Brian Dougherty, graphic designer and author of the newly published book, Green Graphic Design, is recognized for being a pioneer of green design. Located in Berkeley, California, Brian was the cofounder of Celery Design Collaborative. Celery Design worked with clients to push for sustainable and recyclable materials as a medium. Recognizing the needs of businesses as well as upholding environmental responsibility, the company set out to educate themselves and their clients of the need to communicate with optimal efficiency and minimal impact on the environment.

CADRE students, Teck Liew and Vivian Mak, had the opportunity to interview Brian Dougherty via phone, a week before he spoke at AIGA's 2008 Y-13 Conference: "Seeds of Change", a convention for graphic design in San Diego (http://y-conference.com/y13/home.html).

Interview:

Vivian Mak: What does green design mean to you?

Brian Dougherety: Any green design is merging of issues of sustainability into, in my case, communication design, but it gets a part of more general practice that extends all the way from architecture, industrial design, interior design, and to graphic design. So the way we look at it, there is definitely the aspect that relates to materials we use in the manufacturing processes, but it also goes deeper, especially with graphic design, into the kind of messages we put out, and ultimately, the actions that you spur. So if you think of graphic design as we are not just in the business of printing or business of making printed artifacts. We are also in the business of trying to influence people. So there is the aspect of green design that gets into the question of, "What are you influencing people to do?"

Teck Liew: What have you contributed to green design?

Brian Dougherety: When we started Celery in '97, we have this idea that we wanted to do green design, but at that time there doesn't seem like there was any model or anything to follow in the graphics world, but there was a lot going on in architecture and green architecture at that time. It was just kind of

still a niche but a pretty robust niche. Since then green architecture has exploded, and it is very much part of the mainstream. At the time it was a really exciting niche. So what we imagine was that we were trying to bring that same way of thinking to our area which was graphics and communication. And so, I think we succeeded to some degree. At least in creating a firm that looked like what we wanted, what we hoped a firm could look like. Meaning that we were doing good quality professional work and merging environmental sustainability issues into everything that we do. That's the personal aspect of what we are trying to contribute, just creating a business that builds really at its core around green issues. On a professional level, I have done a lot of lecturing, and in June I have a book out, it is called "Green Graphic Design". In the last year, I have spent a lot of time pulling together all the research and the thinking behind the work that we do in order to contribute to the community and hopefully move the community forward.

TL: What inspired you to start-up this green design business?

BD: What inspired us to start it is we were really excited about what was going on in architecture. We were also really excited about what was going on, just generally, with values-based business. Companies like Padagonia, Opema, Body Shop, places like that that were trying to create a successful brand built around not just profitability or features that benefits of their product, but also based on pushing beyond the minimum standard for what a product needs to be in order to sell. It could actually be better than you expected. That is the same kind of psychology that goes into what we do. We are not trying to do as little as possible in terms of sustainability, we are trying to do as much as possible. We donāt have to wait for our clients to force us to do this stuff, we don't even have to ask permission from our clients to do this stuff. It is just part of who we are, it is part of our values. That value-based business model has been developing for a couple of decades. Again, as a niche in the last five or so years is exploding in the mainstream. Now you see a lot of action in the world of corporate responsibility, corporate responsibility reporting, and values-based branding. Big companies like BP, they are re-branding themselves as beyond petroleum; Wal-mart trying to reposition themselves based around their corporate values. That's all a flower that was started from this seed, and this seed was planted by companies like Pagadonia. So in the business world, that is the paradigm for green business that really inspired us. In the design world, things like what was going on in green architecture was probably the most direct. Also there was an industrial designer named Victor Pappernack, who wrote several books that inspired me, he wrote a book in the 70's and 80's called "Design for the Real World". There is a book called "Ecology of Commerce", author is Paul Hawkins, who is also speaking at the Y Conference. And Paul was a big influence on me.

VM: It must be exciting for you to be speaking with Paul?

BD: Yes, in fact, when we started Celery, Paul was one of our first clients. We were in our 20s, and we just started this little company. Through s friends of friends, we got in touch with somebody that was working with Paul Hawkin, to bring a non-profit to the US, called "The Natural Step". They were founded in Swizten. They were doing a branch in the US, and wanted to make a brand for the organization, so within months of starting the studio, Although we didnā€™t make much, it was a very good learning experience. Paul was very instrument in getting us started and established 10 years ago.

VM: What obstacles did the company face, when it first started, the challenges the company faced with clients, and the availability of materials?

