Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit

Design Better

Matt Owens, co-founder of the design studio Athletics, traces his evolution from a Texas punk and skater kid to a pioneering web designer and agency leader. He reflects

Key takeaways

• Matt Owens launched volume1.com in 1997, which is now preserved in SFMOMA's permanent collection.
• He attended Cranbrook from 1993 to 1995, where a self-initiated, critique-heavy environment forged his workhorse ethos and technical curiosity.

Main topics

• Early web design and the 1990s internet scene
• Cranbrook Academy of Art education

Notable quotes

You have to have rebel optimism to forge ahead.

Conclusion

Owens' career demonstrates how punk-rock fearlessness, continuous hands-on practice, and strategic

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) You have to have rebel optimism to forge ahead. I tell all my students at SVA, this is as good a time as any to be a designer. It will be okay. Human beings are still human beings. They still want creativity and beauty and smart ideas. And all of that is not changing. Your mindset and your attitude are everything. Speaker 1 (0:23) When I was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside of Philadelphia, my coworkers and I used to crowd around to monitor to study volume1.com. Most websites back then had a picture or maybe an image map, like very simple website design. But Matt Owen's site had 3D animations and experimental graphic design and interactivity that none of us could figure out how he made it. Matt launched VolumeOne.com in 1997, and it now sits in SFMOMA's permanent collection. Before that, he was a skater and a punk kid from Texas who ran a record label with his twin brother, then went to Cranbrook and landed in New York just as the web took off. In 2004, he and his friends rented an old boxing gym in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and started a design studio called Athletics. Today, it's a 30-person brand studio working with Google, IBM, Stripe, and Major League Soccer. We spoke with Matt about how punk rock taught him Speaker 2 (1:27) to start things without overthinking them, what designers lost when Flash died, and how athletics grew from a punk house into a proper agency. He also explains why he calls himself the studio's most capable intern and still takes on projects of his own to keep his skills sharp. We get into how his team uses AI as one ingredient rather than the whole recipe and why good creatives can smell polished slop. Wrap up with this book, a visible distance and the rebel optimism he passes on to his students at SVA. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Wooler. Speaker 1 (2:02) And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and learn from the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a paid subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. You'll get access to our Slack community where there's amazing people helping one another, our library of eBooks, and every podcast and post that we publish. Visit designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe to learn more. Speaker 1 (2:49) We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Speaker 1 (2:59) And now, back to the show. Speaker 1 (3:06) Matt Owens, welcome to Design Better. Speaker 3 (3:08) Thanks for having me, guys. Speaker 1 (3:10) So I want listeners to know how important Matt Owens was in my very early days as a designer. I was a young guy coming out of grad school, living in Philadelphia. I studied painting and drawing, and I got my first gig at an agency in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, where we constantly looked at Matt's work. volume1.com it was like a mystery we were all standing around looking at this thing like how the hell did he make that it was like 3d stuff animation stuff in a time where it was like people were building websites if it was fancy it had like a picture and it was really fancy had an image map but matt's website had animation cool graphic design there was so much happening I want to talk about volume one, but first, you are the co-founder of Athletics, which is a legendary design studio. And before founding that, you ran a record label. You were involved in skateboarding and art galleries and punk rock. And I have a hunch that those pursuits shaped a lot of the work that you were doing early on and probably still today. Speaker 3 (4:24) Oh, for sure. I mean, going to Cranbrook. for grad school at 22, right out of undergrad. All of that swirled together. Definitely a child of the 80s, and skateboarding was so instrumental. Palo Peralta, Santa Cruz skateboards, Jim Phillips artwork, all of that stuff was so instrumental. And, you know, I had a radio show in high school, so making flyers and all that kind of stuff. And then punk rock and Discord records and record covers done by Jason Farrell from Swizz. That was... a year older than me. And seeing all of those things when you're 17, 18, it's like, this is possible. This is a thing. And I think that really hooked me. And then going into undergrad and Austin and being there in the early 90s before the internet was anything and just seeing how music and culture and weirdos could all be together and produce amazing music and amazing culture was so huge. And then going to Cranbrook. at 22 to 24 was like oh okay i can see the application of these ideas in hippie modernism At the time, I was really getting into technology and early web stuff. So for me, all of that translation from skateboarding and punk rock and independent publishing and DIY and going into grad school and understanding what that was about and traditional graphic design and then coming out of the web as the web was sort of exploding, it all kind of made sense to me and I think made me for a lot of people. It wasn't like that, I'm not sure, but all those things sort of sandwiched together to give me the mindset to be really creative and make, make, make, make, make. I would say the punk rock aspect of it gave me kind of a fearlessness to start stuff, meaning like, oh, let's put out this record by our friend's band. Okay, let's do that. Oh, let's go do this. And there was never a no. It was more like a how do we. All of that happened between the age of 16 to like 24. and really laid the foundation for my worldview and my decision-making once I got out of school, you know? Speaker 2 (6:29) Tell us a little bit more about Cranbrook. So we had another guest on a year or so ago named Mikon Van Gastel, who's a founder of Sibling Rivalry. He was also a Cranbrook grad. And then my favorite design professor as an undergrad went to Cranbrook. He actually technically didn't graduate. but somehow became a tenured professor at Stanford. I think probably the only one that didn't graduate college to do that. But he was amazing at giving critiques. And I think