001 - Mike Spakowski
Episode description
Mike Spakowski is Partner and Creative Director at Atomicdust – A Branding and Marketing Agency.
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
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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