Peter Arnell has built an unparalleled reputation creating groundbreaking, boundary-averse work for many of the world’s most celebrated brands. He joins to discuss his new book and storied career as a designer, branding executive, photographer, founder, and CEO.
Debbie Millman:
In the world of design, advertising, and photography, Peter Arnell is a pioneer. His work with high profile clients, including Donna Karen, Samsung, Home Depot, and PepsiCo, have put him at the center of some of the most successful and sometimes controversial campaigns of recent decades. His energy is legendary, and it spills over into collaborations with artists, architects, and performers, including Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Michael Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tina Turner. A new two volume monograph brings together the extraordinary diversity of his work. It’s called Peter Arnell: Projects 1980-2020, and we’re going to talk all about the book and his storied career today. Peter Arnell, welcome to Design Matters.
Peter Arnell:
Oh, thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Peter, you’ve written about how the earliest memory you have is still painfully clear, and you’ve described it as, “A snippet of a lost and forgotten eight millimeter film jerking all over the screen in front of an old Super 8 projector.” Can you share a little bit more about the memory and how it has impacted you since?
Peter Arnell:
I think that memory, which I think affected my work and my life, was seeing the riderless horse at the Kennedy funeral. And I didn’t know a lot of things that I know now years later, about the boots of a soldier in backwards, and what a riderless horse was, et cetera, et cetera. But what was fascinating was just during the news reels, it was quite amazing to see tens of thousands of people in crowds everywhere staring at this horse without any rider on it. And it must have affected me dramatically because I think I spent the rest of my life looking for what’s not there.
And I think when you are in the creative business, it depends on what era and what decade we’re talking about, but I think in the early days, I was always trying to do things differently by staring not at what’s there, hence the competition, but looking at new ideas or points of differentiation by seeing what’s not there. And it also, of course, creates a tremendous amount of curiosity. So when you start to look at both the process of developing an idea, as well as actually expressing an idea, a way to articulate in a very simple fashion the right question to the audience, the way you do it is by, I think, removing the very obvious, or the very expected that the customer, or the viewer, would expect in a piece of communication, and add a billboard, et cetera.
And I think that that impact of that riderless horse probably stuck in my memory somewhere, what are all these people looking at? What are they staring at? What is this celebration or sadness all about? And so as I went on in my career, I think we’ve been known here for launching campaigns and products and services without ever even showing the product in them, because we believe strongly that if you could create a conversation that touches people’s feelings or emotions, they will go much farther and deeper to a potential customer who, in the end, we are really asking to join our brand, not really buy the brand. That kind of long-term thinking, I believe, and that approach came from those early visuals of that funeral of Jack Kennedy.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents split up when you were very young. From what I understand, your father disappeared. Your mom wasn’t able to raise both you and your sister, and you went to live with your maternal grandparents. What is your relationship with your parents like now?
Peter Arnell:
Well, unfortunately it’s been quite a while since we put Nathan and Ada to rest. But I think the dramatic effects of all of these breaks or cracks in one’s life, I do think affect ultimately how you operate or think in life. I don’t know how they affect the psyche, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’m sure all those things had tremendous effects on the way I operate, the idea of collecting how I try to keep everything, maybe the fear of loss, I’m sure they’re connected up somewhere.
Debbie Millman:
You collect quite a few different things, these are just a few things that I’ve read about, dried leaves and twigs from a memorable autumn trip, bottle openers from places you love, matchbooks, paper napkins, photos, postcards, and all sorts of mementos that help you remember a place, a time, and a feeling. And you’ve said that your purpose for collecting is for saving your life, literally and figuratively. And Peter, has somebody that has also over the years done quite a lot of collecting, including repurchasing my childhood library and all the toys I played with, I really fully understand the desire to do that. What was the first thing you started to collect?
Peter Arnell:
At 65 years old, I’m not exactly sure of what the first thing was, but I think it was matchbox cars. I still have a couple of them, I have a BP, British Petroleum, lime green and blue tow truck from that, and I have a British Leyland, a white ambulance. But the collecting I do helps me in building a library of thoughts and ideas that touch me at some point that I believe are applicable at some point later in my life, and that’s really what I do, all the things that I collect have a direct relationship to some event or some experience that I had in my life, as you mentioned. But it’s quite random, and it tends to be a lot of objects that relate to my journey.
I have these bags that are called, they’re in files called PPT, people, places, and things, and I bag and tag everything. I mean, if I showed you my desk right now, to your point, I just picked up a incredible collection of new leaves on my trip to Paris a couple weeks ago. And I don’t stop there, many times, I then work on displaying them and figuring out how they can actually be presented so that they can be shared with friends and family. So the house is filled with thousands and thousands of very odd things from all over the world.
I think that when I was an adult, I think probably in my early 20s, I started to study Eames, and I was fascinated, I was, by the incredible collections that they had, and how-
Debbie Millman:
You’re talking about Charles and Ray Eames, right?
