy from Ogilvy told me I had a pretty consistent folio. The old train of thought is to have 15 pieces in your folio. But now it’s all about putting only your good pieces in. If you have 50,000 good pieces, then put them in, as long as they are the best pieces. My book has 130 pages of work, but I consider them all really good, for me. I was told it is rare to have such a consistent great book. But I think it’s simple – I’ve been working for myself in my own studio for the last three years. If I’d been working for another studio, I’d have a lot less great pieces of work. I was controlling what I wanted to do with my other partners, everything that we did we tried to do the best. That’s the big difference. Every other place I’ve worked, I’ve probably got three or four pieces. If I start working for someone else, I think it might be difficult. But it would be fun.

Jr: What was it like working in Spain?

D: The weather is great all year round! However, the money in there is pretty bad. It’s one of the lowest paying countries, and they won’t offer to give you more. I have a theory when it comes to asking for money, and that is to do it when you don’t want it. Traditionally, you always ask for a pay rise when you think you deserve it, or if you’ve bought a house, etc. And you know they’re going to say no. So if you ask before any of this stuff happens, and they say no, they know that you’re thinking that you want more money. Rather than asking when you need it and then hating your job as a result, because you need the money. People are afraid to ask for a good wage, because they’re afraid they’re going to get fired. You aren’t going to get fired. You’ve got to make it clear from the start and know what you’re worth. You’ve got to get what you deserve. It’s like Ant Keogh said in his interview: you make yourself invaluable. And I think I’ve got to that point of knowing how I can be important, and knowing that I’m worth it.

Jr: But how the hell do you do that? How do you make yourself invaluable?

D: The most important thing I’ve realised is you need to make sure people remember you. People go into jobs and work two hours, and think, this is how much I need to be paid for this time. I often work a lot of hours for free. It’s not about my ego, but I know that one day that’s going to give me more than the money they could have paid me will. They will remember me. Again, I think it was said in another interview with Marcus from Droga5 – make an impression.

Jr: That’s really great advice. We’re pumped to do stuff now! So what’s the deal for you now? You’ve got the design background, and now you are going to go and dabble in advertising. Is that out of ambition, or what you want to do, or winning the Lion pushed you in that direction, or would you be happy to go back and just pursue design?

D: I think I’d be happy doing design. We were doing advertising at the studio mainly because we had to eat. We did a lot of guerilla advertising in Spain. We started doing that by accident, but it always worked. And that’s how we started thinking. I’m at a crossroads where I have to decide what I want to do and where I want to go. For me, outside people have been telling me I should try something else because I’ve got the type of book that shows fresh ideas. That’s the only reason I’ve been considering it. I do like it but I’m not sure it is my thing. I’ve fallen into it and I’m not sure yet, I know I’m good at it but it’s just happened. But maybe I should trust these guys who have more experience than me and know more than me, and see if they are right.

Jr: You definitely should! Go for it!

D: I feel like creative director is a bit out of my league at the moment though. If I could just be the guy that helps out I’d be happy with that. The honest truth is I’m scared, I’m shit scared.

Jr: You’ve got to make a crack at it though. You’re at a crossroads, and which way do you go?

D: You’re never going to know. That’s the thing. Only when you look back will you see how your choices have shaped your road.

Has anyone seen that new Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche? It’s pretty great. There’s a scene where the aging protagonist/writer is shown a best-selling book of apparent genius written by a four-year-old named Horace Azpiazu. You see, there’s always someone younger than you, doing something better than you, more authentically than you, and winning more praise than you. So chill the fuck out, realise that you’re younger than a lot of people and get to work. Because Stan reckons you’ve much more to offer than just enthusiasm and a will to work for nuthin’.

Big news from the fourth estate this week, with the appointment of 23-year-old Ben Naparstek as editor of The Monthly magazine.

Yes you read that correctly – he’s 23 years old!

So I guess that puts him in the Junior demographic. Except he doesn’t see himself that way and neither should you.

Talent is talent. Ability is ability. Age should be irrelevant.

As Naparstek himself said, “I’m old enough to be well used to people telling me I’m young.”

Despite what he himself thinks, Narparstek is very young for the position he now holds.

Yet he is, if memory serves, two years older than Aussie advertising legend Siimon Reynolds was when he was made Creative Director of Grey in Sydney.

“I’ve been an adult for, what is it, five years now,” said Narparstek. “I’m 23. How much longer is this going to continue?”

Obviously Ben Narparstek doesn’t consider himself a junior. So why do you?

If you have talent and ability, you’re just as capable of having a great idea as someone ten or twenty years older than you.

So rather than thinking of yourself as someone looking to get a foot in the door, start selling yourself as someone who can contribute to a business.

Someone with so much more to offer than just enthusiasm and a low salary expectation.

