Community Spotlight: Raymond Brigleb

Part of an ongoing series highlighting the amazing people in the Portland creative community.

For over a decade, Raymond Brigleb and his agency, Needmore Designs, have a been vibrant contributor to Portland’s creative culture. And it’s been to no one’s surprise: Brigleb has made a conscious effort to partner with many community members while adapting to the website industry’s ever-changing design landscape. The Minnesota native also has an ear for vinyl, an eye for local art, and a time-tested love of coffee. Back in February, Needmore Designs tweeted their thoughts of the G Cody QJ Goldberg talk.

See Ashley Forrette's photos in all their glory on Flickr and check the interview below.

I heard through the grapevine that you were one of Stumptown’s first employees. Is that true?

I worked with Duane Sorenson at Peet’s Coffee just before he founded Stumptown. Thinking back, he was the most colorful employee at Peet’s and seemed fairly out of place. One afternoon, we were hanging out and he suggested an interest with starting a business. I couldn’t tell if he was serious, but I told him if he was that he should hire me. Turns out he wasn’t kidding: I was, indeed, hired on as Stumptown’s first barista.

Over the years, Duane has made a conscious effort to develop strong relationships with the communities at the source of Stumptown’s coffee beans. Did his global perspective at all rub off on you?

He was keen on building relationships with our coffee farmers. I, myself, was too busy with management and being a barista that I wasn’t able to travel to where the beans were sourced across Latin America. Duane’s global interest, though, sparked my initial pitch for a Stumptown website. At that time in 1999, I didn’t feel like anyone was telling the story behind coffee. Sure, there were popular brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, but no one in between. It seemed to me having our own story online would be important for our brand’s success. What’s funny is that today’s culture is inundated with stories. Customers care only to know if a cup of coffee tastes good or not. But 15 years ago, online storytelling was a novelty.

At that point in your creative career, how long had you been designing websites?

The first website I ever built was two years prior in 1997. When I was living in Minneapolis, I co-founded a café named Rudy’s. It was my partner’s idea to only play ska music, while my pride aligned with our website being built with Gopher, a conceptual precursor to the World Wide Web and the namesake of the University of Minnesota’s mascot. I know I’m dating myself, but it’s worth noting my first computer was an Atari 400. Back in the 1980’s when my father worked for 3M, he would bring home spare electronic parts and challenge me to build a computer from scratch. A short time later in 1998, I lived in Santa Cruz and had a chance to work with computer graphics for several video games. The titles themselves were not successful, but the associated websites found some traction in the design community. These were, still, the very early days.

Returning to Rudy’s, what was the motivation behind only playing ska music? I read in your agency biography that you share an affinity for avante-garde music.

I should probably update my biography! To be fair, I have an affinity for all types of music. In the office, I’m the one who insists we have a turnable and fresh vinyl records to listen to. As for Rudy’s, I didn’t care if we were playing ska so long as we were a business who shared a story and an opinion. We had something that we stood for, but also had something we inherently stood against. In saying we were ska café who played records and sold funky cigarettes, we earned a loyal following as opposed to other generic coffee houses. And even if all of us served crappy coffee, at least we served crappy coffee while playing good music. And hey, if you were a customer who brought in a record, we would probably play it. Rudy’s was like hanging out a radio station. 

When you started the coffee house, did you have more of an itch that you were going to be a barista? Or, after dabbling with computer graphics in Santa Cruz, that you were heading towards a career in web design?

To be honest, design has always interested me. I don’t know if kids still do this today, but if you grew up in the ‘80s like I did, you would draw the names and logos of bands you liked on your backpack. The thing is, I got really into it. And so, with the half-dozen coffee houses that I worked for during my early years, I grew frustrated. Each were just getting off the ground and each felt like a dead-end. I didn’t like the management side of business and, at the time, I couldn’t understand why. When I was fired the second time, though, from Stumptown — and yes, I was so bad at customer service that I could get fired twice — I decided that the thing I always wanted to do was design. And seeing as I had always been tinkering with computers, this seemed like my chance. I was on unemployment and could start a business. More or less, I asked around for projects and got started.