BD: When we started, green design was largely an aspiration more than a reality. We were doing software packaging and we had some contacts from our previous jobs that we survived on for a while. We poured a lot of energy going after clients who would let us deal with the kind of content that we were interested in. So we ended up working with a lot of green building world because we were passionate about it and we learned a lot about it so we can actually offer some help on how different people, maybe itā€™s architects or different organizations, trying to promote green building. We knew about graphic design and we knew about their content so we can offer some help to them. So that was our first in-road into green design. I really think that responsible production using good materials and manufacturing them efficiently, to me it is like kerning. You don't have to ask your client, "well should I kern this well?" or "should I kern it poorly?". You just kern it, and you do it the way you think it needs to be done, and if they don't think it looks good, then they will correct you. My default position is that we use the best materials we possibly can. I think a lot of people go into this very timidly, and they think they need special permission to do the right thing, and I don't think that is how the world works. You try to do the right thing, and if somebody is going to call you on it, then they will call you on it and you don't have to be dogmatic about it. We don't approach it as "our way or the highway", but we assume that everybody wants the best material and manufacturing technique that we can give them. There is an availability issue sometimes, there is cost issue sometimes, but by at large, you can work around those issues. If you plan ahead, you can get the materials. If you can't get them, then you use the best you can get. From day one, we have done a lot of research. For instance, say we might do some research for a project today and it turns out this is going on press in a week and we can't get the material that we want; well, next time if a similar project comes up, we will know that this has a two week lead time so we will order paper earlier. I wouldn't say it is easy, but it does get easier as you do it again and again. We start with printer earlier, if we didn't care about sustainability, we want to make sure the printers know what we want to do.

VM: You mentioned in your article "Celery Design: Lives the Green Message", that it is more expensive to print out the door hangers. Can you tell us about the tactics you used to talk to your client that what you used in the end is the better result?

BD: The biggest thing that we have discovered, as we were doing this, it is sort of a losing game to get into this kind of very narrowly focused line item cost calculation. For instance, if you compare material x to material y and you try to get it down to what is the cost per pound of paper then almost every time the more responsible solution is going to lose because you are focusing so narrowly that you are only looking at one very specific cost. It always going to seem like it's not worth it, but if you back up and you look at the bigger picture and say, "Well, what does it mean if it's worth it?"; and I think there is two sides to that equation. When you say something is worth it, you are saying that there is a cost and then there is the value that I am getting for that cost. If it is worth it, then the value outweighs the cost. If it's not worth it, the cost outweighs the value; and the kind of trap that designers get into is that they think the only place that they can change things is by lowering the cost, but I actually think designers have a lot more leverage by raising the value; and that completely changes the equation. So with the Elephant Pharmacy piece, the reason that it was okay that it costs more is because it was totally different experience than if we did like a plastic bag with pizza coupons in it. So once we stopped talking about junk mail and started talking about gift boxes, the whole conversation changed. It didn't become this thing of, "Okay, we have to do this 13 cents a unit because this is kind of pizza coupon junk mail realm." It became more of a question of, "Okay, if we decided to give 30,000 people a gift, what would a gift look like?" and we have to be cost conscious. Chip board is cheap and we used chip board. We printed two color, that is cheaper than printing four color. We did hand-illustration, much cheaper than a photo shoot because we can do it in-house. So things like that we did to save money, but yea, at the end of the day it definitely costs more than pizza coupons, but it was a completely different user experience. It is this balancing act, but the most important thing that designers have to remember is that, what we are really good at is creative, innovation and adding value. We try to do what we can in terms of cutting cost, but that is not the only place that the designers can play. When we talk with clients, we try to look at the total value that they are getting out of this campaign not just the line item cost.

TL: Are there limitations of green design, and what impact does green design have?

BD: I think of it as multiple spheres of influence. The smallest sphere is that we can get our own house in order. The things we manufacture, we can manufacture better, we can use cleaner materials. That applies to anything that can get manufactured. More broadly, we are not only limited to the materials, we can have an influence on the messages. So for instance, a client might come to us and say, "Here is this marketing message that we want you to do layout for", so we might work with them and try to figure out how could we use this piece to add value. Could we educate people? Or give them something that is unexpected that might make them find it valuable and keep it. So we are trying to get little bit involved in the messages. You can call it a limit, in a sense that we are not exclusively in control of the messages. We are collaborating with our clients. If you have clients that have messages that are contradictory to sustainability then that is definitely a limit; you can force your clients to be green, but you can try to sway what they put out into the world in a way that it adds value. The broadest thing is that if you can influence people, not just what they do, but actually who they are and how they identify themselves then that is probably the broadest definition of green design.

Green Graphics