We like to think we know a thing or two about design.

After all, we’ve been designing magazines for twenty (one) years. Hundreds if not thousands of spreads down the drain, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, though we often don’t know why, and we find a designer we like, we ask what they think does it.

Eddie Mandell is a designer we like. His work is fluid yet coarse, organic, clean, and precise. His unique style has drawn the attention of some of our favorite artists like SZA, Model/Actriz, and Ethel Cain. The pieces and components that make up his design are palpably intentional and yet somehow obvious, as though they could be intuited naturally, and that to have that line or that dash or that texture anywhere else would be an intrusion into the piece itself.

We tried to ask in quite a roundabout way if he can tell us why it is that when things work, they work exactly so well, but like us, the reply came with a shrug. That question probably requires a conversation more than answer, so that’s exactly what we had. We begin right in the middle of Eddie explaining why he’s considering a move from Los Angeles to New York City, a common debate among the residents of both cities.

-I don’t know, I just think there’s more shit happening for fun. People doing things for fun and for their lives.

Well, have you heard of the third place?

No, what’s that?

The third place is something that’s absent in American culture, it’s a place for people to gather and hang out that is neither work nor home. Like how the UK has a great pub culture, or Europe has extensive parks and city squares and what not - a gathering place. America has bars and parks, but it isn’t the same, and being such an automotive culture doesn’t help.

My homie from Amsterdam, whenever I talk to him he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m out right now, on a Wednesday Afternoon.’ and that sounds great. 

Are you with an agency or freelance?

I’ve always been freelance. I feel like if I worked at an agency I’d get fired immediately.

Why?

I don’t know, I’ve never been very good at taking directions from a boss.

How’s that been? Creative direction and graphic design feel like crowded fields, but you’ve done well. What do you credit that success to?

A lot of luck, being in the right place at the right time. Also, lowkey give a lot of credit to Covid. I came to LA for college and didn’t really know what design or visual art was-

What were you doing?

I actually grew up as a dancer, and spent a lot of my childhood flying out to LA for jobs. I had an agent for it, I was out here a lot. My goal was to move here, go to school for something that wasn’t dance, and kind of pursue dance professionally on the side. When I got to LA, I started to realize that dance wasn’t doing it for me as much as it used to. I had done it since I was seven, so it took up my entire life. Then I sort of stumbled upon cameras and I got really interested in shooting random shit, and a friend of a friend reached out when I was a freshman in college and was like, ‘hey I need a creative director,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is, but sure,’ and it’s snowballed since then.

Did you go to college for this?

I transferred into the film school, which I quickly learned wasn’t quite for me. I couldn’t find what I wanted in that program, I found that classes moved either way too fast or way too slow. In the middle of school, Covid happened, and I made the conscious decision to do actual work. At the same time, an agency hit me up to work together, so I worked with them on some stuff. I started creative directing Tate McRae, and that was my first real directing job. 

Creative directing an artist?

Yeah.

What does that entail? I hear about artists having creative directors, and I’m like, what is the artist doing, then? What the hell do you do?

That’s a great question and it is a question that I will often ask myself in the middle of these projects because it’s so contextual and every project is a completely different soup of personalities and people and circumstances. Some projects, the artist has a general idea about what they kind of like, and it’s my job to do research with the artist, guide them in the right direction, and build the general themes around the album into a visual world. A lot of it is, ‘how do we translate the pillars of themes of this music into visual art?’ Then we take those themes and figure out how they can play into the music videos, photos, merch, live shows, posters, all that. I think my approach has changed over time, but it’s really just about building a world out of the album and then figuring out how each visual piece of the album looks at that world and shines a new light on it. Have you ever played GTA?

Grand Theft Auto? Yeah.

Yeah, you know how if you explore a new part of the map, it illuminates that part of the map?

Yeah…

Yeah, so the way I think about it is that the general album creative direction is the entire map, and the goal is to use these little pieces to illuminate the entire map. That might be a dumb analogy, but it’s kind of true. 

It makes sense, do you work primarily musicians?

Yeah, it’s been mainly music. I want to start doing things outside of music just because it’s been a lot, but for the past four or five years, it’s been music. 

You said that your process has changed over time, what lessons have you learned that have helped you to streamline that process?

Going into it, there’s no rule book. I tried to reach out to people to ask how to do this and they told me that it’s up to me. Everyone has their own way.

So no outline?