Peter Arnell:
Yes, yes, and how they affected their designs. They were living with childhood memories and books and scrap art, and things they collected from all over the world, and masks, and it goes on and on and on. So I guess in a way that legitimized what I was doing. It does get quite complicated because then you have to find space for all of it, and space in New York City is not so available, so you have to find systems. I have a big storage facility out in Long Island, way out in Smithtown, that’s around 9,000 square feet, where everything from as far as I started collecting lives there. And it’s not just objects, it’s also how many magazines of how many ads that I ran an ad in, or it’s a swatch of some material that we developed, or it’s a prototype and a model, it’s everything and anything, I don’t throw anything away. In fact, we have no garbage cans in my office.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, we have one in the kitchen, which is, of course, needed, but I don’t know where that came from, it certainly makes things a bit complicated at times for everybody in the studio. But I just think that everything has beauty. Everything in life has beauty, if you seek it you’ll find it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a crumbled piece of paper, and those days that I worked with Frank Gehry, watching him create the most extraordinary architecture from simple ideas or notions of building things on his desk, to broken things to artifacts, they all have value and they all have beauty, and there will be a time in everyone’s life where those things can and should be applied. So by keeping all of that, and keeping it well and preserving it and cataloging the fashion that you can access it, I found that to be a very calming situation for myself.
Debbie Millman:
Your grandparents lived between Brighton Beach and Coney Island on Shore Boulevard at the end of Sheepshead Bay. You’re a native New Yorker, I am too. We’re also in the same exact generation, you’re just a year or so older than I am, so I remember how all of those wonderful neighborhoods felt back then. At the time, I read that you thought of yourself as a New York street rat. Why?
Peter Arnell:
Well, maybe I need to explain first what a New York street rat was for me.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, because I know what they’re like.
Peter Arnell:
I come from very humble beginnings. My grandfather was a fishmonger in the Fulton Fish Market. If we wanted to do something, if we needed money, we had to find a job. I folded newspapers at Shelley’s Luncheonette on the corner of Neptune and Shaw Boulevard, I pumped gas at the Mobile station, I worked at Juniors cleaning dishes in lower Brooklyn. You had to hustle all the time in order to keep things going, or keep up with things that maybe, at that time although small, were dreams.
I think the streets also, in the late 50s, early 60s, were a place of community, in neighborhoods like Sheepsheads Bay, and especially around that area, by Manhattan Beach and Brighton Beach, there was a great sense of community, and people lived, weather permitting, on their stoops and in front of their homes, and that was the gathering place. People followed and watched people’s patterns, and when they came and when they went, and the policeman was on the horse and the horse was parked by the little building that was there on the island, temple-like building where the police officers used to sit watching the neighborhood. People entertained themselves by going to schoolyards and playing basketball and stick ball.
So when I say street rat, I refer to myself as someone who got savvy quickly, learned a lot about life and experienced things on the street. The home apartment, 3D, was a little tiny apartment. It looked bigger then than it really was in my mind as a child, but it was a small apartment, and the bed was right by the kitchen in the little pantry area. So being out with friends and by the bay, and the activity and the community and the Mister Softee, and all this stuff that was going on back then, it got me really comfortable with the streets in the sense of that’s where one would learn, one would grow, one would have experiences. So I refer to myself as a street rat just because most of my knowledge and experience on how to approach things, or how to move things through a timeline, come from those days on the street, watching, observing how things moved and how people were, et cetera.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned your grandfather being a fishmonger. He was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and he became a fresh water fishmonger in the Fulton Fish Market, and I understand you often accompanied him to his work, helping him pack trays of fish with ice. You’ve written something really beautiful about the experience and I wanted to share it with our listeners. You state, “We woke up before midnight to pile into my grandfather’s cream and butterscotch colored Buick Skylark for the ride to the Fulton Fish Market at the South Street Seaport. It was a thrill at that age, heading toward the gleaming skyline of Manhattan, though the ride often lulled me back to sleep before we rolled over the Brooklyn Bridge.
“We pulled off at the first exit in Manhattan and parked in grandpa’s regular spot under the bridge. My grandfather would yank open the driver’s side door of the Buick, that always woke me up. A boy of 14 or 15 or 16, still half asleep, I looked up at the Wall Street skyline, and at the span of the bridge stretching back towards Brooklyn, murky and mysterious and majestic, shrouded in mist. It was the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen, and it’s burned, engraved, into my imagination.” And you went on to write that the bridge like was a gateway to a fantasy land, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how the bridge became that gateway to the fantasy land. What kind of fantasy land?
Peter Arnell:
If you lived in the outer boroughs, making a trip to Manhattan was like going into the big city. I mean, everything scale-wise seemed extraordinary. To this date every time I cross the Brooklyn Bridge I get a rush. I think that Roebling had an extraordinary vision. When you cross a body of water, the act itself on a bridge, especially back then, I believe was quite violent, because the East River, as it opens up the Atlantic Ocean, et cetera, it’s just this very calm, beautiful, elegant stream that is incredibly turbulent, but at the same time, from a visual point of view, quite beautiful and harmonic. And then you see this massive piece of architecture in a funny way divided, and it’s the most bizarre set of architectural elements of Gothic, it’s Renaissance, and he’s got everything going on there, along with modern technology to span this river.
And I think I understand it all, and I felt it all from an early age. And so I think it became this arrival into the big world, into adult world every time I crossed it, and this lingering to really be on the other side from Brooklyn, which some people might not call the suburbs, but they were back then, into the big city. And Lower Manhattan, with all Wall Street, and the movement, and the energy down at the fish market, and the boats and the harbor, it was breathtaking. It did offer me, in the end, an incredible contribution to my entire career.
