Golden Apples Design

/**
 * @article	Metallo Arts 
 *
 * @since	April 23, 2009 
 * @package	Identity, Photography, Website 
 *
 
 *
 */

This one I’m a little ambivalent about including in my portfolio. I was employed for over a year by Metallo Arts, a kind of a one-man interior-design-startup-cum-con-job. In the end, my job came to an abrupt end when the “CEO” of the company split town, stiffing me and other employees out of several months pay, leaving behind tens of thousands of dollars in vendor debt and screwing over all his investors to the tune of maybe two hundred thousand dollars total. There’s a very good novel to be written about that story; maybe someday I’ll get around to it…

In the end, I decided to include this in my portfolio for a couple reasons. One, my name is still listed on their website as the VP of Design… no matter how many times I’ve asked to be removed. So if my name is going to continue to be associated with the swindle that was Metallo Arts, I might as well take the opportunity to put out my side of the story. And two, for better or worse, being there—like trying to put lipstick on a pig a lot of times—helped me really clarify my ideas on ethical design, integrity and honesty. Finally, despite everything, I do stand behind a lot of the design decisions I made while employed there. While a lot of the projects which were important to me were rushed through and not given the time or budget necessary to really do them well, I think I made some stuff that was really pretty.

When I first started out with the company, it was essentially an idea without a product. I spent I don’t know how long photoshopping every cobbled-together prototype we could come up with to try and get something impressive-looking that could be used on a website and possibly end up in a magazine or something. Some of these really took off—this picture I made of a Warhol-themed range hood ended up getting reprinted in KBB, Kitchen and Design News, This Old House, and a whole bunch of other industry publications. Funny looking back on it now, but somehow this kind of concept really stuck with people.

Let me be clear, I’m not opposed to creativity at all. I don’t even really have a thing against companies embellishing a little in their self-promotion. I’m well aware of how capitalism works. An unfunded startup needs to present their vision in a compelling way in order to break into a marketplace that’s dominated by older, established companies. And one thing we did have, in abundance, was vision.

So, a fairly slick—if low-tech—website, a few dozen carefully retouched photos, and a couple actually completed jobs were enough to get noticed on the level with the big competitors and start drawing some media attention. Up to that point, I don’t have any issues with how things were done. I think the point where things started to seem really shady for me was the whole take on social engagement.

My design background was in street art and activist propaganda, and that really colors my take on design ethics a lot. I don’t have an issue with attention-grabbing stunts, but I’ve always felt that the goal of any successful artistic project is always to break through barriers and stimulate real and honest conversations among people, between consumers and producers, between the public and the company, etc. Even in the projects I was involved in that were intentionally anonymous, the main concern in design and messaging was to maintain a certain level of essential honesty about who was speaking, what was being said, and what place the project had in the public dialogue as it existed.

I’m a firm believer in transparency and social engagement, and I started to get real uncomfortable when the company’s CEO started to pull dishonest public relations stunts with no apparent ethical justification at all. Posting daily under a dozen aliases to message boards and forums and putting out intentionally misleading information through the company blog were bad enough. Lying to clients about the status of their jobs and the materials and construction methods used was a step further. And finally, getting all paranoid and trying to enforce NDA’s with threats of lawsuits on all his employees was just laughable.

Look, we live in a pretty decent world to be a startup in any industry. No matter what industry you’re in, you can get started with a good idea and a small investment. This tabletop was created with probably $50 in materials, and an investment in tools and machinery that wasn’t more than $15K tops. And its a damn pretty tabletop, even without the photo retouching. Now, selling a product like that means you’d be competing with plenty of established, well-funded furniture companies, so you’d have to be on your toes. There’d be pressure to continue innovating, marketing, and communicating with clients and distributors. That’s the prospect I thought I was getting into working for Metallo Arts. Instead, I ended up being instructed to lie to customers about how the products were made, make up stories to feed to the media and the industry press, and generally present a false image of the company.

Lying turns out to be a lot more work and pressure than being honest. I finally realized after trying, and failing, to explain this fact to the CEO for years, that he had a little more to hide than I had initially thought. Last I heard, he was down in Savannah running a couple new companies. All using my photography and product copy. A couple of them still using the original websites that I built.

Bitter? Moi?

Edit (7-15-10): After receiving a libel complaint from Christopher Plummer, my former employer at the company, I’ve taken down some of the personal information in my original writeup. I believe that my initial points about the company—and my design work there—still stand, however.