No outline, no. Starting, I just would try a few of these things, and the things that work, I’ll keep. It was sort of evolutionary, darwinian, but for creativity. I also discovered that a lot of it isn’t about creativity, it’s about managing people and getting an artist or a label or a manager to understand what you’re trying to do. If they bring you in, it’s for a reason; they don’t like where their creative is at or they want to scale it up, and as most people are, they’re scared to jump into the deep end of it, so a good chunk of it is getting them to understand what you’re doing and why, and to communicate effectively with them.

As a designer, what do you identify your style as being? Is there a throughline?

I think that it’s kind of difficult to identify your own style, because a lot of the time it’s just kind of innate? But I would say a lot of subdued coloring, a lot of muted coloring. A lot of neutrals. I don’t want to say a word that’s going to define it, like for myself. I mean, it’s dark, obviously. Very clean and intentionally minimal, and textural. 

Would you say minimal? Model/Actriz stuff is pretty minimal
I mean, Model/Actriz- sometimes I try to break out of my main route and that stuff was me doing that. Just because of how wild and intense their music is, I wanted to make it sort of different. 

Let’s say you have a blank Adobe Illustrator page. What’s your step one?

That’s something I am always trying to figure out, dude. That’s always the hardest part.

Are you a fonts person? 

Yeah, it’s kind of just like throwing a bunch of stuff together, and then you have a ten gig Photoshop file, and you have all of these ideas from the last five hours or couple days, and then it’s just like taking pieces from each little thing you’ve experimented with, and trying to cut down. I’ll usually cast a wide net and then really hone it down before sending it to a client, as opposed to sending a million options. 

What’s your editing process like?

I don’t know, if it feels good. I don’t know! It has to feel good and if it doesn’t, I’ll cut it.

How do you achieve a balance between what you love and what you know a client will love?

I’ll usually initially pitch what I love. I’ll obviously design something that I like in the light of what I think that the client is wanting. The main feedback I get is that it’s too dark, so that’s a tough one because I like darker shit with minimal tonal differences. I like black on black but with like a slightly different shade of black. I didn’t know about this until recently, but are you familiar with Wabi Sabi?

Yeah!

I think that a lot of my design choices are around that. I didn’t know what it was until someone gave me a book about it, but reading, I thought that it’s very how I approach design. 

What elements are you incorporating? 

It celebrates impermanence and imperfection, and a lot of what I go for isn’t perfect. I’ll start with it being perfect and then add imperfections, whether that’s texturing it digitally or printing each layer on a different piece of paper and then scanning it all back in; I try to go for things that are imperfect, that aren’t set up on the perfect grid and follow every design rule. 

So it’s a sort of meticulous, intentional process but with a bit of a fuck it attitude. A little chaotic. 

It’s mad fucking chaotic, I totally agree with you on that. When I have to start something, I quite literally do not know how to start. It doesn’t work the first time because it never works the first time, so you rehash it a bit, and it works. It’s like a puzzle. 

When you have a block, do you have something you do that unblocks you?

Yeah, recently I’ve been getting into drumming, which is cool as a hobby. I just have a tiny electric kit in the laundry room next to the cat litter, and when I feel like nothing is working, I’ll go and do that for a bit, which is nice to get out of design mode. 

What advice would you give to a designer who is experiencing the block? What do you think that drumming does for you?

I think that when you stop focusing on something, it helps things to fall into place. When you leave it, you’re still subconsciously thinking about it and I think that sometimes that deep brain helps to figure out what your conscious brain can’t. A fresh perspective often times will lead to new thoughts based on things that you’ve made. The first time, you’re a little too close to it. Take a step back, come back to it. Go to your third place. 

Even if you think that what you’re making looks like shit - and, it always does in the beginning - you need to push through that. If this one little thing isn’t working, try it a different way and keep pushing and making iterations. The more you push down that path, the more refined your design becomes. I’ve never just thrown something into Photoshop and been like, ‘love it, done!’ It’s always a struggle.

Is it going well? Are you happy with the struggle?

Yeah! I mean, it always works out! 

That was a super not confident ‘yeah’. 

I mean, I’m still learning, you know. I’m still trying to figure this shit out. But I don’t think that anybody really knows. There is no right way to do anything. I think that when I was a lot younger and trying to understand this art world that I wasn’t quite a part of and didn’t get, I was searching for the right way or validated way of designing or talking to a client or doing a shoot, and I’ve come to realize that there isn’t a right way. There are things to do and not do, but there is no outline for this stuff, and the more that people try to enforce some sort of outline, the less diversity of art we get. I’m still trying to figure out my way, and smashing my head against a wall at the start of a project is my way, and I love it, but it’s probably, hopefully not for others. 

Find more of his work, here.