My grandfather parked his car a bit away from the fish market, because the people who really couldn’t afford parked under the bridge. And of course the reason why people didn’t like to park their car there was there was pigeons and they did nasty things on your car all day, so if you parked your car under the areas where the pigeons were, the car was ugly and smelly by the time you went to pick it up. But that’s where he parked it, and he parked it very close to the, it must have been about 10 degrees off of the angle of the bridge, and that view, which I’ve seen so many times in so many different lighting conditions and weather conditions, it still remains to me one of the most beautiful images of discovery, of design, power, presence, of anything in the city.
And I remember one night I had the good fortune of meeting Donna Karen and her, at the time, head of marketing, and there were just two employees, I think, at the time. She had just began, it was days into her new career after leaving Anne Klein. And she went on and on and on about New York and all the things that I loved. I got along with her very well. It was late in the afternoon, and I thought to myself, my God, she’s talking about designing clothes for people who live in that place of which I understand and know very well, and the way she described it, and the way she described her dream and her ambitions, kept on leading my mind back to that spot with grandpa in the Skylark, looking up at the bridge.
So that night with a little Ricoh Instamatic camera, when the moon’s up high, 400 black and white Tri-X film, with the light bouncing on the river, it picks up the light quite beautifully. And I wanted so badly, I was being offered an opportunity to pitch for her business. And Kalman, I believe, is the other from M & Company.
Debbie Millman:
Tibor.
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, Tibor, who is one of the most brilliant people we know in our industry, God rest his soul. And it was him and I pitching, and I guess it was a very anxious Peter that night. And I went out, I went back to there. I also have been known to go there, there are benches there now, and speak to grandpa. Still to this day. But I went out, I shot a picture of the bridge at night, in black and white, in a period in the early 80s where color and fashion and red lips and big hats, and all this vivid stuff, imagine the antithesis of that was a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge at about 10:30 at night, and I just was convinced that she would get it. I was convinced that she would understand that I knew how to launch her company. And I ran to Ja Brunell, he was a man who made Veloxes. I don’t know if you remember back when he did these Veloxes.
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
Peter Arnell:
And with Optima type put New York under Donna Karen. She had been talking about, in the meeting, about Maud Frizon shoe boxes, and how they said Maud Frizon Paris. So I put all that together and I took this picture, and then I ran to her the next day. I showed it to her, and she started crying. She had the same emotional, incredible reaction to just this stupid black and white photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I’m sure even that angle exists in postcards and tourist sites and everything forever. But it was the fact that we were displacing that to represent a hot new fashion company, of which the product wasn’t even designed yet, in a world that was all color, in black and white, no models, no clothing, and I guess in that conversation I just said, “This is it.” And she said, more importantly, “This is what I really believe is my image.”
And I’m not sure if I knew, or she knew, or anyone knew what we were up to at that point. I think we get too much credit for seeing and thinking things through with such depth, I think a bit of history and memory and informed intuition, and there’s a whole bunch of things operating, and then you’ve got to have the chutzpah to push it forward. So I went up there, God knows what she would’ve said, and then that began really my career in communications advertising. She gave me my first real chance.
I think that night, through Donna’s dream, and something that happened in the room between the two of us, the street rat was alive and well. The street rat was trying so hard to knock on the door of opportunity to say, I don’t know anything about fashion, and I know less about clothes and models and shootings and advertising, I don’t know that world. I was writing books at the time on architecture, and doing graphic design at Bergdorf Goodman for 300 little line ads to make money.
And at that point, it didn’t matter if I knew fashion, nor, in a way, did Donna care about that. It was just this other world we stepped in around ideas and thoughts, and if you always are holding on to the things that are so meaningful in your entire life, they will come back, not to haunt you, but to support you in a very, very powerful way. Especially in the arts and in communication arts, because the world turned into an entire visual economy with Instagram and social media, and everything, but back then, there was a process involved. There were croppers and layouts, and we’d have computers, and we had to use scissors, and all this other good stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Wax machines.
Peter Arnell:
Wax machines and T-square, everything. So the hand was involved, it was a craft, how you print a picture. So I think she felt that night that there was some connection, some bizarre connection between me and that bridge, my history, which I never talked about that night, nor with her for a long time. And being the grandson of an immigrant, and her being the granddaughter of an immigrant, it’s the whole thing. And her family growing up in the sewing, the garmento business, and mine, it’s all that stuff, and it began a journey of 40 years of extraordinary opportunity and luck to be invited into other people’s great work and collaborations, and so forth.
Debbie Millman:
You started working with Donna Karen in 1984. I graduated college in 1983. And I am a native New Yorker, I was born in Brooklyn as well, I lived in Queens, I lived on Staten Island, and I went to school in Albany. When I graduated I knew, the only thing I really knew for sure was that I wanted to live in Manhattan, and came and lived in a hovel, in a tenement building in Manhattan, and struggled to find my first jobs doing layout and paste-up in magazines, and was a magazine rat, for sure. My dream at the time was to work at Vanity Fair. But I have to tell you, I remember, I actually remember the first time I saw that Brooklyn Bridge ad, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.
