Agent Provocateur: Bill Cahan

“There is nothing cool about me,” says Bill Cahan, totally deadpan. “I’m the Antichrist of cool.” He might be believable were he not sitting in the very cool conference room of his very cool office, surrounded by his cool projects, showing an achingly cool three-minute video that bombards one with over 500 images of his firm’s creation, with the Killer’s Mr. Brightside blasting as a soundtrack.

“I have an ironically safe personal life,” insists the creative guru, founder of Cahan Associates, the legendary SF-based design company that has garnered an unprecedented number of awards for its work. “My New Year’s resolution was to have no fear and to do things that make me uncomfortable,” says Cahan, allowing that in his professional life, that is already a given. Controversy, making people nervous, and flirting with the tension between appropriateness and self-expression is his creative modus operandi.

Cahan & Associates, according to its founder, is the embodiment of “smart contrarian thinking.” The company rose to prominence creating fresh and exciting annual reports, a previously “boring” form, specializing in design-resistant industries. Bill found himself inspired by the dissonance between the mundane environment present in these companies, which are nevertheless quietly revolutionary, as they are changing the way business is done. But, as he is quick to add, he doesn’t do annual reports anymore. For one, due to Enron-style affairs, innovative reports were seen as adding to the disingenuous nature of what certain companies were doing. Besides, Cahan is a novelty seeker, and his company was ready to move on to different things. “We’re basically a 23-year old startup,” he says proudly. The challenge at this point lies in building new businesses and agencies within the company while dealing with the sheer volume of new projects.

It sounds like this New York boy, who started out as an architect and never studied graphic design, has been hugely successful in his career conversion from 3D to 2D. But Cahan stresses that he is much less motivated by potential success than by the fact that each new job is an opportunity to fail. In his wallet is a crumpled Julian Schnabel quote about working without a script: “If you can't surprise yourself, how do you expect to surprise anyone else?" On Cahan Associate’s latest project, an advertising campaign for accessories giant Aldo, the photographer was basically shooting what Bill describes as “unchoreographed chaos” in order to try to depict pure joy through “authentic moments in time”. The client was stressing out, asking Cahan, “what’s going to happen?” “I’m not sure,” was Cahan’s gleeful reply.

Cahan seems to get a kick out of things that don’t exactly work out as planned. In fact, the company’s current website does not feature any of their work, just a simple caption that reads “Seeking Greatness” and a short video featuring a shaky close-up of Bill talking about the company at a brainstorming session, saying things like “We’re not going to talk about branding today, we’re not gonna talk about strategy, we’re not gonna talk about our process, our people, our great clients, we’re not going to talk about anything. You know why? Because it’s boring.” Reaction to the video has been virulent, spawning YouTube spoofs and blog rants about Cahan’s arrogance and pretentiousness. “Yes, it’s got that Andy Kauffman annoyance factor to it,” smiles Bill, who is not arrogant but concedes that he might come across that way, even if “I’m confident about some things, not about others.” But he doesn’t mind because making people uncomfortable is a good thing. And he certainly hasn’t bothered to take the film off the website.

Cahan Associates’ book, I am Almost Always Hungry, which came out in 1999 but still feels new, attempts to illustrate a small fraction of the devouring creative passion that goes into each of the company’s projects. Though Bill is constantly finding inspiration, it is not quite so obvious as coming across a classic painting and having a “wow” moment. Rather, for him, inspiration lies in the tension between intent and execution. Cahan cites some of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, with the friction between a staid Helvetica font, for example, and the statements or exclamations they are making. Cahan describes the best art show he has ever seen: an expo in LA featuring works by autistic and schitzophrenic artists. He describes the “impossible color combinations” and brilliance, which reminds him of a painting class he attended, in which the instructor attempted to “challenge your core belief system” by giving assignments like “what would you paint if you were insane?”

Cahan says he is “cynical” about design today. There is an overload of design, and especially a lot of copying. “The world is over designed,” says Cahan, who cites London as an example of a city he has a love-hate relationship with because, in becoming over-designed, it is beginning to lose its “rawness and unpredictability.” Cahan mentions that he travels a lot to overcome boredom- does he find other cities more inspiring? “Inspiration is in moments, it doesn’t matter where you are,” he says. He also stresses that, in the case of his company, he is just a small part of the creative process. Though he is the “catalyst and provocateur,” much inspiration also comes from collaboration with his creative team. Here too, it seems there are few constants and few rules. “We are competitive yet collaborative, we share well here. We have no rules. Maybe we could use a few,” laughs Cahan. “We work together because on any given day there is no guarantee that one person will nail something, we need to push to the next level.” Then again, he worries that sharing too nicely can sometimes bring out the “lowest common denominator.”

Cahan Associate’s success means that Cahan has the luxury of being able to actively seek out a balance in the projects they accept. Companies they work with need to represent certain core values, which is one of the reasons they accepted to work with Aldo despite initial reticence. Cahan says he doesn’t respect certain fashion companies because they “make people feel bad about themselves.” But Aldo had an AIDS campaign in ’87, before it was “cool.” And projects for innumerable large companies such as the vodka brand for which he brainstormed on “redefining what a vessel might be” are balanced by giving back in some way, “doing the right thing.” The firm has always done work for non-profits but now has created the Circle Foundation, a dedicated organization within Cahan Associates headed by Crystal Vann, a senior account manager who specializes in nonprofit branding. Their first client was The Institute for OneWorld Health, the first non-profit pharmaceutical company in the U.S. “It’s like putting Karma points back in the bank,” smiles Cahan. Now if he could only do something about that boring, uncool life of his.