By Alice
29th November 2019
In honour of the opening of US design wunderkinds Brian & Jason’s debut show ‘Objectionable’ at Nelly Duff (and in London!) we asked them some good fucking questions to get to know them a little better…
WTF is GFDA?
Good Fucking Design Advice is a US-based studio that helps organisations with quarterly budgets great and small realize crazy dreams, accomplish impossible goals and harness the power of culture by taking the right creative risks. We’ve been invited to destinations around the globe to share the wealth of our experience in client initiatives, lectures, and workshops.
GFDA began in 2010 as a joke between co-founders Brian Buirge and Jason Bacher. At the time we were graduate students at Kent State University and had recently begun our first semester of teaching. While walking back to the graduate studio with coffee one morning after teaching a class, we were joking about ridiculous ideas that would grab our students attention. Somewhere in the nonsense of our conversation the idea for “Good Fucking Design Advice” came up and we raced back to the studio to build out the first iteration of the website. We had no intent of developing the idea beyond that — just a simple text-based website. However, after launching and before the end of the first week, the site had garnered over 100,000 unique visitors and a plethora of requests for products — mostly posters and t-shirts. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.
Why profanity?
So let’s just go ahead and get the whole f-word thing out of the way. A lot of people are uptight about it; some are openly hostile. Our earliest detractors even predicted that our use of profanity would set the entire design industry back ten years.
Rarely are accusations of our crimes against decency ever accompanied by objective criticism of the quality of our work, or a denial that our audience finds meaning in our message. The most valid denunciation of GFDA is that we use profanity to get attention . . . because it’s absolutely true. We’re lucky to have had so many deeply inspiring friends, mentors, and collaborators, and our exposure to them would have been insignificant if they hadn’t shaken us up and challenged our perspectives. We’re just trying to reproduce that effect—to challenge your perspectives, to actually make you stop and think. If one little four-letter word provides the leverage necessary to pry open the eyes, ears, hearts, and minds of a multitude, then ruffling the feathers of a small minority is a fair trade in our estimation. Make no mistake about it, being offended is always a choice.
Do you always take your own advice?
We certainly try to — however, as many people have noted over the years, some of our advice is contradictory. An easy example being “Use fucking Helvetica.” contrasted against “Don’t use fucking Helvetica.” How can we possibly advise both? Well that’s precisely it, there isn’t one right answer. It’s up to you, our audience, to make the call when one or the other is right for you. We get some push back on key pieces of advice like “Stay up all fucking night.” and how unhealthy that is etc. etc. but we also have “Take a fucking break.” Between the two it’s up to you to decide which one YOU need right now. Maybe you need to get off your ass and wrap up that project tonight and you’re not going to sleep — or, maybe, you’ve been working too much and it’s time to take a break and recharge.
Have you ever done a solo show in London before?
We haven’t! This is our first show in London — and we’re super excited about it.
What is it you like about working with Nelly Duff?
Nelly Duff is our favourite gallery/shop to work with. When we started out nearly 10-years ago, Nelly Duff was the first gallery to reach out to us and ask about reselling our prints. We were so inexperienced at the time we hadn’t even considered that places like Nelly Duff would be interested in our prints and products. So our relationship goes way back, and that interaction is what ultimately prompted us to begin offering our stuff outside of just our website. Otherwise Nelly Duff has been great to work with, they’ve always been interested in maintaining our classic line of prints and been open to our new prints as we’ve experimented over the years and we don’t always get that with other places.
What would you like people who visit the show to think about it while they’re on the way home?
We’d like them to think they invested their hundreds of dollars in print purchases wisely.
Favourite swearword?
Fiddlesticks
Which edition would you keep for yourself?
Be fucking bold. Is our favourite of the new editions we’ve developed.
Private View: All welcome, Thursday 5th December 6-8.30pm @ Nelly Duff (RSVP here!)
On show from 6th – 12th December 2019