I was sitting at my desk at my little rinky-dink office, doing my little rinky-dink layouts with X-Acto blades and wax and whatnot, and I turned the page and there was this bridge, this almost hazy black and white Donna Karen New York, and I was hypnotized by it. I was hypnotized by it. And it became this aspirational little world I wanted to embody and live in. And went to Bergdorf Goodman, and it was so out of my reach, and so beautiful. That’s how powerful that ad was for me, for millions of women, especially the young working women of New York at the time that were really being seen as this generation of young women in the workforce for the first time.
You ultimately created an identity and a world for Donna Karen that created one of the most successful fashion brands of all time. You went on to create Donna Karen New York, which was another huge blockbuster success, and a career was ignited. What did you imagine when you were a kid that you wanted to do when you grew up? Because kids like us didn’t think about design, we didn’t even know about design.
Peter Arnell:
First of all, thank you for, it’s very beautiful what you said, and it touched me. People who purchased magazines back then, they just couldn’t wait until they come out, many couldn’t afford them. The September issue was always too big to carry, and it was the fights with the publishers about where you position that, and all this stuff, and what sections were good. And it’s so funny because of all the things I ever did in my life, that was the one project that I did where there was no cropping, there was no meetings about approvals, there was no discussions of where it’s going in the magazine. I think I was just so overwhelmed and proud that someone would actually print something that I had, in my own little way, contributed to this massive, incredible force called Donna Karen. She was, without exception, a leader of a generation, not just in fashion, but in spearheading the aspirations and drives for tens of thousands of women in university and Parsons and FIT, and she was really the guts of 7th Avenue for 20 years.
So when you speak about it, I have to say, I think I was acting much more as a documentarian that day than I was as an advertising person. I was acting as a New Yorker, respecting and demonstrating the values of our great city, but as it was slightly displaced over into fashion and into an ad, it exploded. And if you really think about what you’re saying, she started a business with, I want to say we had $14,000 budget that year, and she had less than a million dollars to start the whole business, so it was incredible, if you think about it, that such a powerful idea came to be known as a brand that then became this very highly regarded and very effective tool that’s taught in schools for those things that I did back then.
But they didn’t come along with a plan, they came along just with maybe, at the time, a fear that I would lose the opportunity to do something great and get an account. They came with relying on my childhood, and going back, not forward, to something that I really did believe was a gateway, and in the end it was, to my entire career. I mean, that bridge ends up becoming the reason why I go on for 40 years of getting all these chances to do interesting things. And I don’t believe that as a child I could have seen or put that together. I think that my father, my biological father, Alvin Arnell, did a book called Standard Graphical Symbols. It was when I was one year old, or something. But he designed what we now know as emojis for electrical, structural, and mechanical engineering, and he did a book, it was like a AIA standard graphical symbols for the engineering world.
So I have to say I did grow up with, there was something there in my genes or DNA, or in the environment or something, there was something there, even if it was for a short period of time. Of course later on I studied him. But I don’t think I ever had any thought about what I wanted to do when I was a child. And I would argue I don’t even know what I want to do today. At some point, I realized this incredible life of making and creating things permits me entree into so many worlds all over the globe of so many different industries and so many different challenges and solutions, whether they be Special Olympics, or whether they be Chrysler, wherever I work or have worked, that I’m able to roll my sleeves up and learn. And I think I ended up putting myself in a perpetual school. I’m always in school learning.
I’m not sure how much I know, but somehow I was able to aggregate friendships and associations, experiences, and they kept on building and building, and then at some point people believe in you, and they go from, “What do you do?” To, “I like what you do,” to, “I’d like you to do what you do for me.” If I had to do it all over again I would probably do some things over differently, because as you grow and expand at that young age, you just don’t have the capacity or experience or knowledge to know how to manage much of it. Now older, looking back 45 years, you see things so differently, you see things so differently.
Debbie Millman:
What are some of the bigger things you would’ve done differently?
Peter Arnell:
When you have nothing and you’re fighting, and you’re in a world, Madison Avenue, just nobody, it was a small little tiny company fighting against BBDO, and all these big giants, and my God, you just go. You just go, and you just are blind. Any opportunity was an opportunity, and you’re just banging down walls, and you’re ranting and raging, you’re just trying to get stuff done, and so on. And all of that, in the end, just a waste of time. One services one’s own growth and fuels it much better by looking in the mirror and reflecting on certain realities, and trying to understand and have gratitude for yourself before anything else, as a human being.
And I missed a lot of that stuff because I was going so fast, and building so fast. I mean, imagine 22 years old and you did that Donna Karen thing, and then years later, shortly thereafter, I was credited for coming up with DKNY, which was a massive shift in the fashion industry, because prior to DKNY, second lines were built as a cheaper fabrication of the first line, Anne Klein, Anne Klein 2, on and on. This idea of the other side of the same woman, that a woman who likes caviar also likes pizza, that women are spending a few thousand dollars for an outfit, could also enjoy putting on jeans and running barefoot, whatever. So that idea of extending the brand, and then taking Donna Karen New York, taking those letters out, it changed again. And I was young, and I was just on fire. We went on to work on second lines, and A line, and we were like B for beanpoles, it was almost like a comedy.
