Ep. 137: Biden/Harris Campaign Creative Director Robyn Kanner
Robyn Kanner’s personal story is twisty and beautifully american. Largely self-taught, She fought hard to find her voice, and has battled bullies, addiction and self-doubt on her path to purpose. She, alongside Carahna Magwood, led a design team that effectively imbued the Biden Harris ticket with an uplifting, hopefulness that stressed reliability, inclusive values and unification. From the hot pink Biden & Lady Gaga promos, to unifying red-blue gradients. Robyn’s is a story of acceptance, healing, hard work, creativity and community - and feels as bright and hopeful as a victory gradient.
Read the entire transcript here.
Robyn Kanner: We just spent a month and change, like exploring websites and exploring brands and gradients and logos and typefaces and really finding the voice of the Biden campaign, structurally and visually.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today, I’m talking to Senior Creative Director of the Biden/Harris presidential campaign Robyn Kanner. She and deputy design director Carahna Magwood led a design team that effectively imbued the Biden/Harris ticket with an uplifting hopefulness that stressed reliability, inclusive values, and unification. The logo was strong, bold, and unified in a way that didn’t break with tradition and the rest of the communications signaled an attunement with multiple perspectives, generations, and pop culture. From the hot pink Biden and Lady Gaga promo to the unifying red and blue blending into purple gradients to the truth over lies message that quickly adapted to the truth over flies flyswatter after a fly parked itself on Mike Pence during a debate. The speedy response times indicated a youthful alacrity and modern mindset while also lending credibility to the kind of swiftness that would be needed for our current crisis-stricken era. The bottles of hand sanitizer printed with Biden’s COVID-19 plan signaled the seriousness of the pandemic, and the creative adaptability needed to attack this complex social and public health problem. And the victory gradient felt like the dawn of a bright new day. Robyn’s personal story is twisty and beautifully American. Largely self-taught, she fought hard to find her voice, identity, and tribe. And she’s battled bullies, addiction, and self-doubt on her path to purpose. Her’s is a story of acceptance, healing, hard work, creativity, collaboration, and community and feels as bright and hopeful as a victory gradient. Here’s Robyn.
RK: My name is Robyn Kanner, I live in Washington DC, for the moment and I’m an artist and most recently creative director on the Biden-Harris campaign and I do it because, it’s just what I know. I think it’s really the only thing I’m good at, so I keep doing it.
AD: I find it hard to believe that that’s the only thing you’re good at, but I can definitely relate to finding something you’re good at and going with it. Because it feels right. If you don’t mind, can we backtrack all the way to the beginning? I always like to set the stage for how you become you by talking about your early years. I understand you were born in Ohio but grew up in rural Maine? What do you feel like sharing about your childhood and family dynamic that would lend insight to your creative path?
RK: I was born in Columbus, Ohio and when I was about two years old my dad took a weeklong trip to Maine and he wanted to leave Ohio. My mom wanted to leave Ohio and my mom was basically like, you know, go to Maine for a week and if you get a job, we’ll move. So my dad went to Maine and he got a job as an optometrist in this little town called Waterville, Maine and we moved into a few different apartments when I got there. We labelled them by color. I remember the green house and the white house and like the other green house and everything except for the trailer we lived in for like a year. They all known to me by color. Yeah, I grew up in various apartments and homes in Waterville and Fairfield, Maine.
AD: What kinds of things were you fascinated in and what was grabbing your imagination?
RK: I wasn’t really a creative child, you know, I didn’t read books, I didn’t write, I didn’t watch things critically. I was really into basketball. I played a lot of basketball and I watched a lot of basketball and -
AD: Sports are creative don’t you think? It’s like an amazing choreography.
RK: Yeah, in some ways, I wasn’t thinking of it in that sense at that time. I mean -
AD: Well no, we’re kids, we don’t know it yet.
RK: Yeah, exactly, yeah, so there were a few outdoor courts that I’d play in and my friends and I at the time, that’s all we did, we just, you’d wake up and you’d bike to somebody’s house and then you’d play basketball or something. And I did that, pretty much exclusively up until I was 15/16, all I did was that. So yeah, I wasn’t like a remarkable student or I really wasn’t interested in movies or film or art or anything. I just really liked playing basketball and that’s pretty much all I did.
AD: I’m sure there was a kind of improvisational rhythm that you picked up from that.
RK: Yeah, I’m sure there was. AAnything that like got me out of the house when I was younger, was what I did. And basketball was just a way to really sort of let off stress and anxiety as a kid. So yeah, I was either playing basketball or I got a little bit older, I started to run a lot.
AD: Are you still athletic?
RK: Yeah, not nearly as much as I was back then, but yeah, I mean I primarily bike now and I had a couple of friends I play basketball with on the side and I’m running less now because it’s really cold outside. But yeah, I mean it just really was this sort of escapism when I was a kid.
AD: Well how did you find your, start to find your creative voice?
RK: I always really felt left center when I was a kid, like I really didn’t fit in and I didn’t have the strongest outlets, you know. And my family, my dad had this disease called multiple sclerosis, MS for short and it really took a huge priority over stuff that was going on with my family. So you know, for me, I started to pick up creativity, I think just as a means to express when I was 15/16. Fifteen/sixteen was then I stopped playing basketball every day and started to get really introverted. I spent a lot of time in my room thinking a ton and I really wasn’t making anything, but I was thinking about making things a lot. And it was largely an outlet to deal with what was going on with my dad.
