The Marma Spot:
Morning Melissa & James. How are you two today? Please take a moment to introduce yourselves for those that don’t know.

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: We’re JW & Melissa Buchanan from The Little Friends of Printmaking. We’re artists/designers living in Milwaukee. We were first known for designing concert posters, but now we do a bunch of different things. We’re about thirty.

Melissa: We studied Fine Art at the University of Wisconsin. We’ve been married almost 9 years. We’re award-winning illustrators. We’re collectors
of stuff. We release about 20 art prints a year. We think art should be cheap. Nobody knows if we’re artists or designers, including us.

The Marma Spot:
What time did you go to bed last night and what time did you
wake this morning?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
Melissa: We went to bed around 2:00 or 3:00am and woke up at 10:00. That’s our usual schedule.

James: It’s good for us because we can get a lot of work in without those weird, wasted morning hours.

The Marma Spot:
Branding is important especially in this day and age where there are millions of creative individuals doing their thing. I have been a fan of Little Friends of Printmaking for a while and always wondered about your name. It definitely sets you apart right away from everyone else. How did it come to be?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: Melissa and I were at the university and we’d just started to work together. Around that time, our best friend Joe was involved in the student government. Somehow he’d discovered that student organizations had free and unlimited access to university fleet vehicles—cars, vans, busses— and not just the big and important student groups but the renaissance faire people and the frisbee golfers and the didgeridoo club and so on. Knowing this, he decided to start a sham student organization so that he could rent a van. And so one day, he came over and said to us, “Congratulations, you’re the President and the Vice President of the UW Art Club,” and we all had our little sneaky giggle about that. Shortly thereafter, Melissa and I started getting phone calls night and day from people who wanted to join this exceedingly fake and unjoinable UW Art Club; our home phone had been listed online as the primary contact. Chemistry majors with an undiscovered talent for decoupage were now leaving us messages in the middle of the night asking us to “evaluate” their “portfolio.” And so it became necessary to change the name of the club– to change it to something that would inspire ZERO interest in the general public and elicit no phone calls, ever: The Little Friends of Printmaking.

I thought Printmaking would be good because of its total lack of glamour. When people aspire to be artists, they are almost certainly not thinking about lithography. And then pairing that with something pitiable and modest like
The Little Friends of, which has a Catholic school, The Poor Sisters of Our Lady of the Bleeding Exploding Heart kind of thing going on but also a starchy English sort of intractability; it definitely did the job. The phone stopped ringing immediately. And then eventually Melissa and I adopted it as our name for the work we do together, because we’d really liked it. So we’ve always thought it was funny that a name we came up specifically to repel people has been so effective for us.

Melissa: We love doing branding stuff for Little Friends. We love coming up with slogans and writing the newsletter and making alternate logos. Sometimes it can be more fun than making the artwork, making the product.
I feel like everything we put out there ought to be a reflection of our personality, and not just the artwork but everything. It’s not that we believe in building some kind of cult of personality around ourselves—We want to find the people who want our stuff, and we want them to feel like they kind of know us.

The Marma Spot:
Something I am very interested in is the balance between creativity and sustainability. As team/business how do you handle and keep all of the
“office work” straight and how do you change gears from that “office work”
to the creative side?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: Melissa is a much better executive than I am.

Melissa: We just document everything. I keep lists. A master to-do list that’s constantly updated, a master list of shipments to send out, a master list of print ideas, a schedule of prints to release. And then we can organize all that information into a semblance of order. I’m a chronic, habitual e-mail checker, and we get loads. If you keep on top of it all, it isn’t too much work really. Keeping track of these things myself has been really helpful in some ways.
I’ll meet people and they’ll say, “You probably don’t know who I am; I sent you an e-mail three years ago—“ and I will say, “Oh, no. I know who you are.”
I know who everyone is. It’s creepy (for them).

The Marma Spot:
I live here in Milwaukee also and am “trying to make it work” so to speak.
It’s rough not living in a major metropolitan area but Little Friends is thriving.
It’s almost like people that live in one of the major areas don’t trust people in a little cities to do work. How was it first starting off and what things did you do/what things happened that helped clients trust you more and get you seen as a legitimate option for clients?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: That’s true about a lot of New York clients. They would definitely prefer it if you’re out there with them. They put an inflated value on the idea that you’re right around the corner, even if they intend to deal with you only through e-mail and conference calls. It seems like security but it really signifies nothing. I guess it was hard for us starting out, but at the same time we weren’t looking to New York at the beginning. Our focus was almost completely local. Slowly, we started getting more and more far-flung jobs,
and now we’re at a point where I think only two or three of our clients
are in Milwaukee.