And then in the middle of it we were running to Paris, we were hired by Mr. Arno to work with Mr. Lacroix to start a couture house. And I was in Paris all of a sudden, and we were on fire. And when you’re on fire and when you’re growing and when you’re going that fast, you’re really blind to so much, especially when you’re young and don’t have experience, I think you tend to step over, or step around, things that are important in life as building blocks to character and knowledge, and so forth. So I would have gone through it differently by slowing down and enjoying more of it, less of a street rat and more of a well-mannered citizen of society, so to speak. And then we kept on growing. I mean, it didn’t stop, it went on forever. We were just lucky. And most people in our space, who was talking about brand in the early 80s?
Debbie Millman:
No one. Oh, well, if they were, they were accusing you of being a sellout and doing the devil’s work.
Peter Arnell:
Right, right.
Debbie Millman:
As I was accused. Do you think that if you knew what you know now about the speed in which you grew, the work that you would do well, the work that would be criticized, would you have done anything different, or do you feel that that has all led you to this moment? I once asked Seth Godin what he would tell his 30-year-old self, and he’s like, “Nothing, because if I did anything any different I wouldn’t be right here right now.”
Peter Arnell:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
He wasn’t talking about talking to me, he was talking about where he is in his life.
Peter Arnell:
Sure. I mean, there’s a certain, they always say 30% of my OCD triggers 70% of all else I do, you know what I mean? So if I wasn’t the same person, of course. But yeah, I was fearful of too many of the wrong things.
Debbie Millman:
Like what? Don’t go over that too quickly.
Peter Arnell:
I should have had more confidence in what I believed in in regard to my work than worrying about outside criticism or competition because the work. However, I was lucky enough to arrive at this ongoing month after month, year after year, successes around being associated with the early days of Nespresso capsule, and Listerine pocket packs, I mean, it goes on and on and on, The Gap with Mickey, Banana Republic, and the naming and launching of Allure for Mr. Wertheimer, Chanel.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, some of the greatest work of the latter half of the 20th century, without a doubt. Martha Stewart Everyday, Michael Jackson’s Invincible, Hanes Hosiery with Tina Turner, the list goes on and on and on.
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, so I think that I would’ve probably found more opportunity. I always think that the more time you have, and the more reflection you have, the better the work’s going to be, and I think the first thing is that I’m almost sure that almost, without exception, everything I’ve ever done could have been better. I see now many of the opportunities to have gone all the way, but I think there was a few there that I had reached a certain point that worked, so I was okay, and everyone was happy, and the client was content, et cetera. This idea of pushing yourself and working hard to just always try to seek the truth in a solution, there is an essence and a truth in every message and in every company’s culture that if you hold a mirror up correctly to, and you angle it to the audience, you will see there’s a spot there, a sweet spot.
Steven Spielberg said to me once that you really need to believe that sharks don’t have soundtracks, and that always stuck in my head about Jaws, that do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, I think without that soundtrack the shark wouldn’t have been very threatening. So I think there’s always this kind of expectation in the marketplace where people find the mix between familiar and the unexpected, the sweet spot, to be magical. And I think that, I wish almost 100%, that I would’ve spent more time in front of the camera, I would’ve tried to play with the leading on a piece of type for more hours, it goes on and on and on. So you only saw, and even if those things were whatever one would consider successful, were successful solutions for clients I had, I would think at the end the real hero in all that was the client who allowed those things to get to the marketplace, because many of them were so unbearably difficult to believe in or to follow.
There were many, many times where the art of the sale is as important as the art of the idea, which is as important as seeing the vision of what’s not there, and then putting all that together and solving a marketplace problem for a client, which then has to compete, and on and on and on, it’s very complex. And then when you put the billboard up, it doesn’t have your phone number, you can’t explain anything to anybody, it either works or it doesn’t work, in a split second, in a business where communication has to just get it, like Think Different, or Just Do It, just in a split second you get it, you have a community or you don’t. They do take time to build, but in the beginning if you entrench a brand in the right lane, right from the beginning, I think they are forever propositions, they don’t really need to change.
And so I think I could have done better many, many times, schedules, budgets, time, clients, relationships, all affect the result that ends up in the marketplace. It’s not just the idea. The other thing is that sometimes, I think as I got into my 40s, I don’t know if it was just psychological or age, but I felt like I was listening less and hearing myself more, and I think that tends to lead to problems, because you start out with Donna, who’s banging her chest about New York City, and then you do a picture, it’s so clean, simple, elegant. I came out of this background of editing and writing books on architecture, James Sterling, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, all these books that I wrote and edited and laid out, that’s how we started our career in the studio.
And so I’m very academic. The academic side of me uses up, many times, too much time, versus the intuitive creative side, the artist side. And then when they bang heads the academic side always wins because it knows too much. And so I would do a lot less of the academic and a lot more of, again, I would not be fearful of making sure all my boxes were checked off, and everything was so picture perfect in both presentation as well as execution, and more time on the values that I would’ve built in, or the ideas, how to mask them. And I was very much also at that time into the win versus the journey with a client.
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Peter Arnell:
It was the 80s, it was Wall Street, it was the pitch, and then I would lose interest after a certain period of time. So I did hold onto, and worked for years with Samsung and Donna, and I had very long relationships, but they were few, and most of what I do and did were assignment based. So if you design the Pepsi logo, you do it once, then you finish, and that’s it.
