If the Harvard Business School did studies on the value of first impressions, Xeno, the city`s most avant-garde graphic design firm, would surely be a textbook case.
From the moment you enter Xeno`s studio in a refurbished factory at 900 N. Franklin St. and meet its three partners, Chris and Patty Garland and Michael Neu, you sense that you`re in good hands–very creative, professional hands. No hipper-than-thou superiority or flaky artists here, even though Chris wears spiked-up blond hair and a tiny diamond earring.
They`re in the business of creating image and style for their clients and the image-building begins with their own. After shopping for more than a year, the Garlands, who are husband and wife, chose the former industrial building for its uniqueness and strength.
They left the concrete pillars and floors exposed and designed a spare free-flowing work environment punctuated with a judicious selection of color against black and white and the burly cityscape that a grid of windows reveals.
”Honesty keeps Xeno going as a business,” says Chris Garland. ”We play by the golden rule, and it extends into the overall esthetic. There is a certain beauty that comes from natural concrete, natural glass, natural metal. No polyester hanging around here.”
They dress deliberately, too. In the Garlands` case it`s casual clothes in minimalist black with perhaps a shot of white or a rich hue, while Neu, the account executive, favors natty business suits. Each has a perfect handshake, strong but not bonecrushing, and their manner is friendly without being pushy or obsequious.
Trio intrigue
Xeno`s clients talk almost incredulously about ”the experience” of working with the trio.
”They formed a relationship with us,” says Helen Doria, program coordinator in the Mayor`s Office of Special Events, which hired Xeno last year to show the city in a new, exciting light in tourism campaigns.
”Not only were they committed to us as a client but also committed to the integrity of our work. They strive for excellence. I`ve never worked with anyone quite like them before and I`ve worked with a lot of good people.”
Xeno was founded in 1981 when Chris left his job as an art director with the Playboy organization and Patty hers in the graduate medical evaluation section of the American Medical Association.
The word ”xeno,” which Chris Garland says he stumbled on, means
”stranger, foreigner, exotic.”
”I`ve always felt that amongst the design community that my work–and I guess my attitude as well–has stood unique,” he says. ”And I`ve never been embarrassed by that. I also wanted to not use a name such as Garland Design or Chris Garland Associates, so that anyone who worked here for us or was a supplier for us felt that no one person was overriding everyone else and that it could be considered a team effort.”
Xeno has been a resounding international success, winning awards in every major show including those of the Los Angeles and New York art directors clubs, American Institute of Graphic Artists, Society of Typographical Artists, Creativity Awards (New York), Graphis magazine (Switzerland) and Idea magazine (Japan).
The right stuff
A good part of Xeno`s early work was for the music and music video businesses and, for a time, they did work for City, the high-style River North emporium. But as the firm, which is also a full-service advertising agency, matured, the range of clients broadened to include such accounts as Spiegel Inc., Blue Cross-Blue Shield Association and International Harvester.
The Garlands hired Neu as account executive, a position other graphics studios eschew, believing that nobody but the artists can present the work. But Patty Garland knew it was possible if the ”right personality” had the job.
Neu, 32, a native Chicagoan who has an undergraduate degree in art and education and a graduate degree in psychology, was ideal. Married to Karen Meyer of the Illinois Attorney General`s office, he had been working as an art therapist until a combination of burnout and disillusionment (”too many incompetent people working in the hospital and patients not getting well”)
impelled him to change careers.
Gregarious and warm, Neu is the perfect diplomat but strong-minded enough to express the Xeno design view in dealings with clients.
”He has another viewpoint, a passenger`s viewpoint, which is helpful,”
says Patty Garland. ”He is excited about the work and he knows how to give and take–and give and take in our favor.”
Neu says his job has changed his life. ”There`s nothing to hide here,”
he says. ”You can be very proud of being a part of the organization and that`s really important to me.”
