001 - Mike Spakowski

Mike Spakowski is Partner and Creative Director at Atomicdust – A Branding and Marketing Agency.

www.atomicdust.com

@mspako

 

Notes: 

9:30 - Introduction

10:30 - Why I’m Doing This/Happy Birthday Mom

13:00 - Strange Brew & Ric Moranis

14:30 - Fatherhood: Could Mike be a stay-at-home Dad?

16:10 - How we met

17:30 - Competing and comparison in art & design

18:14 - "Comparison is a death spiral once you start comparing yourself to other people. Yet you have to acknowledge how good and bad your work is."

20:30 - Lifespan of Work / Porano Case Study

22:30 - Revisiting work from other eras vs. staying in touch 

23:26 Life & Design is one of those things where we’re constantly solving the same problem over and over and over.

25:54 - Karlsson Wilker - Tell Me Why

27:40 - 90% of the work that you do ends up in the trash heap, art has a longer lifespan

28:38 - Expression is Hard

29:26 - "Art for me is trying to figure out a way to take my life philosophy and tie that in to things that I’m proficient at."

30:25 - How you constrain yourself is the key to making art

32:10 - "When I was young, I had all the ideas but no way to execute them. When I got older, I had methods to execute them, but forgot how to have the ideas. And now, I have the ideas, I have the methods it’s a matter of trying to find fucking time to get them done."

34:10 - Artistic process and outlining a concept

36:50 - This isn’t an art and design podcast 

– 

37:25 - Mike’s Story

38:08 - Never knew what he wanted to do

39:20 - Community college and needing an art credit

40:08 - Seeing his and other students work in the hallway

42:15 - Parody and irreverence were alluring

43:25 - Buying a PC, playing games and designing loading rooms

46:25 - The beginning of Atomicdust

47:10 - Learning to code

49:55 - It’s impressive to make a successful company

51:25 - Important to sit back and reflect

54:15 - "It’s hard to make a living doing creative work, it’s more deeply personal."

1:01:25 - Is college necessary?

1:03:30 - The internet is the great equalizer

1:04:20 - RZA: "Whether I went to school or not, I’d always study."

1:05:25 - Encyclopedias to Internet

1:06:15 - "Learning no longer has a barrier to entrance, it’s a barrier of interest, time and stamina."

1:09:10 - The unexamined life

1:11:11 - Whatever you do, make sure you enjoy it

1:12:38 - Contemporary business and pressure

1:14:55 - Vlogging & routine

1:17:25 - Casey Neistat’s older video work

1:19:04 - Appeasing larger audiences

1:20:15 - Finding things early on and feeling “ownership”

1:21:50 - Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point

1:22:25 - Anderson Paak & Kid Cudi

1:25:25 - Hold yourself up to a higher level and push forward

1:28:20 - Does the work suffer after appealing to a larger audience

1:29:05 - New work by an artist should almost confuse their fans

1:31:05 - You can’t worry about the audience

1:31:45 - Steven Pressfield - The War of Art

1:33:48 - Taking in content vs. producing

1:36:00 - Doing Something in the "FuturePast"

1:38:15 - Keep it interesting

1:39:25 - Tattoo Story & Tattoos in general

1:46:25 - Mike’s Hair, Cheap Beer

1:57:00 - Outro