Flash back to the late 1960s and the parking lot of Southeast School in Sycamore. There, Michael McMillan is lined up with his partner and best-bud, Pete Johnson, waiting to launch their just-constructed paper airplanes and test the theories of aerodynamics that they’d learned in the classroom.
“Remember, the more streamlined the shape, the less air resistance,” his teacher had advised, announcing that the team with the farthest combined flight distance would be the winner.
Razor-sharp planes were cruising close to the pavement, nosediving fast.
That is, until Pete approached the line with his aeronautical magnum opus-a flat, unviolated piece of construction paper. Suddenly, he wadded up the paper into a ball and whipped it into the air, sending it soaring toward a blanket of clouds and twice as far as any of the leading contenders, McMillan recalls.
The kid crowd went wild. The scientific reality was challenged. And 6th grader McMillan says he learned a valuable lesson that he has used ever since as the flight pattern for his own life.
“It changed my way of thinking forever. It made me see how important it is to look at things differently, to take chances and to risk failure,” McMillan recalls.
Today, at age 35, Michael and his wife, high school sweetheart and senior prom date Anne, also 35, own and operate McMillan Associates, a mid-sized graphic arts firm in West Dundee. In just nine years, McMillan Associates has built a reputation as one of the most respected leaders in a highly competitive and crowded industry.
What’s more, the firm is fast gaining recognition in publishing circles, thanks to its most high profile project, the Michael Jordan volume titled “Rare Air.”
West Dundee may be a long way from Madison Avenue, but these days at least one industry leader is calling McMillan Associates “The Cover Girl of the Graphic Arts Industry.”
That’s not exactly what Michael McMillan and his team of 10 designers (Anne oversees the financial/administrative end of the business) were aiming for when they introduced San Mateo cabernet sauvignon to the board room, sent A.C. Nielsen Co. execs flying into orbit over the North Pole and shoved an Ameritech honcho to the edge of the cliff-on paper that is-in the corporate brochures, annual reports and promotion pieces they’ve produced.
No question, these are forward-thinking, signature styles-with-an-attitude, especially for the traditionally conservative suit set with whom they usually work.
But as Michael McMillan explains, most of the firm’s work involves taking a sophisticated idea and translating it into a fun, sometimes even sassy, concept that the honcho in the board room or the engineer can understand, but also the man on the street-the customers.
Indeed, industry leaders and corporate clients agree that the firm has anchored its business in creating award-winning visual communications, using an innovative approach to design for its international roster of corporate clients.
But it was putting Michael Jordan and his two sons, Jeffrey and Marcus, in a bubble bath, on the counter in his kitchen munching on Chicken McNuggets with the kids, and bare-chested on his bed sharing an especially poignant and personal moment with infant daughter Jasmine that recently launched McMillan Associates into the national limelight.
Some know success when they see it-and certainly, Michael Jordan is a name synonymous with the epitome of such. So no one had to tell the McMillans to go for it when the firm’s reputation as a top designing team earned it a spot among the list of dozens of contenders, and ultimately the assignment, to design “Rare Air” (Collins Publishers San Francisco).
It was an assignment completely out of the firm’s traditional corporate realm, and one that took McMillan and John Vieceli, vice president of design for the firm, into the Highland Park home of the sports hero, into the Bulls’ locker room and behind the putting green at the golf courses frequented by Jordan.
Indeed, “Rare Air,” which already has sold 83,000 hardcover copies ($55 each) and 617,000 paperback copies ($25) domestically and an additional 85,000 books overseas, offers a peek at the legendary sports hero’s life on and off the court.
The book combines the photographs of Sports Illustrated’s Walter Iooss Jr. of New York City with Jordan’s own words as reported and written by Mark Vancil, developer and coordinator for the “Rare Air” project and a writer who covered Jordan daily for 10 years when he worked for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and The National sports daily.
McMillan Associates designed the book. A reprint of 85,000 paperback and 10,000 hard cover is expected to sell out, according to the publishers.
The book’s author, Vancil, and publisher, Collins Publishers San Francisco, agree that it was the McMillan firm’s ability to express their corporate clients’ purpose with confidence and creativity that persuaded them to sign McMillan Associates onto the creative team.
Says Jennifer Barry, vice president/publisher for Collins, “Michael (McMillan) and his office did a superb job of sorting through a tremendous amount of photographs and distilling the key images to tell the story. We were very impressed at how they worked it over and over again in their own very unique and sophisticated approach to design.”
Adds Vancil, who first approached Jordan about doing a book in 1988: “In order to find a designer for the book, I started calling all the major printing houses to ask them who’d be best. Again and again, they were telling me about this dynamic firm in West Dundee. I’d already interviewed some impressive firms in New York, but I kept hearing about how impressive this operation was.”
