“You can ask anything you want.” Thus begins my conversation with Richard Haines, better known as Designerman NYC, blogger extraordinaire behind
What I Saw Today. Haines occupies a unique position in the blogosphere as one of its top illustrators—or should I say 'quick-draw artists',
zing—and is known for impressionistic sketches that add an element of louche sophistication to whomever he's turned his eye onto. (He even drew me! Ah! That's the manliest I've ever looked, by far. You can see what I was wearing that day
here.) Read on as Haines and I talk drawing, dating, and why Bushwick is where dreams come true...
FP: So I've read a little bit about your background in previous interviews you’ve done, but it’d be interesting to see what you think the importance of blogging is and where you think it’s going. The internet is obviously something you’ve been able to kind of leverage, especially...later in your career [laughter/nervous giggle].
RH: The twilight years?
Well you’re not Tavi, or…
I’m 61. It’s been five years now and I usually do this thing on my blog where I thank everyone, but I forgot to do it this year because I’ve been so busy. But that says a lot. I mean, I think for me, because I really remember life before the internet, this is all still kind of astounding and mind-blowing. That I could just start a blog, really with nothing…I mean, I had a scanner and a laptop, just like everyone else. And I was at a crossroads with my career as a designer...I wasn’t getting the work that I wanted. I had a small business making shirts and that was really floundering and I just thought, well, there’s no overhead in drawing and posting it. And I remember the first drawing I scanned and put up. It was an amazing thing to just have that ability to have my voice, unedited and out there where people could respond to it. And it’s really been like that ever since.
I feel like five years ago in the blogging game is such a difference, it's so dramatic. That’s the old guard, if you will. 2008 is worlds away. We have a girl at work who’s doing some illustrations and doing it all on an iPad with a stylus…the idea of drawing and scanning that in, I guess we may have done that a few years ago, but now? Have you ever thought about switching mediums?
I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind—I mean, I’ve seen people do amazing things with digital and the possibility of it is really wonderful. But there’s something that just feels incredible to me about a charcoal pencil and a piece of paper that I can’t really duplicate. What I do is very basic, it’s very primal. But I kind of like that. It works for me.
I think it’s good that you have something that’s so...not off the grid, but offline. That’s so disconnected from constantly looking at a screen. A lot of photographers and people who are blogging constantly...it’s just incessant screen to face time. To be offline and to be disconnected is probably very healthy.
I mean, it’s healthy for me. I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil. Now the idea of scanning something and writing a caption and downloading it is just like, oh my god, that’s so much time, you know? I just want to shoot it and Instagram it. It’s amazing. And when I first started to blog, people would come and leave these lengthy comments and I would go to other people’s blogs…and that’s how it started, it was really viral. I would say, “I see you like fashion blogs, I just started a fashion blog, here’s my link.” And now the idea of people even leaving comments is this kind of charming and old school. Now it’s just like, ‘like.’ The attention span is really changing.
I think it’s because of the way people can have those conversations on social media now and connect online on so many platforms. You just don’t need to be leaving a blog comment anymore, it's just an endless stream.
I think Facebook changed that with the ‘Like’ button and Tumblr changed it because if you like it you’re just going to repost it. It eliminated a comment.
Do you think that it’s harder to start a dialogue, per se? Or have you found over the years that your feedback has changed at all?
No, people don’t leave comments on the blog but people still have a real need to connect. So now people connect with me through Facebook chat. People from all over the world talk to me through Facebook chat. It’s really amazing. Other illustrators, or students, or just people who like what I do. I don’t think people have really stopped connecting...or...
Reaching out?
Yeah, reaching out. Communicating. It’s just the format is different. If anything, contacting someone through Facebook chat is much more immediate than going through a blog.
