Seb McLauchlan

A lot of the people who I graduated with had a single-minded goal that after Massey they would get a job at Wētā Workshop. One of the most talented designers I have ever met was at uni, Reuben Smith who joined Wētā straight after study. He was unbelievable and basically taught the whole digital design class, and at 20 knew more than some of the tutors. He just chipped away and learned programs like Maya and ZBrush all in his own time out of class.

Massey had some incredibly gifted teachers. There was a teacher of mine, Lee Jensen, who passed away very suddenly three years ago, and he was just incredible. Not that the other tutors weren’t good, but he was just an unbelievably natural teacher and had such a giving, generous, curious demeanour to himself. We would walk around the campus and have the most interesting conversations about everything. 

This was at a stage where I didn’t know anything about anything, and he would drop all of these design references for me to look at and I totally ate it up. Lee was such a massive part of my experience at Massey, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. But for the first couple of years, it was honestly quite lonely.

The feedback I’d always get from my teachers at high school was that I was naturally quite intelligent and gifted, but I would just never really apply myself. I would do the minimum to get by, and I really didn’t give a shit about it or care about marks and stuff because I knew it didn’t really matter. Once I got to actually choose what I wanted to do at Massey I became really driven. 

I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to be better than other people and get the opportunities that I felt I needed. I wasn’t very good at group projects and was very independent. I’m certain that people who worked with me on some of those group projects thought I was a total dickhead, and it’s because I just couldn’t let go of control. 

I knew that I was going to execute this better than them, so I just did it myself. It was probably also one of the first times I’d ever had to work with other people, and it didn’t come naturally to me. I would try to use papers that other people didn’t use, come up with format ideas that other people didn’t try, and use references or content that people wouldn’t consider. I would constantly try to do things other people didn’t, to continue to move me into a different space. I also didn’t really have a huge social clique and it was more: come in, do the work, leave.

There were loads of opportunities there, and I’d be trying to get internships and work placements all the time. I went twice to Shanghai on an internship with my sister’s company, and they asked me to come back as a freelancer because it went so well. Those experiences taught me a lot, actually working in the real world and getting people to ask you to do something within a certain amount of time and to not fuck it up. And if you do fuck it up, you have to work late and get it done.

That was a big credit to Massey and happened in my final year. I wanted to get into drawing fonts, and it came through discovering Kris Sowersby’s blog. When I read it for the first time it was at one of the lowest points of my life personally: looking back on it, I was probably depressed and didn’t know it. I didn’t even understand what that meant, and was putting a lot of pressure on myself with the degree. 

So reading Kris’s blog, I found this guy who lived in the same town as me, had a pretty similar biography to me, went to Wanganui Polytechnic, was in his late 20s like me and he was already killing it. He was the first person who articulated design on a level that I could fully understand.

It was really like the director’s cut again for me, going back to the Lord of the Rings reference. ​‘This is how I make this font. This is how deeply I’m thinking about these shapes.’ And he wrote so well, his vocabulary was great, but also it was a very simple way of writing and easy to follow. It was a revelation: here’s this guy who was taking what he’s doing this seriously, and at that moment, because of what was going on in my life, I decided I needed to be just as passionate.

I realised this is what it takes to actually do this thing. I clicked that there are 90 people in my class, and this is just one class and one uni, and there’s probably about 1000 people every year graduating with a design degree in New Zealand. How many of us are actually going to get a job? How many of us are going to get paid and get to work on great projects, enjoy their lives and get out of student debt and all of that?

I needed to get my shit into gear, and I loved the idea of drawing type. I love the idea of the craft — typesetting, paper materiality, good coding. I drafted an email to Kris, saying ​‘I’m a big fan, can you teach me everything you know because I want to learn?’ I had the presence of mind to read it back, and it was just all about … me. How is this guy going to receive this email? 

He kind of figured it out himself and had Christian Schwartz mentoring him via email,  he just learned by doing it. So I’m pretty sure this guy is going to tell me to just learn it for myself. And honestly, knowing Kris now, I’m sure he would have said ​‘Sorry, mate, but you’re going to have to figure this one out on your own.’

So I started emailing Grilli Type asking for feedback on my pretty average type designs. I had no idea what I was doing and they did, so I thought what could I lose?

The first round of feedback was literally telling me my work sucked and I should keep drawing. And then I would reply every few months over the year and slowly the work got better. They were asking for interns, and I think they were very intrigued by the idea of someone from New Zealand coming to Switzerland as I was their first intern. To Massey’s credit they realised that this was an amazing opportunity and said I needed to go and do this, and they created a paper for me and awarded me credits so I wouldn’t have to take a semester off.

Noël Leu and Thierry Blancpain at Grilli Type opened so many doors for me, and that experience alone gave me a lot of confidence and validation. I was suddenly being held to a very high standard, whereas before it had been more about fun.

It’s also about judging the situation. I’d certainly had enough experiences with people who I knew weren’t my people. You can tell within one minute whether the body language is right, and I’ve had enough experiences reaching out to people where it didn’t work. And I knew when it did: this is someone to keep talking to; this is someone to share and continue to give energy to. Getting that job at OK-RM gave me so much confidence to be able to hit people up and connect.

For some people who maybe don’t have those anchors or pillars in their life, or that confidence, it is really difficult. I see it in some of the students who I’ve taught who aren’t so confident, and trying to get them to connect is quite hard.