So a combination of living in that world of either fixing or finding identity or expression, communication, idea, solution, strategy, marketing, whatever, and the pace of it all, and the hungry Peter, who was always looking for the next, and the world changing dramatically from the East Coast, to Silicon Valley and technology, all this was going on for… I mean, think about my life, was 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, each decade is just filled with major shifts in societal, crazy bell curves of amazing introductions, innovations, and movements that I was a witness to. So I was wanting to move and always keep up, and always stay in shape, and practice exercising the brain. But you get in your own world at a certain point, you closed down, because that’s your mission, is to survive, grow, contribute, win, be the best, and you lose sight sometimes of, not sometimes, but many times of the other parts of life that are truly valuable and also feed that.
Balance was never my thing. Someone said to me, “How do you vacation?” I said, “I tried that once, it didn’t work for me,” and it really is the case. I usually go to bed around 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, and I usually get up about 3:30, and I’ve done that most of my life. I’m known for not sleeping, I like to do two days in one, I like to win, I think that’s important. I don’t drink, I don’t go to nightclubs or bars, or things like that. So I work, and I still think I’m the grandson of an immigrant scared to not be able to pay his bills. I think it’s the same person who is just there always if you follow, it just never changes
Debbie Millman:
Your life now, and the work that you’re doing now, is very different than the work and the life that you had in the early part of the 2000s. You sold your business to, I believe it was Draft, and then bought it back, and then sold it to Omnicom. I also sold my business to Omnicom, so I understand what that was like, and then left. You had a breakup with Omnicom. And this all was around the time you redesigned Pepsi and then Tropicana. What happened with Tropicana?
Peter Arnell:
This might end up becoming the most famous podcast ever in the history of marketing if I answer this, not only truthfully, but accurately.
Debbie Millman:
Well, if you change your mind and you want to take it out, we certainly can, but I’d love to-
Peter Arnell:
No, no, no.
Debbie Millman:
I should tell you, Peter, I should tell you, I don’t know if you know this, so full disclosure, I really should have told your people before, but I worked on the design that you redesigned that Tropicana went back to, so there’s this incredible symmetry to this right now. But I don’t do that kind of work anymore either.
Peter Arnell:
So I’m going to try to give you a very simple narrative. So the chairman at the time, the chairperson and the president were enamored by our studio and the work that I was doing, and we got a lot of work from Pepsi. In fact, we got every brand, Mountain Dew, and I think the only thing we didn’t do was SoBe. Gatorade, excuse me. And Indro was, at the time, super excited about design. That was her thing, she went out to speak to Steve Jobs, she had a meeting with him, and she was really on the right track for many reasons. Indro came to her office one day and showed me a champagne glass. She wanted everything modern and clean and cleaned up, and so forth. And I tell many people this, but can you imagine, how does a designer get accused of having authority to change all the factory lines throughout the entire world? It doesn’t go down that way, it really doesn’t.
Actually, the way it goes down is you’re given an assignment and direction on a brief, and you follow it. And if the client is tough on that brief, you follow it by just illustrating with your talent the values or the objectives that are in that brief, which is what we did. And if you don’t want to pay to change the factories in the line to get a pet product, see through plastic, because it costs too much money, it’s a big investment, tooling and this and that, then somebody raises their hand and says, “Just put the juice up there. Put it in a champagne glass, it’ll look rich and valuable.”
So that instruction came from the company, that is the truth. And then we went ahead and we did thousands of images and pictures and layouts of moving all that thing around, we moved that around a lot, and they loved it. Not only did they love it, but how does in a big corporation, something get registered and trademarked and printed, manufactured and distributed, because an art director, no. So we were an easy fall, the lesson I learned was you need to do what’s right, that idea that was presented was never right. The idea that was presented was to redesign the packaging, which we did, which came out with Trop50, there was a clear pitcher-like bottle that I designed that came out years later, the half the sugar Trop50 version of that.
Debbie Millman:
Which still isn’t on shelves.
Peter Arnell:
Yes, yes, yes. But it all exploded, and then there was an article in the Newsweek with Danny Lyons that was hysterical, accusing me as public enemy number one in the design world. It just went on and on and on. And then the New York Times had this editorial with a straw coming out of my head saying idiot. So they got, what I understand, six or eight letters, and the gentleman who was running the company in Chicago, who was appointed by the chairman of Pepsi, he wanted to do what he wanted to do, and he really probably believed that it was a mistake to change the packaging. So within weeks there’s a famous Stu Elliott article that comes out talking about the campaign, and it was all about squeeze and love, and all this beautiful black and white photography, and the whole thing. And then weeks, days, I don’t remember, a week and a half later there was an article that Pepsi’s pulling the whole thing.
It was probably not necessary in the end. However, I think the lesson I took away from it all, back to my point about believing in myself, and fear and all this, was I should have just raised my hand early on. Although you’re in these contracts with clients, you can’t say anything. But I just should have kept my mouth shut and just simply say, “Things happen, mistakes happen in life, and people make the wrong choices.” Instead I said something like, publicly, “They paid me a ton of money, if they don’t know what to do with the work, that’s their problem.” I don’t think that went over big.
Debbie Millman:
Yikes, yeah.
