Bill McConaughy

The work

For forty years I made things for institutions: hospitals and medical schools, universities and opera companies, federal agencies, motion-picture studios and record labels, the Portland Trail Blazers, foundations and trade associations, and campaigns for housing and health. Some were household names. Some were three people in a borrowed office.

What I did for them: campaigns, identities, publications, exhibitions, illustration, and fundraising architecture — the structure underneath a campaign that decides whether it works before anyone sees a single piece of it. Some of that work was small. Some involved campaigns with budgets in the tens of millions, and the carefully saved money of people who had worked hard for it. That is the part worth saying out loud: the weight of being trusted with someone else’s reputation, and someone else’s money, for a long time.

I also taught: print and pre-press, color, calligraphy, papermaking, and bookbinding, at colleges and studios around Oregon.

Selected work and references are available on request.

What it costs

The work asked more of me than a portfolio can show. You are all in, all the time; the job isn’t over when you go home, it’s over when it’s right, and the deadline belongs to someone else. There is not much life to speak of while you’re inside it, and the stress of it is life-shortening. I carried deadlines and other people’s expectations home, and sometimes gave them time and attention that belonged elsewhere in my life. Retirement was a chance to recover some of that space. Returning now, I want to bring the care without rebuilding the exhaustion.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

How I work

Over forty years, I learned to take the trust behind a brief seriously — and to look for what I could bring to the work beyond what was asked.

People arrive with a job description, and the job description is almost never the whole of what they need; they have named the part they could see. My work is to paint the finished picture past the edge of the ask — to build a little further than the brief, so that what they end up holding is the thing they would have asked for if they had known it was available. I call that magical architecture, privately, with a straight face.

It only works if you listen harder than is comfortable, and longer than is billable.

How I regard the people I work with

I look for the light in people, and I usually find it. It tends to be somewhere they have stopped looking: in the sentence they apologize for before they say it, in the idea they think is too odd to mention, in the reason they took the job in the first place.

My side of the exchange is to make a place where that is safe — where a person can say the half-formed thing out loud and have it met with respect instead of efficiency. The work comes out better that way, though that is not why I do it. What I know how to do, I give away freely to the people I am working with. It has never cost me anything I regret.

The rest of it

I studied calligraphy under Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College, and the hand he taught is still in everything I draw. I play acoustic guitar with roots in jazz, R&B and folk, though I work the whole forge: folk to fusion, bebop to jukebox. Every genre is a room in the same house. You can hear the solo acoustic album, The Algebra of Winter, if you’re curious. I cook, and I pay close attention to the natural world, which has taught me more about structure than any design program ever did.

What I’m doing now

Studying, mostly — harder than I ever did when somebody was paying me to. Keeping up with what is happening in the world is its own slow indignity, and the only honest answer I have found is to get organized about it.

So I am connecting dots. There is a dusty shoebox of seeds under my bed: some of the best thoughts human beings have produced, which I am trying to shoehorn into something a person could actually pick up and use. I have enlisted friends and family and a highly competent needling committee, whose job is to tell me when I am wrong. And I have been writing — chamber plays, motion-picture concepts, ways this place might become itself again.

I take my cues from people like Carl Sagan, and from groups like BD Clean, the Bangladeshi young people who decided to clean up their own country and then went and did it. We have built a central nervous system for the species and we mostly use it to argue. It would be a shame not to turn some of that light on what we have in common.

The Civic Record

The Civic Record is the first piece of a longer list. The rest of what the Circle is working on is set down here, unfinished and open to correction: the initiatives.