Did any reception from the Stumptown website lead you to believe you could start your own design agency?

Honestly, the initial Stumptown website didn’t make a dent. When you’re bootstrapping yourself, your goal is to do stuff for cheap and earn exposure. You end up working for next to nothing with a lot of artists because they also don’t have money. Eventually, I caught the eye of the illustrator for DailyCandy (a culture website growing in popularity with young women). She liked my style and wanted me to redesign her website. I said yes and, with time, people began affiliating my designs with DailyCandy. It was an impression I did nothing to dissuade because it was helpful to work alongside a company courted by brands like AOL. Things, then, took off. For over ten years, Needmore has literally never advertised. I’ve found if you do work that leaves a good impression — and maybe encourage people to tell others about you — that things will work out for the better.

 

I read an entry on the Needmore blog regarding your redesign of the De La Paz website, a coffee company based in San Francisco. You described there being a unique “feeling” behind a Needmore design. With the changing landscape of web design — between the new publishing platforms, new programming languages, and new trends — how has that “feeling” evolved and/or stayed consistent over the years?

I think a lot of today’s designers sell their aesthetic style as being uniquely in-house. To me, it’s no different than someone who learns how to act by only waving their arms. Instead, when working with a design, it’s important to step back and consider a project’s most important design principles. And if those principles resonate with a client, that’s an expression of style that’s much more powerful than if you were to only stick with a color, like orange. And not to diss everyone who uses orange because I’m sure we have used orange on Needmore designs in the past. As for the De La Paz site, we had to consider the landscape of coffee websites. They all seem to have a certain look nowadays, often using craft paper. I wanted to express something through design that would appeal to the larger Bay Area community and reflect the specific interests of De La Paz’s clients, including tech companies like Google. Clarity was key. When Needmore visited De La Paz, it was difficult to reduce our experience into words. Instead, we were taken by the business’ vibe. They were playing records, had funky and weird wallpaper, and showcased lifestyle imagery. And so when considering De La Paz’ website, I was interested in an experience where customers were inside photographs surrounded by information, rather than being inside information surrounded by photographs. For instance, instead of showing a bag of coffee atop a white background, we designed entire pages with urban landscapes featuring bags of coffee atop a table. In addition to typefaces and line weights and their relationship to a consistent buying experience, we hoped to invert the approach to coffee websites.

As it relates to design principles, Needmore’s portfolio includes several projects interested in betterment within the local community. How has Portland influenced your agency’s perspective on social good?

It’s nice to attend to an event at a place that you support, to see your name on a program, and hear someone say something nice on-stage about your company. But for me, it’s even cooler when I attend that same event and the speaker describes our relationship with, say, a high school and the the kids go crazy. With our Washington High School project, I had biked past the school a million times and wondered if a story lay behind the building’s faded glory. Our agency was later connected to Venerable, a local development firm. We had the unique opportunity to tour the building, take photographs, and collaborate with those responsible for the school’s historic preservation plan. We, effectively, could tell the school’s story. And that’s what’s cool — to show someone on a map that I’m in one place and being able to connect those regional dots with others who are so close. Another similar project involved Portland’s Literary Arts program. The young students had written poems that lined the insides of TriMet public transpiration around the city. I’d catch myself on my way to work scanning the bus’ ceilings and thinking, “I can’t believe this is my client!”Other times, we simply seek people out. It’s an easy win-win if a collaboration can achieve some sense of social good. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a cause I believe in standing behind a crappy website. For example, last year we worked with Equality House, a rainbow-painted non-profit in Oklahoma advocating for social equality. The space lives across from the Westboro Baptist Church, a group notorious for their hateful picketing. We reached out to the house, suggested that their website could use some work, and offered our help for free. As it turned out, the guy who runs Equality House was incredibly supportive. As our relationship grew, our agency grew more excited for both their cause and our redesign. In fact, one of our newest employees joined our team because of the project! And so, I’d like to believe our team doesn’t work for the money. Yes, our new espresso machine may be enough incentive to come into the office each morning. But it’s more than likely because we all feel like there’s a sense of purpose in what Needmore is doing. We actually give a crap and we’re all trying to make a difference. (Sorry! I’m trying not swear because my daughter’s sitting right next to me.)