Melissa: I think that for a lot of people there’s a certain novelty to us being here in Milwaukee. I think it’s actually led to stuff for us. You have to find a way to make that work for you, not against you. We never apologized for being in Wisconsin. I think you just have to do cool stuff and make people think, “Hey, there’s something fun, cool, different happening over there.
I want to be a part of that.”

James: I also think having done stuff for overseas markets and being kind of popular outside the States has made it all right for people on the coasts to hire us for stuff. In Europe, they really don’t care that you’re not in New York.
It’s all America to them.

The Marma Spot:
What I really like about your work besides the amazing color is the Little Friends lens I see the world through. Seeing how another creative individual honestly sees marks, for me, a successful product/style/brand. Who are some people’s lenses you like looking through and what things inspire you both and your art?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: I think Geoff McFetridge is the main one. Our primary goal when we set out to do something is just to not completely rip him off. I remember first seeing his work and Mike Mills’ work back when I was in high school. I had always been fine art-oriented and that was maybe the first stuff I saw that got me thinking that there was some alternate path to take, or that I was more interested in design than I’d thought.

Melissa: Ed Ruscha and Gary Panter, too. I think the thing all of these people have in common is that they appear to be doing something really simple but it can’t really be replicated.

The Marma Spot:
What is the most difficult obstacle you have faced since opening Little Friends? How did you handle the situation?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: The toughest thing might have been transitioning out of concert posters and into art & design stuff without losing our people. I love doing concert posters, but there came a point where the process of it wasn’t as rewarding to me as what we were doing with our Bad Vibes art print series. And we didn’t see the concert poster thing as being sustainable for us over the long haul. Looking back, the way we made the transition fairly smooth was to basically replicate in a piecemeal way the experience that people had had with our concert posters. People were accustomed to seeing new Little Friends posters every month, so we had to become disciplined about releasing Bad Vibes prints at a similar pace. People were used to going to message boards and seeing us joke around and be weird and to have some kind of personal access to us, so we had to recreate that experience through the newsletter and the shop.

Now that I think about it, maybe the real obstacle was that our website is a piece of junk designed in a rush five years ago and our solution was to never do anything about it and hope that people hire us and buy things anyway.

Melissa: To me, the location thing is still the biggest obstacle for us.
We’re still figuring it out. We have a good-sized internet presence, and that helps. It was a big obstacle to come from a fine art background and be taken somewhat seriously in the design community. That just came with work and experience. But with all of these situations, our main thing is just to take a pragmatic approach and be patient.

The Marma Spot:
I have adopted a new personal train of thought “Let’s Begin By Letting Go.”
Is there anything in your life you want to let go of and why?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: We’re not good at letting go. Anyway, I don’t like it. I feel like
being a tightly-wound ball of misery keeps me focused.

Melissa: It’s the key to our success!

The Marma Spot:
You have worked on many posters for bands/musicians. What albums/songs are on heavy rotation for you at the moment.

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: Thee Oh Sees’ new record, especially “Ruby Go Home,” those awesome dubby remixes from the Higamos Hogamos 12-inches, that re-issue of “I am a Vocoder” by Gay Cat Park, “I Believe in Miracles” by The Jackson Sisters, Oppenheimer Analysis, “When I Let You Down” by M&G which has this awesome warm cosmic-disco keyboard sound over what is essentially fake Depeche Mode, and “International Feel” by Todd Rundgren. I’m a WFMU listener so I can’t really claim credit for any of these. Check them out,
there’s lots of cool programs.

Melissa: You forgot “How Do I Let You Know” by Le Matos! It sounds like a 1986 Stevie Nicks single, but from the future! That’s all.

The Marma Spot:
I edit a site with friends Yes Yes Y’all where we discuss music we love and love to learn about. If you could, please take a look at the site and pick a song that in your time at the site stands out to you most? What stood out to you about the song you choose?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: We looked through a ton of your site (which is great)  and the thing that stuck out the most to us was Polyrock because that’s the type of thing we generally like and I’m not sure but I don’t think we’d never heard of it! It’s got a b-squad new wave, organ-based kind of feel like that Chandra EP that got re-issued recently.

Melissa: It’s like fake Joy Division! And fake Joy Divisions need love too.
It’s like a public domain cover of “Transmission,” like when they re-record
a popular song for a TV commercial and they have to change 3 notes.