Publishing. It’s a world many young creatives yearn to enter. Magazines offer all the tantalising perks of being young – photography, writing, culture, ideas… They also get made in amazing warehouse style offices with attractive ladies at reception and all the blow you could ever want. Well, at least that’s what we’re lead to believe – or want to believe. We wanted to know more about this industry and the successful people who make it work. That’s why we’re super dooper excited to introduce you to Andrew Losowsky, arguably one of the world’s leading voices on publishing. Andrew does many things. So many in fact that we reluctantly put ‘editor & writer’ under his name above. His website losowsky.com unearths at least a fraction of said ‘things’. He writes a blog on magazines, has just published a book, co-runs a worldwide magazine symposium called Colophon, and thinks the internet is shit. If you want to have absolutely anything to do with the publishing industry, do not skim read this. Your career depends on it.

Junior: Hey Andrew, we hear you’ve just moved to the U.S. Is there something there you couldn’t find in London or Barcelona?

Andrew: Yes! My beautiful, wonderful wife. Love is all you need.

Jr: Aww it sure is! Hooray for love. So fill us in on your education and how you first fell into doing what you do.

A: Degree in English Literature and Theatre Studies from the University of Warwick in the UK, but far more instructive were the 40+ hours each week I spent there in my second year, editing the student newspaper. That helped me to get work experience placements on websites and magazines, and then soon after graduation, an eight-week job came up at a magazine company called John Brown Publishing in London. Eight weeks became three years, in which I became the youngest editor in the company, and was named one of the UK’s New Journalists of the Year.

I then started to look around for new challenges – and without knowing anyone there, or hardly any Spanish, decided to move to Spain. A few months into my Spanish adventure, I got involved with a new startup company called Le Cool…

Jr: Yes! LeCool was a pretty great idea. It was definitely one of the first publishing projects we saw as young impressionables that illustrated the possibilities of publishing. True story. Was it one of the first ‘projects’ you began that wasn’t just ‘writing for stuff’? How did it spring into being and what is it doing now?

A: Le Cool was the brainchild of a Swedish media mogul-in-making, René Lönngren, who was living (and still lives) in Barcelona. I joined about three months after I arrived in Barcelona, in about week three of the company’s first weekly email magazine. I was translating/rewriting texts from Spanish to English, as a way of improving my rather poor language skills. I hung around the office (actually a windowless corridor between two other offices) long enough to become a fixture. Meanwhile I was working as a freelancer, editing a couple of other publications, and writing journalism for The Guardian newspaper and others. I also wrote a blog about living in Barcelona.

René was interested in creating a special kind of guidebook to the city, and so we started to plan it together. We worked so well together that he then asked me to become the company’s first editorial director. And so I did. I did that for four years, before moving to the States, in which time we expanded to eight cities, created five guidebooks, made a revolutionary monthly inflight magazine, and created various client projects around Europe. It was quite a ride. The company is still going strong – Dublin, Moscow and Budapest are their next expansions… with plenty more to come.

Jr: We know you’re a big fan of independent publishing. Setting up Colophon (the Luxembourg based magazine symposium) with Jeremy Leslie and Mike Koedinger is an obvious testament to that. There’s going to be a lot of keen young publishers reading this – what are the most important things you think they should know before deciding to live their days in self-imposed squalor?

A: If you want to create a magazine, you need to think long and hard why you want to do it – and then focus on those reasons.

What is it you love about making a magazine as opposed to, say, a Facebook group or a website? If it’s about the tactility of the object, then focus on your design and on unearthing wonderful types of paper that you can afford. If it’s about the distinct rhythms that the best magazines have, then make sure that your magazine has that, that it’s clear, focused, on theme and on message throughout. Ensure that the reader knows where they are at any given moment, and can see clearly how all the parts add up to the whole.

If it’s about beautiful photography, work hard to make sure that it is beautiful, and don’t try to cut corners on quality reproduction. Try to break down what it is you love about the object.

There are so many other, cheaper options for getting your message out that aren’t magazines, so if you are going to commit to print, be sure you know why you’re doing it. These are the reasons that will keep you going on those long, unpaid nights, and help you keep falling in love with making magazines every single time you get a new issue delivered.

Jr: Penny Modra told us this, “I mean, look, novels don’t suck, but they won’t make you money and it’s no way to start out.” You’ve written a couple of books now and done quite well at it too. Say I’m a budding writer, where should I realistically set my sights? Writing books, journalism, freelance writing, zine producing, espresso making, all of the above…? Help!

A: Penny’s great. I’m a big fan of hers.

I will say, however, that you should tell the stories you want to tell, in whatever medium they fit best in. If it’s a novel, write a novel. If it’s a radio script, write a radio script. If it’s a blog entry, a Twitter feed, an eBay description, a picture caption… do that. Find what you love, and only then see if there’s a way of making money from it. If there isn’t, don’t fret about that. Enjoy the fact that you’ve found something you love, and fit it into your life wherever you can.

I would highly recommend experimenting with different media, playing around with any and every way of telling stories you can find, and keeping an eye on what new possibilities developing technology might offer.

