Designer Peter McClelland is the modern self-made man.
Pete McClelland, a 22-year-old designer at the hotshot brand consulting and design firm Landor, is clicking through his web site, greyisgood.com. "It’s purely for me," he says. "It’s not for friends, for money, for publicity." It features wacky one- to four-minute films that McClelland directs, shoots, edits and sometimes acts in. He may do the site for himself—and given how his ever-active brain works, he probably needs the outlet—but the site attracts 9,000 visitors—not "hits" or "clicks" but distinct visitors—every day. Most companies would kill for that kind of traffic. "It kind of freaks me out," McClelland says.
If you visit greyisgood.com—where, for instance, you’ll see McClelland playing basketball with a chicken in his mini-movie "Gregg & Me"—you may get hooked yourself. McClelland’s brain has some finely tuned synapses in the humor region. But after a few more short films, you may begin to wonder what’s really going on inside his head. And how it gets there. To understand, it helps to visit McClelland’s world, starting with his most prized possessions.
A Dead Plant.
Sitting prominently in McClelland’s cube at Landor is a handsome ceramic planter with a large—and dead—plant inside. The attached card reads, "Please accept this planter as our apology." McClelland received the plant—alive—during his second week on the job. But he didn’t understand the cryptic message until he learned that he was supposed to have received flowers. The planter was the intended make-good. McClelland laughs as he fondles the dry leaves. He explains that he intends to display the planter and its apologetic message until he quits or gets fired. It’s more apt to be the former.
His boss at Landor, creative director Richard Westendorf, says that after encountering greyisgood, he was "so enamored that, even though we didn’t have a position open, we didn’t want to miss getting him on the team." So Westendorf created McClelland a job.Westendorf is particularly fond of "Mandi," one of the greyisgood films. It captures McClelland jumping up and down on his bed while wearing Homer Simpson slippers. The romp is accompanied by Barry Manilow’s sappy tune, "Mandy." "A lot of people Pete’s age are dark and cynical," says Westendorf, "but you watch this piece and you want to meet him." McClelland’s not all bed-jumping. The film "Bottled" proves that point. Acompanied by an edgy soundtrack, a drunken woman breaks glass in the kitchen sink then spreads the shards across her bed and lies down on top of them. Ouch.
McClelland may not be as dark-minded as some of his peers, but he’s not entirely Giggles the Clown either. Not surprisingly, a mind like McClelland’s will often wander. "Sometimes you have to push him to go a little further," says Westendorf. "But when he does, wow!" Landor’s Cincinnati office recently collaborated with the Paris office on a design project for a Fortune 500 firm. Landor ultimately presented, with great pride, five ideas to the client. Three of them were McClelland’s. "Pete doesn’t follow directions so much as ‘interpret’ them," says his sister Holly McClelland, a marketing director in Detroit. That might explain why McClelland opted, at the least minute, not to attend UC’s DAAP. He then enrolled in the Art Institute of Cincinnati. Then dropped out. "Not to sound pigheaded or anything, but I felt I knew everything," he says. "And I felt that the school wanted to form you into the artist they wanted you to be. And I didn’t want that." McClelland doesn’t want any school, any TV show, any anything to tell him how to be.
Old Men Photos.
McClelland, who has a soft, easygoing way about him, lives in Over-the-Rhine, which is neither soft nor easygoing. He moved there a month after the riots. "I took a lot of shit for that," he says. But he doesn’t see what the big deal was, or is. He walks to and from work, Central Parkway serving as his mental dividing line between his personal and professional lives. Resting on a bookshelf inside his tidy 13th Street loft is a one-by-two-foot framed black-and-white photograph, taken in 1927 at the annual gathering of the Institute of American Meat Packers. The photo captures 600 suited men sitting down at banquet tables. All eyes are staring directly at the camera’s lens, and you can clearly see the expressions of those meat packers in the foreground. Some look downright bored. Some drunk. Others nearly possessed. McClelland smiles. He has other "old men" photos on display. "I like the technique of the photography, the clothes, the background, the oddness of them," he says. "He was into retro before retro was cool," says his sister Holly. "As a young person it was always weird that he liked old stuff." Given that he’s still a young person, it’s still a bit weird. McClelland works out with a buddy at the Butterfield Recreation Center on Garfield Place, which caters to senior citizens.McClelland’s a regular at the Burlington Flea Market and the Florence Antique Mall. He searches for old men photos, of course, as well as vintage cameras and film projectors. And, he says, he always keeps an eye out for "silly, cheap stuff like little Santa dolls." Of course, Santa’s an old guy, too, about as old as they come. Same can be said of Jesus.
A Painting of "Short Jesus".