Patty, 28, and Chris, 34, are a package deal. ”Things wouldn`t have turned out the way you see them if the two of us hadn`t gotten together,”
says Chris. ”Who knows where we`d be? It wouldn`t be here.”
They met 12 years ago on a Wendella boat ride while Patty was home from a prep school in Concordia, Mo. It was love at first sight for Patty and she never returned to campus.
At one point, both were working for Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, Patty in public relations and Chris in the graphics department. When they married in 1976, Chris was starting out at Playboy and Patty worked in the media buying department at Leo Burnett Advertising.
Team players
The way they describe their collaboration, Chris focuses like a magnifying glass on the immediate design tasks, while Patty steps back to view the larger picture like a wide-angle lens.
”I can come up with concepts and ideas for the business and then together we would work creating that,” says Patty, who handles Xeno`s administrative work. ”I feel that someone looking at us should get a good sense of how we work–not just our portfolio but our whole attitude should be presented down to a business card or a paper clip that goes on a proposal.”
Clients describe her variously as ”the glue” or ”the technician who sees that it all happens.”
However, Chris Garland has the keenest technical mind. Brought up in Lexington, Mass., he had almost completed his training in engineering when he realized that his true interest lay in graphics. His father was an advertising man, so the terrain was familiar. He moved to Chicago to attend IIT and take a degree in graphic design and photography.
”I`ve always been a bit of tinkerer and an inventor,” he says. ”I built remote control airplane models when I was in high school. I built my own motorcycle and own two of them. I own a Porsche 944.”
The Garlands are always re-evaluating their thinking, their work and the accoutrements of their lives. They edit their wardrobes, record collection and furniture.
They`ve gone through four or five different sets of furnishings, living in bare space in between each one. And Chris sometimes lets his hair revert to its natural light brown and wears it in a style reminiscent of the post-Watergate H.R. Haldeman as though he is pausing to consider another artistic leap.
Seeing the vision
”The inner person always remains the same–and Patty, too,” he says.
”It`s really only now I`m making a better living that I can express myself more.”
That same filtering process informs the Xeno`s refined graphics style. As the prestigious Italian design magazine Modo describes it, Xeno`s ”ice graphics” are ”cold and metallic, incisively controlled, a logotype suggestive of functionalist culture and thinking.”
Yet Chris Garland does not mastermind graphics that only other designers can love. For example, Xeno`s work for Chicago`s summer festivals, using the image of the city`s Picasso sculpture as a departure point, is witty and bright but also hard-edged and exciting with the immediacy of a moment captured in time.
”From the beginning my honest attitude toward the work is that I`m creating public work,” says Chris. ”It should be colorful, it should be exciting, it should have some symbolic images that the majority of people relate to. At the same time, I try to create solutions that are kind of like a high ball pitch. It`s in the strike zone but it`s on the edge, you have to reach for it a little bit.”
He thinks in terms of design solutions that carefully consider a client`s request and then try to ”jet-propel” it.
Constantly on the alert, he seeks out all the visuals that are available from billboards and television to the latest Italian and Japanese design trends. He sifts it all and then follows his own mind. That process keeps Xeno well ahead of the pack.
Xeno has made a concerted effort to use Chicago talent, relying on a
”small group of friends” that includes artist David Csicsko and photographer Jim Matusik. They wonder why the city does not seem to attract and sustain a larger circle of creative talent, because lately they have been forced to hire out of Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
The Garlands remain in Chicago for a combination of reasons they say they would not fully understand unless they left. Before starting Xeno, Chris made a ”surprisingly unsuccessful trip” to New York City.
”I thought I was going to the Big Apple and could meet people with a lot of big ideas, but I found a lot of defensive individuals who were scared to death of being bumped from their positions,” he says. ”(It was), `Gee, you`ve got a great book, but get out of here before my boss sees you.`
”I decided to come back to Chicago, knowing that if I applied myself I could indeed do what I wanted to do. And so I sort of thumbed my nose at New York. And the rest is history.” —