I imagine other design studios may avoid taking on social issues out of a disinterest in possibly dividing an office. Is it difficult to unify a team around your own social interests as one of Needmore’s Co-Founders?

No, frankly, it’s not hard. I don’t want to come to work with anyone who, for instance, doesn’t 100-percent believe in what Equality House stands for. Yes, I understand I can’t fire them for political reasons, but as it goes I wouldn’t hire that individual in the first place. When you and I were talking before our interview, you brought up collegiate athletics and if I knew where certain Needmore employees had attended school. While in retrospect I should’ve asked, what I care a lot more about is whether somebody is passionate about projects in our company portfolio. And, even better, whether I think the work he or she has done is pretty rad. Because for me, our work is much more important than doing another website for a chunk of money.

Between stories of empathy, apology, gratefulness, and frustration, I was intrigued with how many Needmore employees shared personal life experiences on the agency blog. Who inspired the creative transparency?

The idea came from my wife, Kandace Brigleb. I really do work with five amazing artists— even if they’re often just writing code. And even if it comes more naturally to some more than others, each has their has their own interesting story whom I try and encourage to share everyday. One Monday, it dawned on us that we should all write stories about our own experiences related to social inequality. Funny enough, at the same time we had considered producing a short, one-minute video to promote Needmore on our agency website. Instead, we asked ourselves: How could we tell the same story more effectively through a client’s project and through their eyes? Because, for me, I’d like to be working at an agency where our employees are talking to people in the community, letting them what we stand for, and — just as importantly — that we stand for something.

Looking back on the last ten years of projects at Needmore, would you say you’re creatively satisfied?

(Pause.) Yeah, I’d say so.

Who would be an ideal client, then, who you’d like to work with in the next few years?

When you brought up De Le Paz earlier, that was something I really enjoyed working on. In fact, we’ve since been tasked with a project for their lager, sibling company, Four Barrel. During our first meeting with one of the owners to discuss preliminary details, he suggested that he liked the work that we had done. Instead, though, he proposed that we do something with Four Barrel’s redesign that we had always wanted to do as agency. “Do that,” he said simply. I thought, “How many clients tell you to do that? That’s… weird!” What he said, though, was true. I was walking through their coffee house and noticed a chalkboard hanging from the ceiling displaying prices. I assumed I was looking at a transparent piece of plastic because the backside read in reverse. And yet, the owner had me look closer. The chalkboard was, in fact, two-sided. Someone had painstakingly written each menu item letter-by-letter backwards. It was for a little sense of humor and an attention to detail. Those are the qualities in a project that I appreciate: where you can do something that is practical but, at the same time, has subtle details which people will see, think is sublime, and know that someone cared.

Speaking of client relationships, you worked with a brand, The Hunter Collective, wherein you described Needmore as wearing an “anthropological hat” during agency discussions, research, and ethnography. Is anthropology a common design approach in the office?

I would say so. When looking at their site, our design is interested in simple symbology and a color palette akin to what you might have seen at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Munich. The pages are clear and we’ve given the scholarly approach its own flavor. My partner, Kandace, is an anthropologist by training and has a Master’s degree in the field. We joke about her education from time to time because, from the outside, it looks as if she’s failed because she did not become a professional anthropologist. But in reality, the skills of anthropology are uniquely applicable to the web for a myriad of reasons. For one, Kandace is the type of person who is not afraid to put the brakes on a project and re-think our audience. Such skills carry over into user-experience and usability. A sympathetic design cares about what users are going to perceive and how a design is going to be useful to them. As such, quick and dirty user testing is important to us when making sure our design theories are correct. And then there’s Needmore employee, Elizabeth. She’s actually owns an anthropological hat. On any given day, we’ll give her a hard time when she’s not wearing it around the office.