Peter Arnell:
But certainly I got a lot of notoriety for being the biggest asshole ever. But I said what was on my mind. So I think at the end, the reason why it might have never been a success is because the strategy behind it was, in a way, a facade, because when you don’t have a shelf stable product, the colors change during the season, which is very hard for the consumer, and is it good, not good, et cetera, and then you end up with a lot of confusion. So if I had thought about it, I probably would’ve raised my hand and said to the management of Pepsi, “I don’t think that’s a good idea and I’m not going to participate in it,” but the pay was good.
Debbie Millman:
Having spent most of my career in fast moving consumer goods, I know exactly how hard it is to push back with a client that’s on a deadline, and you have a lot of people to pay, and you have a lot of sure deadlines that you have. And it’s funny, Peter, because at the time, of course, I was very dismayed that the package that my company had worked on was going away, and when I saw the packaging and I read the strategy I was like, this is not a bad strategy. Rather than show an actual orange, why not show what’s in the orange, the actual juice? And I remember talking to Paula Scher about it, one of the partners at Pentagram, and she was like, “Don’t gloat, Debbie, because this is not good for design. Because if we give in to people that are trying to keep change from happening, what kind of innovation will ever be allowed?”
And it’s always stayed with me, she’s one of my dearest friends, and for her to say at the time, and she was right, she was absolutely right, because as we see now, there’s almost no brand identity that’s launched these days that isn’t on some level picked apart and accused of being genitalia, people talk about it being female genitalia or male genitalia, and it’s the same logo, or looking like a swastika. So this happens, I think that people have become so terrified of anything that’s uncertain, that when they see something at shelf, nobody goes and says, “Oh my God, could you look at that? M&M’s redesigned, I’m going to try them now.” They go to the shelf, they see something’s changed and they think, why is that different? Am I getting less M&M’s for more money? Look what happened with the recent brouhaha about M&M’s.
Peter Arnell:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
But in any case, everyone has an opinion about everything, the very same identities that people ring their hands over, a year later when they are redesigned, the very same people ring their hands over it again.
Peter Arnell:
But it’s interesting because Paula’s right, we’re professionals. We work hard, we really care about our craft and how things really are put together. And we’re in an industry where everybody has an opinion about everything. I don’t know at what point someone felt maybe in our lifetimes we should have had more Paul Rand’s, because he knew early on he needed to be a tough one to get things through, and he was a tough one, as you know, he was a monster at both the pitch, as well as the control of the product. And everyone’s a designer, everyone’s a photographer now, everyone, everyone, but there are differences in the end, aren’t there? And when someone raises their hand and says no, in a way they don’t have a right to say no.
However, the world today has changed, and in a way they do have a right to say no, because their voice matters. In a way the industry and its value has been so demeaned because the authority, professionalism, quality, the power of the talent that’s out there, you talked about Pentagram, and the extraordinary artists, graphic artists, communication experts, video editors, brilliant talent, real talent, they have been undercut by someone shooting something on an iPhone, and other things, that I guess, in a funny way, I guess the sign of our times, but in a way the industry has let itself do that.
I always believe that what I do has incredible long-lasting value and it’s an investment, and I’ve always believed that, and I’ll always believe it. Not because I think my work is good or bad, there’s many, many others who do much more extraordinary work than I, in my entire career there’s always been giants around me, from powerful art directors to brilliant people. However, I’ve been always able to explain to people that what we do here is IP, and it has value, and it becomes the absolute flag, the banner, the lead of one’s organization in so many ways if you could actually integrate that into every touchpoint of a company and its dealings with consumers.
But there aren’t a lot, if any of me, ever, and still today, who actually go to the mat on the point that what we do might not be the best, or even close. But its competency is very high, its approach is very smart, and ultimately its results work. So it has value, it has the same value as an investment one would make into a corporation if it’s done right. So we maintain the industry’s original thinking that design is good business, as Paul said, and you think about all the corporations, CBS and Dorfman, and Seagram and Meise, and all these incredible iconic designers in all architects, that built these corporations, images, Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, and they all had the same thing in mind which is go to a visionaire, or somebody who sees how to capture, either by mirroring or contributing newness, or freshness, or evolution, or reimagining something, and let them build it, let them expose it, let them have the time to develop it.
I think that’s why Bilbao became the building, and will always be the building of the century, because it permitted a world to understand that good design, and the power of supporting good design, can change a country, can change a city, can change the meaning of art. It has so much ramifications. Those movements, whether they be deco, Bauhaus, [foreign language 00:56:43], whether they be Cassandre doing a poster for a boat or shoes in Paris, or Dubonnet, whatever, those legendary moments don’t have a place today in our world. Those iconic moments, you go to the Museum of Modern Art, just 15 years ago, you would’ve seen design celebrated completely different.
And it’s not a sign of our times at all, it’s a sign of somehow technology, or Andy’s 15 minutes of fame mindset, somehow has taken over the craft and art of industrial graphic brand and packaging and corporate, the things that create the language, the visual and verbal language development for corporations, for products that have always been on the forefront of leading and growing companies, have somehow become secondary, or not even important in the way that a print shop isn’t important anymore, or Gar Lelard at Lab 57, printing black and white photo, it’s all gone. Most of it is gone.