The Marma Spot:
Goals are important. They keep me focused. What goals have Little Friends
set for this year?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: We rarely set goals for ourselves, because we have a hard time dealing with disappointment. I would hate to re-read this interview in 5 years and see a whole list of things we didn’t accomplish. That would be embarrassing. We’ve had a bunch of really good years, but our success
(and the success of any individual project) depends so much on factors outside of our control. That’s been a very hard lesson for us to learn, because we always think we should just be working harder. Ultimately, the further you go in this business, the easier it is to handle something not panning out. When we started out, our thought was like, “That was our last chance to do _____, and it got screwed up,” but it’s never the last project, until it is
(in which case: Oh, shit).

Melissa: I think that because our career today is successful but also completely different from what we had expected it to be 5 years ago,
we’ve learned to manage our expectations. Or at least we’ve seen how arbitrary goals can be.

James: This year is a bad year to make goals. Like everybody else in the world, we are in total nesting mode right now.

Melissa: My goal is to board up all the windows and stock up on canned
goods and guns.

James: If I was going to just come out and say what I most wanted to do right now it would be a Little Friends book. Not a monograph, but something that was like 75% new artwork, themed; like a put on a record and look at the crazy picture book kind of book. And I don’t know the first thing about how to do it and I don’t know that many people in publishing and I don’t have a plan and THAT is the problem with goals.

The Marma Spot:
What projects are you currently working on at the moment?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: Pretty much all of our current projects are NDA. We just did an apparel thing for a thing, and a Europe apparel thing, and some other secret things. We basically live under the pointless shroud of corporate secrecy.

Melissa: We can talk about what we did last year! Last year we did a print campaign for Liberty Mutual that was fun. We did our first solo international exhibition, and the work we did for that was really cool. What else? It all blends together. I remember being busy.

James: We’re pretty excited about doing our next Bad Vibes print series, which is called “Lady-Friends.” It’s all designs about women, or of women;
I think it’s our first series that’s themed all the way through. The first 2 prints are already designed– they should come out in May or June. I guess we’ll see if people like them!

The Marma Spot:
Could you walk us through the steps that occur from the moment you are contacted by a client to the time the final art is delivered?

Little Friends of Printmaking:

James: There are various calls and e-mails and proposals and then I have to price out the job. I use the Guild handbook, which I know people complain about being on the high end of things, but I would prefer to eat and pay bills and so I like it. Then we get told, “yes,” or, “no,” and either we start working or go back to watching TV or watering plants. If there’s a brief, now we read it. Our sketches tend to be really simple and very, very small. Sometimes if it’s the first time we’re working with someone, we might go overboard with a rather overdeveloped sketch, but I don’t recommend that. We usually do at least two comps. This part of the process is really crucial for us. Research and concept is maybe the biggest part of what we do. We’re not stylists, so we have to have a good basis of ideas to work from. Comps get approved and/or we get notes. Then it’s time to make the final, or at least we hope it is the final. (This is why it can be very important to negotiate a fee for major revisions.) We work almost entirely in the computer. We save a bunch of in-progress gifs or gifs of major iterations of the image, for our reference.
We try not to send in-progress images to the client because it’s better if they reserve their judgment for the completed piece. It’s hard to art direct a little fragment or a unfinished primordial globule of something. There are friendly check-ins with the art director. At some point, weeks before the deadline,
the art director asks if he can see the finished piece. This is politely ignored. The final gets finished, and we send it off. Then there is waiting, waiting for approval, waiting for notes and revisions. This is a good time to start filling out an invoice. Make friends with the art buyer or the accountant. You might need their help to push your payment through. What, there are no revisions, because the client says you are too awesome? Hooray! 30 to 90 days later, you get a check in the mail. If they’re classy they send you samples.

The Marma Spot:
Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t already?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
Melissa: This is probably too long already! We’re two and we talk
enough for three.

The Marma Spot:
Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t already?

Little Friends of Printmaking:
James: Shout outs to you. This was awesome. Happy birthday to Mike Krol, good luck in the Nutmeg State. What’s up Josh; I saw you give a shout to us in that book—we felt like proud parents. Rezpekt to Justin Kay; bon voyage, duder.

The Marma Spot:
From us here at the Marma Spot thanks much for taking time out of your busy schedules to chop it up with us. It means more than you know.
peace+respect. To see more of The Little Friends work click here.