In addition to singing praises for Michael McMillan’s design talents, Vancil says the book couldn’t have been written without Anne’s expertise.
Says Vancil, “She’s unbelievable. Even the editors at Collins were turning to her for questions about grammar. Plus, she’s a financial whiz, and that came into play here too.”
Coincidentally, Vancil also had grown up in Sycamore. He had attended the Catholic school in town, (where Anne also went and where she says the nuns taught her grammar), so the trio had mutual friends.
When the McMillan name kept popping up in printing circles he decided to pay his hometown casual acquaintances a visit in West Dundee. Not knowing what to expect in the suburbs, Chicago resident Vancil was impressed by the office almost immediately, he recalls.
Located along the Fox River, the view is pretty spectacular from inside this former grocery store-turned-dress-shop, which was gutted and rehabbed by the McMillans four years ago. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around the entire length of the building and offer visitors in the conference room and back offices, including Michael’s, a view of the river and the trees and homes that line it.
And then there’s the workplace itself, with high-vaulted ceilings and a simple sophistication, much like their designs, along with a lot of touches that are singularly the McMillans-a Bill Clinton light switch, and an easel proudly showing off black-and-white portraits of the McMillan clan, which includes Mark, 11; Paul, 9, and Sara, 6.
Vancil says it was “their extremely impressive operation, the kind that seemed to be doing everything you read about in those management excellence guides,” that convinced him they were the ones to design the book.
Obviously, Michael Jordan thought so, too.
McMillan got one chance to win over the superstar when he accompanied Vancil to a Bulls practice session at the Multiplex sports complex in Deerfield. Ducking news media and fans, Jordan shepherded Vancil and McMillan into a tiny office in the back.
“It was really strange because there you are wanting to be a fan, but you’ve got to be just professional,” McMillan recalls. “Michael kind of just checks you out intensely and sizes you up. It’s a lot to do with chemistry and trust.”
Until Michael Jordan and “Rare Air,” the firm’s work was all built on word of mouth, “doing one solid job for a corporate client, then another, and another,” McMillan says.
But today, while the corporate clients remain the core of the business, McMillan Associates and Vancil are working on plans for more similarly styled books. Discussions with a major fashion designer, a model and several sports personalities are under way.
Another book designed by the McMillan firm hit store shelves last month: “I Can’t Accept Not Trying: Michael Jordan on the Pursuit of Excellence” (CollinsPublishers, $12).
Certainly, the industry is taking notice of this less-than-a-decade-old West Dundee firm.
“McMillan Associates’ work with `Rare Air’ made them the cover girl of the graphic arts industry, and that was great for all of us here in Chicago who suffer because we’re located outside the major hubs for graphic design. It showed that geography has little to do with talent and good design,” says Steven Liska, principal of Liska & Associates in Chicago, a friendly McMillan design competitor and president of the 460-member American Institute of Graphic Arts/Chicago chapter.
“But, more so, Mike has always been regarded as a very professional practitioner of design,” Liska says. “He’s been at the forefront of supporting and educating the public about what our industry is all about. There is a whole group out there who thinks we’re decorators. He’s been very generous with his time and energy in raising this issue and the professional image of graphic design.”
Clients agree.
As the youngest of three children, McMillan honed his creative skills hanging out with guys like the aforementioned Pete, “the class Einstein,” he recalls. He remembers always aspiring for the creative.
Anne and Michael married in 1979 while students at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Both liked the place so much they hung out for “something like six or eight years,” he says, before he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in visual communication and she, a B.S. in communicative disorders.
Immediately following college, McMillan landed a beginner’s position with a small graphics design firm in Chicago, and Anne stayed home to care for their son. A year later, they launched their own business, operating out of the family duplex in Sycamore.
“I remember thinking the first year that we had really made it, when we grossed $125,000,” says Michael. Last year, the firm’s revenues topped $4 million.
No question, family is the core of the McMillan business. The children often accompany their parents to the workplace. Their sons’ fingerprints mark their presence on the wall above the doorway to dad’s office. And 6-year-old Sara’s Raffi tapes are spread across the floor in a corner family room/office. And the parents make it a point to be there for the children too. Dinnertime is family dinnertime at the McMillan house in Barrington even if it means traveling back to West Dundee to burn the midnight oil.
Both the McMillans know firsthand about the importance of lessons learned early in life.
Indeed, McMillan recounts his childhood paper plane enlightenment in a pocket-sized book, “Paper Airplane: The Flight of Change,” which he wrote, designed and self-published last year, and which he hands out free to interested folks. Recently, an exec at Jockey International ordered copies for all its sales reps.
“I thought it couldn’t get much better than this when we got the `Rare Air’ deal,” says Michael. “But it is starting to open some exciting doors for us.”