If you happen to be lucky and persistent, a publisher might say yes to a properly presented proposal – but don’t mistake publication for validation that what you do is good and worthwhile. Publication merely means that the publisher thinks your writing will happen to fit the next marketing zeitgeist, and will complement the other things in their catalogue that season.

Publishing is a business – literary beauty and emotionally true stories are pretty low on the list of what they’re looking for. Marketable, sellable, trendy are the most important factors for publication. Don’t worry if you’re none of these things right now – markets change, trends move. The important thing is to create your own, genuine voice while writing great stories. The market will inevitably eventually make its way to you, so make your writing as polished as you can get it for when it does.

If however your main goal is purely to make money from writing, then find a few niches you can explore, and then be prepared to write to order, even if it doesn’t necessarily reflect your world view. That’s how freelancing works.

But don’t feel that the only way to write is for money. You’ll feel much better about yourself once a need to earn from it is taken out of the equation. And if you’re both very good at marketing yourself, and very very lucky, you might sometimes get to do both.

Jr: Magazine type people talk a lot about the ‘flow’ of a magazine and how an issue has been put together. You sound like a good person to ask. What represents a good and a bad ‘flow’?

A: A good flow is like anything beautiful and true: I can’t really describe it, but I know it when I see it.

It may or may not be: a variety of articles that are the same but different, that aren’t in the same single voice but all contain a familiar tone; a series of articles that aren’t all about the same topic, but have something clear in common, exploring the magazine’s theme from different and unexpected angles. A difference in pace, that draws me in with every twist of the fishing line.

Put another way, every magazine is trying to flirt with its reader. It wants to seduce them into keeping focused, and into a bigger commitment – that is, reading the longer, indepth articles in the second half of the magazine. You can’t dive in at the start and challenge people with something so heavy at the beginning. So maybe you’ll open with some punchy, short anecdotes, give the reader something pretty to look at, something that makes them smile and like you. Then a medium-length piece, then something shorter again, before a longer piece with a beautiful graphic introduction.

You also want your readers to know clearly where they are in the mag at any moment – so make sections bold and obvious, and don’t break the rules about what goes in each one. If a piece is fabulous and funny, but doesn’t quite fit with your magazine’s mission, or into any of the magazine’s clearly defined sections, then maybe this isn’t the place to publish it. Magazines are curated compilations of text, image, design, and you want to keep your reader along for the whole ride by changing the rhythm enough to keep them interested, without making them confused.

How do you learn what is and isn’t good flow? Read lots and lots of magazines, I guess. And then trust your instincts.

Jr: I wanted to ask you a question about blogs that was both relevant and insightful. But nothing I write makes me sound either one of those things. Do you have anything to say on the topic of blogging that exceeds the scope of my question asking abilities?

A: Blogging is conversation – which means that 90% of it is banal small talk that will only interest a handful of people at a time. Which is completely fine, by the way, I don’t have any problem with that. I’ll just read the bits that interest me. Alternatively: blogging is Twitter for people without jobs. It strikes me as strange how technology has now developed to allow people to write less, rather than the other way around.

Jr: You know, I’m sure you remember what it was like being young. Sleeping in, drinking to all hours and all those crazy things we young types get up to. Did you ever have to make the choice between being a twenty-something and being committed to your craft? When did you grow up?

A: Oh goodness. I still don’t have that legendary dedication everyone talks about being necessary to write your 5,000 words a day. Instead of all-night drinking binges, my personal curse is all-day internet surfing and frantic email checking.

One of the best things that ever happened to my productivity was when my neighbour stopped their open wifi connection. Peace at last.

Jr: One question we throw around a lot is when or if to travel. Especially in terms of doing it for the sake of your career. You’ve moved countries a few times now, what pushed you to do it and what was your experience of trying to ‘make it’ in another place?

A: The first time I moved away from the metaphorical bosom was aged 18, to teach English in a Hong Kong school for a year. The whole thing happened by mistake, I was planning on a quiet few months in Canada, and the organisation I applied to offered me Hong Kong instead. I went out there terrified, telling myself that I’d run home after trying it for a month. Instead, I discovered that putting yourself in situations you’re not ready for is the best way to get better at pretty much everything. I stayed a year in HK, and fell in love with the place. Since then, I’ve lived in London, Spain and now the USA – each has their own learning curve. The trick, I think, is to try and view the curve as a roller coaster, not a mountain. Weeeeeeee!

Jr: Such great advice. I hope the kids out there are paying attention! What advice would you give your twenty-one-year-old self if you could actually buy a time-machine from the store and do that?

A: I’m not sure I’d want to give much professional advice to my 21-year-old self. Mostly, as with everyone, the conversation would instead probably revolve about the girls I should have asked out, and people I shouldn’t have bothered pretending to be friends with. Actually, I know what I’d advise: Take this time machine, and sell it to Google. Then, in ten years time, I won’t have to worry about making a living as a writer.