And so that’s okay, you have to move all your times, but talent that exists, and great talent that exists, and professionals who have talent in the industry of corporate identity and branding and communications, the world and the industry needs to celebrate them more, and for the right reasons, because they move the economy, they grow businesses, they create extraordinary progress for enterprises. And we learned that from Steve Jobs, didn’t we? We learned that from Steve Jobs, that design was important. We’ve learned that from Braun, we’ve learned that from Knoll, from Florence Knoll, we’ve learned that from so many incredible giants of design industry, Jony Ive, God knows what this man has done to contribute to the landscape of design.
But somehow in most places it lost its value, and I will never let go of the relationship between the business of that business and the business of design, and those things to me connect strongly. And so I think the other and most important thing to say is that the economics around the industry need to come back in a very strong way, and people have to really start to generate the delta between the common and the unique, the highly available and the very, very exclusive talents that exist there to allow these superstars in the world of design to flourish in their own right and be successful and progress as they have toward others, and customers, and so forth. And I see that went away, but for the industry, like in architecture, architect’s roles, contractors took over and they became less the authority on their destiny in the built environment.
So I don’t know how we got off on all this subject, but it’s probably only to say that on the third point, regarding what would I have done different, I probably would’ve just said, “This thing isn’t for me.” Because at the end, if you really look at what we did with Tropicana, it wasn’t a great design. There was nothing magical or innovative about any of it.
Debbie Millman:
Well, the cap, the cap was.
Peter Arnell:
Well, I haven’t gotten to the cap yet.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, okay.
Peter Arnell:
But God bless you for raising it. But the graphic arts of it was just a glass with juice in it with, the world said, poorly placed type. But the cap was a great idea, the cap could have been their Snap, Crackle and Pop, it could have been the Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz, it could have and should have, and still could be. That idea of the hours and weeks and months of working with the packaging container companies to master the click of that cap and the squeeze to always touch the orange, and then I became like a buffoon explaining it to everyone. I was rattled, I came to a meeting late and went on a video, I was like, “And you touch the cap.” It wasn’t done the way I would do it today.
Debbie Millman:
For our listeners that might not be aware, the cap, because this was quite some time ago, I guess about 15 years ago, the cap was actually half an orange, and it was a dome, and it looked like an orange, and it was ingenious. It seems like you’ve learned a lot since that time. I was really intrigued by your inclusion of all the work that you’ve put in to your book, it’s been 40 years. First time ever you’ve published this monograph of your vast body of work. It’s a two volume hardcover book with a beautiful slip case. It’s 848 pages, it contains over 2,600 photographs and illustrations of hundreds of clients and collaborations. And it’s not just the greatest hits, it’s the work, it’s the life, it’s the evidence of a life in design and advertising and branding, with hundreds of projects, including projects for Unilever and Con Edison and Reebok and PepsiCo and Chrysler, and Commissions from Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Tom Brady. Did you leave any work out?
Peter Arnell:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
You did?
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, 25 to 30% of the projects didn’t get in.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Peter Arnell:
Because it was just growing and growing and growing.
Debbie Millman:
Also, you had to get their permissions, right? Didn’t you have to get permissions from everyone?
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, I don’t know if you realize, most of the photography in the book is my own.
Debbie Millman:
Right, I was thinking about that, because I did a book where I had to get permission from Coca-Cola for some of the images, and it took a year.
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, no, it took a while to get everything, all of the homework in order. But the photography stuff is always complicated, and we’ve always been very good at making sure that I have the rights to publish the work. But I think the big mission in that whole book is, because at the end of the day you like the work, you don’t like the work, isn’t really the point, and I’m not sure if I ever did anything important or relevant enough to be in a book like that, and that’s the truth. But it just seems like I tried my best every time, and I think the book just represents a journey of trying my best. That’s the most you can ask for from anybody.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Peter Arnell:
And I think that when I wanted to take pictures they said, “Put the camera down, you’re not a photographer, you’re not a designer, you’re not a car designer, how could you be at Chrysler designing cars?” It’s just that world. But I don’t know, it’s been a big life, I probably have another 20, 30 years to go. So I’m not going to stop, I’m working on Fontainebleau now in Las Vegas.
Debbie Millman:
Well, they’re a repeat client as well, right? Didn’t you work with them 10 years ago?
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, I’ve done many things from Mr. Soffer at Fontainebleau. I think we started our relationship over 20 years ago. There was the Miami, and then there was the original Vegas, and then Vegas one stopped for a while because of financial turmoil, and then now it’s back and we’re reopening at the end of this year. But I’ve always done really simple things in the end, because in such a complexity of problems and people in the world, and competition, how do you take complexity and convert it into simplicity? Is a really very, very difficult job, consistently.
And I’ve been happy to be with my same photo assistant, Rune Stokmo, for coming up 36 years, and Dan, who’s the president here, who’s been with me for 22 years, and Yuko, who’s been here for 32 years. We’re still with a lot of the, what I call the old timers, the founders of the business. So we’re lucky to be here, and next step is the opening of Fontainebleau, that’s the next moment in my career here. I’m sure that’ll be met with an interesting public opinion, to open up a first casino and resort after. There will be a lot of stuff that’s interesting.
Debbie Millman:
Peter Arnell, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Peter Arnell:
Yeah, thank you so much for today, it was just such a pleasure to talk to you.
Debbie Millman:
Peter Arnell’s latest book is a two volume monograph called Peter Arnell: Projects 1980-2020. You can learn more about Peter, his work, and his book on his website, peterarnell.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening, and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.