In addition to these client projects, what role do passion projects play in your career as a designer? In particular, how has “The Job” podcast influenced your relationship with the local community?

The name, “The Job,” is deliberately generic. But the goal of the podcast is to interview people doing cool stuff around Portland, whether it be creative endeavors or clever businesses. When the idea originally came about, the office was steeped in side projects already. I was trying to network, meet more people, and have more conversations. I thought I could record these conversations — seeing as I already liked to meet with past clients to discuss random ideas. Frankly, it was an excuse to get people into our office. I had to build a website, think about marketing, and learn important lessons once the workload became overwhelming. After 32 episodes last year, we decided to stop, reboot, and do a second season this in 2014.

What’s one lesson that resonates with you most since starting “The Job”?

We’ve had to be careful of overcommitment. It’s important to focus your business and thoughts on what’s most important: design. That said, without side projects we’d go insane. “The Job” has been great for our agency because the podcasts generate their own agenda. And with each new conversation I walk away with a head-full of new ideas. Whether it be with Jaimi Curl and the evolution of her local companies, Saint Cupcake and Quin Candy. Or with Hutch Harris, the frontman of The Thermals, and his marketing’s reflection of the changing music industry. There’s seems a fascinating intersection between business and design. What’s irritating, though, is when I record a conversation and it doesn’t air for a month. I want to tell the world, “Just wait, it’s that good!”

It seems you’ve struck a balance between work and fun. If you could dial the clock back and put yourself on the hot seat, what kind of conversation would you have with a younger Raymond?

I would caution myself. Back then, I had never experienced what it was like to really run a business. Instead, I was having fun far too often during my misspent 20’s. I would have told myself to be more aware of that little, nagging feeling in the back of your head. Just because life is more boring than you’d like it to be, you know things can be much better. And, most importantly, that I should act on that feeling sooner rather than wait until you get fired twice. Otherwise, I would’ve said you’re doing fine, to enjoy the hair while it lasts, and to keep buying records.

And while we’re looking to the past, when did you come up with a name like Needmore Designs?

I was really into a band called Guided by Voices. Their music was as good as anything The Beatles were putting out at the time — and I’ll admit to being the world’s biggest Beatles fan. But Guided by Voices was also recording their music on four-track tapes in their basement and, as a listener, it was obvious. They were proudly on a shoestring budget, drinking cheap beer, and being all-around amazing. I collected their records and noted that their publishing company was Needmore Songs. I found the name to be hilarious because this band was a song-writing machine, having written at least twice — maybe ten times — as many songs as The Beatles. I saw it as a beautiful bit of irony and decided to nick the name for myself. From then on, I’d be Needmore Designs.

Finally, in the context of CreativeMornings and morning routines, you certainly share an affinity for coffee. What’s your ideal cup and and what does it say about Ray, the person?

It’s a shot of espresso pulled from a machine in my office. It’s for myself with no customer service involved — which, as we’ve come to know, is a good thing. I couldn’t necessarily say what bean it would be, but the fact that I get to pick is part of the magic. The taste is indescribable — it’s always better knowing I can pull that shot, return to my laptop or book, and keep working.

Has an espresso always been your top choice?

A double-shot? No, god no. Duane taught me everything I know regarding my taste in coffee. Before, I hadn’t a clue. I thought the best coffee was the kind that was burned the most, like a French roast. And having lived in the Midwest, people would compare an espresso’s caffeine with that of a Red Bull. But they’re not the same whatsoever. Espresso has a unique history, culture, and a function. Duane was even one of the first people to put a standing table by a coffee house’s front window. And after he hounded me for years, I’ve come to understand that there’s no better expression of someone who is passionate about what they’re doing than to have them pull a double-shot.

See Needmore Design’s work here! Interview by Sean Danaher, Photos by Ashley Forrette.