Lone Star
During the American summer of 2009, my good friend Sam Trustrum and I rode a Mustang from Georgia to Texas and back. While in Austin TX we met Pentagram design partner DJ Stout.
A year ago all I wanted was a pair of Tony Lama full quill ostrich skin cowboy boots. So I went to Texas to get them.
My wingman and I were realising that mythical American dream. We were on the road.
As connoisseurs of American steel we rode a gunmetal-grey 2010 Ford Mustang on a 2500-mile loop out of Atlanta and back. Before setting off, we stuck our fingers to the wind to see how it blew. We wanted to collect T-shirts, drink beer and buy boots. Meet some designers too. Five star hotels were preferred and in the teeth of the Great Recession better value than a Motel 6. How long we would stay in any one place depended on whether it had a pool or not.
Rolling south through bourbon country the sun bore out like a hot rifle barrel, but the air-con blew cold. We had Playboy radio to keep us company. After sampling Nashville, Memphis and the bizarre delights of Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi (that’s another story) we peeled off the I-10 onto a 200-mile stretch due west of the Mississippi river. Towards Texas.
Now I like Texas. It really is how they say it is. The T-bone state is big, very BIG. Everything is done to scale. You get the impression they’re just trying to fill it up. What do you do with all this space and that big wide sky?
Concrete flyovers and flybys swept out of Houston. Big-hat-small-cattle country. Texas was the only place the heat made sense. Everywhere else from the Mississippi Delta to the Louisiana bayou was only a depression of oily air. In Austin, it’s authentic – dry and clear – a bit like DJ Stout.
We were keen to meet him. But would he see us? By way of introduction our editor had emailed Stout a copy of a story I’d told about Pentagram partner Harry Pearce – that should do it. Stout replied from nowhere in far west Texas that he’d love to catch up, but wouldn’t be back for three days. We guessed that was pretty far west and as our hotel had a pool, we were staying.
Austin is a bubble town. Built over the years by artists, drifters, Mexicans and musicians, it was somewhere untouched by the dirty fingernails of a deep recession. Pitched between the glitzy cities of Houston and Dallas, Austin was rundown and flat out during the 1970’s. Then the usual happened, it became cool and the douchebag moved in. But as you cruise the wide and lazy South Congress Boulevard, that original outlaw spirit is still alive and well.
It was Monday. The weekend had been heavy. Sunday was hazy. We found Pentagram’s Austin office in a nondescript building tucked away down a leafy street. Only a small red square with typeset Modern No.20 gave it away. We both wore boots and thought Stout would be impressed with our grasp of Texas culture. I don’t think he noticed.
Did he know what to expect? Who were these cowboys from New Zealand? We thought he looked stunned. Maybe a bit slow. Was it the heat? Could he understand us? No. We realised DJ Stout is a slow burner.
I was prepared. Sam had his camera. I even had questions, but they went out the window. Stout just wanted to chew the fat.
DJ Stout joined Pentagram and Lowell Williams as partner in the Austin office 10 years ago. Since then Williams has moved along, but Stout burns on strong. With five dedicated staff he has quietly turned out a portfolio of recognised world-class work across identity and editorial design.
Stout cut his teeth in Dallas working for corporate communications firm Robert A.Wilson Associates before moving to Austin in 1987 and sharpening them on Texas Monthly. His strong art direction and photographic sensibility set the magazine apart. There, Stout had a trusting editor and free reign as long as it was on time and budget. Many Texan photographers have that editor to thank as Stout gave many a break to those just starting out. The irony now is Stout’s frequent requests to design books for those photographers he once commissioned at Texas Monthly.
So it’s no surprise then that Stout’s first love is editorial design. “Commercial design is ‘fine to sell stuff’ but books and magazines have a higher calling” he says. “They are a search for something authentic and truthful”. Stout says a magazine is only as good as it’s content, which should resonate with its audience and whose design should be seamless, “you’re not supposed to notice it”.
The studio now works more and more across the identity and brand space as mainstream media tries to compete with the internet. Stout says the future of magazines is uncertain, The New York Times Magazine had to shave an inch of each side to save money. He says the problem with the current crop of magazines is that they’re “eye candy only, they’ve lost the gritty content of their forebears, they’ve lost the ability to tell an authentic story.”
Being a partner at Pentagram comes with responsibilities. Not least, contributing to theongoing series of Pentagram Papers. Stout talks about the 39th edition, Signs. In true Texan style he wanted to “do it his way”. He says previous papers had been “things that interested Pentagram, architectural toys and kimonos and so on, but this time I wanted to do something relevant, highlight a social issue and draw attention to something important.” Inspiration for this issue came through Stout’s sons who gave their time to the local homeless shelter, ‘Mobile Loves and Fishes’. Making sandwiches for those without a home.
If there is one thing you notice traveling the southern states, it’s the homeless and their signs. Pleas for money, food and booze.
The raw material for Signs are the scribbles and scraps of cardboard collected by local Austinite Joe Ely who was a drifter himself in the 1970’s. Ely recalls his first purchase “The guy looked at me with surprise. He wondered if I was on drugs”. Stout then worked with photographers Michael O’Brien and Randall Ford – making moving portraits and records of the signs – as Ely says in his foreword, “signs of the times”.
But rather than just giving the books away, Stout asked for something in return. All in Signsraised $5,000 for Mobile Loaves and Fishes. Stout had set a benchmark for future Pentagram Papers. No more kimonos and designer follies then?
By now we had taken an hour and were thinking of wrapping up. But Stout was warming to his theme, wanting to show us his latest project and the reason he’d just returned from far west Texas. The state is full of eccentric characters and none was stranger than wealthy oilman and rancher Herbert Kokernot. In the 1950s he built the Alpine Cowboys into the biggest little baseball team in the desert.
From the pictures and photo albums Stout pulled from the boxes he’d collected off Kokernot ‘s grandson at the end of a dusty cross-road, we began to understand just how strange old man Kokernot really was. Stout is connected through his father Doyle who was a professional pitcher drafted on a full college scholarship. It’s an oddball Texas story and an even bigger book. But as a 6th generation Texan there’s no one better to tell it than Stout.
It was still warm and time for a beer. We asked Stout where his local was. He pointed across the street from the studio to the ‘Cat’. ‘The Mean Eyed Cat’ is a rundown shack slash Johnny Cash tribute bar squeezed between two high-rise apartment buildings. A former chainsaw repair store I kid you not.
As we sat in the Cat pulling on Lone Star beers we thought about this gritty little fort. Holding out amongst those glass towers. Much like DJ Stout. Still here. Still wanting to tell real stories. Still embracing Texas and the spirit of the west in everything he does.
(This article was recently published in issue 108 of the New Zealand design magazine Prodesign.)
