“We’re not the best-dressed guys,” says Jeff Johnson of himself and his 10-person shop, Spunk Design Machine. “And we’re kind of hairy.” Jeff refers to his own look as “Russian mystic trucker.”
Myself, I think they look fabulous. Their work absolutely does. Big clients like Target, General Mills, the New York Stock Exchange, and the University of Minnesota certainly concur.
But I’d say Spunk’s not about big. About 60 percent of Spunk’s work is for “small, innovative companies that are trying to compete with larger ones,” Jeff says. And as relentless local business journo and frequent TCB contributor Dan Haugen reported recently in The Line, the shop has made something of a specialty of “mission-oriented” work, for nonprofits like the Seward Co-op and Augsburg Fortress’s innovative Sparkhouse division. Spunk’s one-stop-shop capabilities include naming, logo design, interior and exterior design, product packaging, and interactive design.
What’s more, as Dan notes, Spunk’s been booming the past couple of years, despite the recession. Perhaps, I’d guess, because of it. Not that Spunk is the cheapest shop around. But its overhead is low, and it knows how to do more with less. And its projects are about more than making things look good—they influence for positive change. For instance, Spunk helped Galactic Pizza create a compostable pizza box that’s also a $1-off coupon (in order to get customers to return them for composting).
Jeff founded Spunk in 1996 while working at Fallon. “If Pat Fallon asked me to lay down in traffic, I’d gladly go and lay down in traffic,” he says. Jeff would do likewise for another early mentor, Joe Duffy. Both guided the North Dakota expat fresh out of Moorhead State University.
(Moorhead State, by the way, has produced a remarkable number of top local designers: Besides Jeff, they include Tim Larsen, Sharon Werner, Haley Johnson, and Travis Olson.)
Jeff originally opened Spunk in the Warehouse District. Seven years ago, he realized he didn’t need to be in that traditional creative center. Thanks to digital technology, “I can do what I do in a box in the desert, or on an ice floe off Greenland.” He moved Spunk to a former florist’s shop in Nokomis. It’s now another storefront business (in a way) at a neighborhood node that includes a shoe shop, supermarket, Italian restaurant, dentist’s office, bakery, bank, post office, library branch—you get the idea. It’s also close to his home: In fact, he gave up his car five years ago.
So Jeff’s a neighborhood guy. But a neighborhood guy with a very broad vision—and not just because his shop’s clients include companies in Switzerland and Hong Kong. He also loves to talk about agricultural and food policy (he owns the family farmstead south of Fargo), economics, and clean energy. He’s got informed opinions that are provocative, progressive, and fun. No reason why those traits can’t all go together.
Much of Spunk’s mission-oriented work reflects that mindset—I call it Spunktivism. Check out a recently went-live Web site called Fair Food Fight, in conjunction with a steady Spunk client, feisty Boston food cooperative Equal Exchange. Best known for its fair-trade coffee and chocolate, Equal Exchange has recently introduced fair-trade bananas—a fruit whose “production” has a less-than-appetizing history. Spunk’s work includes Web site design, point-of-sale materials, and a number of ancillary products, including this awesomely provocative T-shirt (the allusion’s to Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song).
Another Spunk project is a Web site for Principle 6, a kind of cooperative of cooperatives that will combine the purchasing power of several food coops (including Seward) across the country. (The name is derived from the list of cooperative principles as articulated by the Swiss-based International Cooperative Organization).
There's a lot more going on. Spunk opened a Brooklyn office a few years ago to accommodate a couple of valued employees that wanted to move to NYC—they’re spreading the Spunk gospel there, mostly with smaller clients. Jeff’s also gearing up for the next version of the Poster Offensive, which unites politically oriented poster artists from around the country, many of them local. (“The Twin Cities are a capital of poster design,” he says.)
With all the awesome technological possibilities for building new, innovative, socially responsible (and responsive) businesses—including his own, Jeff is enjoying himself in the right here right now. “I'm glad to be breathing at this point in time,” he says.
Comments