that was largely because of his experience in Cranbrook. So walk us through what it was that was like and what it enabled for you once you entered the studio and started running your own practice. I Speaker 3 (7:04) met a few people like Dan Olson, who was one of my undergraduate professors, came out of Cranbrook. Diane Grimala, who was there in the early 90s at UT. was really into technology and she got me into all that early, early stuff like HyperCard and weird stuff like that. And so when I was 22, it wasn't like I was a great designer or anything. And it wasn't like I was really had any, I'd done some internships, but I was really into the digital crossover and I was really into like zines and making and soul screening and all those things. And so Dan. was like, you should look into Cranbrook. And so I applied to RISD, Cranbrook, and CalArts, and I got into all of them, thankfully. I would have been in Jeff McFetters' class if I had accepted, which was kind of a bummer. But when I went to Cranbrook, I met Kathy and Michael McCoy, and I met Elliot Earls, who's the head of the program now. I was just spellbound. I mean, it's in the middle of... Michigan, you know, outside of Detroit. And it was this beautiful campus. Charles and Ray Eames met there and it has this amazing legacy. But seeing all the work that was coming out of Cranbrook from say, 89 to 92, 93, the Maculas and all this stuff, it was the connection between what COOL was and what was in books and graduate study. They were right there. They were right there in the crucible of all of that, along with CalArts. And so when I applied, I later learned that I did not actually get in and somebody bailed on them. And I was one of five of my class. But I think it was just the vibe and the fact that there's no grades and it's all self-initiated and you have critiques twice a week. And all of that really excited me. And I think ultimately. the work that was coming out of the program at the time and how connected it was. Was it an immigre and all of that stuff? It was that moment where it was on the internet, was in those magazines. This is a place that's really magical and special. And I think what those two years did for me coming out of central, you know, Austin, Texas, some sort of kid, maybe a little too young to be going to grad school. It just taught me. so much about speaking about my work, defending my work. It gave me like a workhorse mentality or a workhorse ethos because I think at that time, Cranbrook was really, really well-respected and everyone I was with were a little bit older than me. It was like the brunt of the litter, if you will. I just got there and I was like, this is what I had to do. This is what I want to do and really tried really hard. And then Doug Bartow, who's my studio mate, Doug got really into like... web stuff. And he and I joined forces and ran phone lines through the ceiling to get our own internet and all that old school stuff. And I just thought it was really liberating. And Speaker 1 (9:46) it Speaker 3 (9:46) was like the best of the wild west of graduate study. And I think it complimented all the things I had been doing. And, you know, hats off to Dan, who I don't think if Dan had been my professor and he had come out of career work, I loved all the little books he was doing and just the thinking. And if he hadn't recommended it, I probably would never have gone. Speaker 1 (10:04) What years were you at Cranbrook? I Speaker 3 (10:06) was there from 93 to 95. And at the end of 95, Kathy and Michael McCoy left. So I was their last graduating class. And then of course, you know, 95, boom, the internet becomes a commercially viable thing and studios start to erupt. And so it was good timing. You know, I was getting out. I got out when I was 24. right before I turned 25 and I already had built my own website and done weird stuff. I had an email address, I had all these things that other people didn't have. So that gave me a little bit of an advantage. Speaker 1 (10:42) So I think what a lot of folks today might not understand is getting technical chops at the time, it was challenging. There were no programs for like... Go here and learn HTML, CSS. There's no YouTube. There's no list apart. You can barely even find a book on the topic. And if you found that book, it was outdated in a very brief amount of time. How did you build the chops to go from graduate student at Cranbrook, where I'm sure they're probably very focused on physical creation rather than digital creation, and get those technical chops that... towards the end of the 90s, you're creating volume1.com. Speaker 3 (11:25) Those three or four years were so huge. When I was in grad school, Doug and I were just figuring it out. We would just research as much as we could, learn books, whatever, trial and error. And then when I got out and I got to New York in really December 95, January 96, I worked with Adeo Ressi at a company called Method 5, and he hired me as a designer. Within a year and a half or something, they went from seven to 45 people and grew, grew, grew, grew, grew. And I was just there 14 hours a day, every day. And I think that pressure cooker after grad school was kind of a blessing because what I was learning in graduate school was so creative and so compressed. You're with your peers, you're iterating. And so when I got... to Method 5, it was totally different, but it was the same level of pace. And I was around amazing designers and developers also and new business guys that it's like all figuring it out as well. That was the magic was I was able to put myself in an environment very shortly after getting out of school where we were in a small startup that was growing and I was able to hire people, work with them, collaborate. And that's when Flash came out. And so. I think that's the crucial part, whether it was in graduate school or was it when I first moved to New York, I wasn't alone. You know, it's like, would Bob Dylan ever have been famous if he hadn't gone to the West Village, right? I put myself in the way of what was happening in New York, maybe by accident, but that was the secret. The secret was to put myself in an environment where this was happening. And I think that was the fuel that allowed me to keep that pace up and learn. And also, I think at the time, if you think of early Razorfish and stuff like that, There was a little bit of egotism in that world. Everybody wanted to like show how awesome they were. And there was a certain kind of, I don't know what that is, but there was definitely a certain, I want to prove myself that came out of that first dot-com boom that I think fueled a lot of creativity in weird ways as well. Speaker 1 (13:30) We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Speaker 1 (13:40) And now, back to the show. Speaker 1 (13:47) Talk to us about the spirit of that time and what was