My Creative Hero: How My Highschool Art Teacher Sparked My Love of Art Direction

Chris Lange is the founder & chief creative officer at MONO. Chris is driven to simplify the way agencies work: with each other, with clients, and with a diverse approach to creative solutions. His leadership in MONO’s thoughtful, design-centric approach to developing innovative creative has led to award honours ranging from Communication Arts to Cannes Lions to AIGA design. Prior to MONO, Chris worked as an art director and developed international award-winning campaigns for Porsche, BMW, Dyson, and PBS. The PBS ‘Stay Curious’ campaign garnered an Emmy and is part of the permanent collection at MOMA in New York.

LBB> Who would you say is your creative hero?

Chris> My high school art teacher. His name was Robert Anderson, but we all called him Doc. I’m not sure why. Maybe he had a doctorate? He always looked very professorial. I went to a public high school in Minnesota in the late 1980’s and we actually had a lot of art classes to choose from, but I do think choosing Doc’s class helped set me on the career path that I have now.

 
LBB> Why is the person such an inspiration to you? 

Chris> First, I think I was fascinated by him because in addition to working at the school and being an artist in his own right, he had a small advertising agency on the side. I hadn’t ever really thought about advertising until I heard about that.

More importantly, he just encouraged us to create. I started getting into photography when I was in his class. Every student got a roll of film each week for an assignment, and we had a darkroom in the classroom. We’d shoot the film and develop most of it right there. Doc knew how much I enjoyed photography and one day he told me to stay after class, took me into the stockroom and just started loading me up with film—I remember holding my tee-shirt out to carry it all!

Sometimes there would be an assignment where Doc would tell us what to take pictures of, but most of the time I just looked for an interesting juxtaposition of images. I actually put together a show of my work and then the school hired me to do all of their photography. I was doing these crazy slideshows for the school district where I had two projects with carousels of 35-millimetre slides and a mixer with an audio recording. It was very high-tech for the time—I could program the slides to switch when I wanted them to and make the images dissolve into each other long before computers.

As much as I loved photography, somehow or another I decided that I didn't want to do that as a vocation. I knew I’d want to be more of a fine art photographer, and I was worried that that wasn’t really a job. 

LBB> Is that when Doc inspired you to go into advertising?

Chris> Not quite. First, I thought I’d go into architecture.

I was always fascinated by it. I remember I did one of those slideshows just for Doc’s art class, all about architecture. My school also had an architecture class. I took that and designed a house and built a model of it and everything. I actually won an award for it. I thought I’d found what I wanted to do. 

My mum worked in an architecture firm at the time and brought me to work with her one day and I was jazzed. A bunch of the architects took me out to lunch and asked me why I wanted to have their jobs. I told them that I loved creating things and seeing the things I created manifest in the real world. Then they all said the same thing: “Don’t become an architect.” Basically, they said you're going to design public restrooms and office buildings for 20 years, and then maybe you'll get to be one of the senior designers on an actual project. They said all the really famous architects owned their own firm. 

They really took the wind out of my sails. I don’t know why I thought I had to have my career figured out in high school, but I clearly did. 

I went back to school the next day and told Doc how demoralised I was. He handed me a copy of ‘Communication Arts’ advertising annual and said read this tonight and we’ll talk tomorrow. I loved the ideas in the book; the concepts and then the visuals that played with the words. Doc was the one who told me that art direction was a career. Not only that, he also arranged for me to spend a couple of days with art directors at an agency in the area. That’s really what launched my career.

LBB> So, he got you started in your career. Do you think he still influences your approach to your creative work? 

Chris> I think he turned us all on to the idea of a concept. Sometimes he would give us advertising assignments. I remember one was to design a billboard for the Minnesota Timberwolves. It wasn’t just about the visuals on the billboard, though, he pushed us about the idea behind it. I think his time in advertising had taught him about the importance of a concept and he passed that on to us. Our work couldn’t just be taking a pretty picture or making something that was beautiful, there had to be an idea embedded in it.

That’s one of the reasons I love advertising. You have a client with a business problem, and you have to come up with a concept that solves this problem. You can’t just do anything you want, you have a defined box that you have to ideate in. That constraint forces you to think of a concept and be creative.

LBB> Have you kept in touch with Doc over the years? 

Chris> I wish I could say I had and that I really let him know what an inspiration he was to me, but sadly we lost touch after college. I’d visited him a few times at the school after I graduated but when I went a few years later he’d retired, and the school wouldn’t tell me how to contact him. I tried to find him, but you have no idea how many Robert Andersons there are in Minnesota.

LBB> Is there something you’d want him to know if you were still in touch?

Chris> I still read ‘Communication Arts’. In fact, a number of years ago I got to be a judge for the Advertising Annual. I went to dinner with the man who ran it (his father had started the magazine), and his family and told them the story of Doc handing me that magazine and launching my career. That would have been a fun story to tell Doc.