Hanging in McClelland’s loft is a brightly colored painting of Christ holding a lantern. "It looks like Jesus has a really big head or is really short." McClelland snickers like a schoolboy with a dirty picture. He owns several other religious paintings and kitsch, including a Jesus bath mat. In high school, McClelland spent a lot of time at Friarhurst Church between Mariemont and Terrace Park. He liked its more liberal and open approach to spirituality. He doesn’t attend church these days, but he makes time every week to write in his journal or otherwise reflect on life. Holly says that there’s a "super-traditional side" to Pete. "He’s the first to suggest baking Christmas cookies," she says, "the first to organize an Easter egg hunt." It’s one of McClelland’s more enigmatic qualities. He’s clearly bright and different—the person who nominated him for this issue of the magazine referred to him as an "odd genius"—yet there are things about him that are most normal, almost too much so. He grew up in comfortable Terrace Park. He played a year of football and a year of golf at Mariemont High School. He had a small bit in the class production of Father of the Bride. He was even the prom king.
But beneath the normal always lurks something darker. McClelland likes to point out that his loft building has housed both a maker of ice cream treats for kids and a casket manufacturer. McClelland’s web site is funny and, at the same time, disturbing. He works out several times a week and smokes Camel Lights. He may be 22, but he’s already figured out both sides of the artist: the destroyer and the creator.
Hostess Fruit Pie Wrapper.
McClelland’s always had a thing for the visual arts. His other sister, Candace McClelland, a teacher in Tacoma, Wash., (and the star of "Bottled") recalls how, at age 6, McClelland drew images taken from advertising, like the Nike swoosh. In high school, McClelland started his own company for detailing cars. He called the operation "Details Deluxe," a name that makes him laugh with embarrassment today. To get the word out, he created flyers and business cards. McClelland’s design sensibilities lean toward the clean and simple. A Hostess Fruit Pie wrapper with its seemingly timeless icon and type treatment hangs in his cube. It reminds him of the power of simplicity. "It’s a super-brand that hasn’t changed in 30 years, and I like that," says McClelland. The name greyisgood comes from McClelland’s experiences at the ad agency Northlich, where he worked in the interactive division. Many of his concepts there utilized the color gray, and he was often teased about it. "Grey is good" became something of a mantra for him.
Interestingly, McClelland is red-green colorblind. It’s perhaps another reason for his love of things gray and simple.Last year McClelland produced a poster for Romeo and Juliet at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. The lean design had one striking image: a handgun. Simple, and utterly unexpected. This simplicity shines through in his work for such clients as shipping company Cendian, financial services firm Vanguard, and the company formerly known as Phillip Morris, Altria Group.
A Mutt Named Gillespie.
One Sunday a year and a half ago, McClelland got the urge to buy a dog, specifically a boxer. His sister Candace told him he wouldn’t find a nice one at the pound. When the search proved futile here in town, they went looking elsewhere. They ended up at a pound that resembled a glorified trailer, at the end of a dirt road in Indiana farm country. There he found Gillespie, an 18-month-old boxer mix. With pride, McClelland describes this as one of the most spontaneous things he’s done. McClelland’s a big fan of spontaneity. "Work-wise, I don’t brainstorm, I don’t sketch, I just dive in and whatever happens, happens," he says. Same for his web site: "All the films are spontaneous, no scripts, no plots, nothing." Check out the work entitled "Gillespie" for a good dose of spontaneous love between McClelland and his favorite boxer mix.His reading habits are spontaneous, too. Every other month or so he’ll jump from one book to another in rapid-fire-sequence and then stop reading for a month, maybe longer. He likes to read books by the same author in succession "to see how he or she changes the style, feel and perception." He recently read Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, Survivor and Lullaby.
A Burt Reynolds T-shirt.
Candace says McClelland has been funny all his life. "It was a mean funny and still is at times," she says, "we just find it funnier now." A look at his film "Beth Snodgrass" will give you a taste. It’s about a heavy-set woman looking for a modeling gig.The McClelland siblings have an annual tradition; with a group of friends, they go camping at East Fork State Park in Clermont County. McClelland always arrives early to pitch the tent and hang out with Gillespie. Last year, McClelland designed a T-shirt for the camp-out attendees. It featured the image of Burt Reynolds. (Once again, old guys were reaching through time to speak to Pete.) Later he created a large piece of art that he calls "Burt & Ernie." It features an image of Burt Reynolds paired with the Muppet, and the point is that Reynolds looks goofier than the fuzzy puppet. But McClelland didn’t do it just for laughs. "What I tried to do with that piece," he says, "was to merge traditional painted art with digital art. I want to make people realize that graphic design is an art just like painting or sculpture." To help make his point, the large piece was printed on canvas to "give it more of a ‘true art’ feel." McClelland doesn’t do anything just for laughs.
There’s always a message between the chuckles, maybe something just a little dark. Like the look in the eyes of those celebrating meat packers. Something not entirely happy, but not entirely sad, either. Something in between. Something gray. |