AD: Yeah, I can imagine, that’s a lot for a young mind/body/spirit to interpret and process, as you’re also trying to find yourself. So as you were thinking about making things a lot, what kinds of things were you thinking about making?
RK: I had like this computer that really had like one gig of ram or something like that, it was really small and I would design PowerPoint’s and they told these fictional stories of just like whatever was happening in my head at that time. And I was listening to a lot of music when I was 15/16 and I did what every kid does, which is like you take a lyric you like and write it in different ways and express it. So yeah, that was really how I was thinking about things. I just found a few albums that really sort of hit me in a way that you know, when you’re 15/16, that’s just what music does. And I just started making things around how other people were feeling. It really wasn’t about me; it was just like something I related to.
AD: I think this is interesting just in a general humanities sense, nobody was pushing you in a creative direction and it wasn’t really being put in front of you, but still the soul searches for something to relate to and it seems like you sort of started pulling at creative things because you could relate to it, or you needed to find that thing that resonated.
RK: Yeah, for sure, I think that you know, growing up in rural Maine, there wasn’t a ton going on and music was made in other places, so that’s largely what my connection was towards it, was just like, I’d read the liner notes and be like, you know, X thing was recorded and mixed in California and I’d be like, where the heck is California? [Laughs] I’d Google that and be like, okay.
AD: Yeah, like it gives you a window to the world too. So then after high school, I read that you had a self-described kind of messy time. No linear path, let’s say - towards the creative profession, what can you share with us about those pivotal moments or those highlights between high school and what you’re doing now?
RK: You know, there really wasn’t like a massive, nobody really took a bet on me [laughs]. There was no chance of massive success on my end, you know? Like I barely passed high school, I got like a C, I’m sure, I actually don’t know, but I’m guessing I got like a C or something. And I didn’t really do schoolwork and I really wasn’t interested and I got a job bailing hay for this farm in Clinton, Maine and I did that for three years over the summers and I liked that because it was like a, a way to get off stress, but it was also this very masculine space that freaked me out a lot.
Because of that sort of inherent masculinity that I had been rejecting, there was this thing where all these, especially in a small town like Fairfield, like a lot of men who are fathers of other children assumed that because my dad was sick, I needed another father and like they very much tried to parent me. I really resisted that and I noticed it a lot when I was around environments like when I was bailing hay, with primarily men who were older and they would try to show me the ropes of life and I’d really reject that, because to me I had a dad even if he was sick.
AD: Was that a sort of a territorial instinct, was it almost defending your dad’s honor in some way?
RK: Yeah, very much that, yeah, I mean I just felt like -
AD: … Replace -
RK: Yeah, it bothered me that my dad was sick, but it also made things worse that people assumed that he wasn’t able to parent when he was. It wasn’t like a perfect job of parenting, but I don’t think any father is perfect at parenting. But you know, my dad was very much mentally there and these people acted like he was gone. I just really resented them for that. And that’s why I stopped playing sports a lot was because people who are, you know, always like men in their 30s and 40s would be like, you have to play this sport because it will teach you how to be this kind of person or whatever.
AD: Yeah, that’s sort of interesting, that assumption that because your dad’s sort of vitality, physical vitality wasn’t there anymore, that he couldn’t parent mentally, emotionally or by just setting an example of honor and valour with how you would deal with this kind of traumatic health sentence.
RK: Yeah, yeah, it was very much a thing. I just really rejected it and what that meant for me was I spent a lot of time in my room alone thinking about things.
AD: Okay.
RK: But yeah, I mean I eventually took this job at Wendy’s, it sounds strange to say ‘took this job,’ as if like it was -
AD: You got recruited for it [laughs].
RK: Yeah, exactly, yeah, and I applied for a job at Wendy’s and yeah, I worked there for a while and was like the closer where, you make fries and sandwiches and then you clean up everything and I had this life where I was 17/18 and I had to work from 4:00pm to 1:00am and I’d work with these people who had made a career out of Wendy’s. That’s obviously totally fine and good for them, but it really rocked me to my core of like, seeing myself at 30 doing that job and being really afraid that that’s what my life was going to be.
I wanted to get really good at something, so I didn’t have to do that. That was like around the same time that I realized I wanted to get out of Maine too, like there was a world outside of it. I basically worked at this Wendy’s from 4:00 to 1:00am and I would go home and I just sort of self-taught myself design for how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or what these basic principles were. And the real root of that was that I wanted to do something that everybody that I worked with at Wendy’s couldn’t do.
And that is wrapped up in a ton of teenage angst and ego and frustration and total, just resentment of self. Like it really didn’t have to do with them, [laughs] I mean I hope they’re all really good now. There was this bar in Maine called The Forks, which is like the place where you do pit parties and pit parties in Maine are, you go to a gravel pit and you get drunk. And one of my managers, their weekend ritual was go to The Forks, get really wasted, come back, or what it is from Monday to Friday, go to The Forks, get wasted. I really resented that. And I just didn’t want my life to look like that. So you know, I got really okay at design and art, enough to like start to carve out a little path for me.
AD: So your self-taught trajectory was sort of born out of like a little bit of loathing and fear?
RK: Oh yeah.
AD: But did you find solace in it at all?
RK: I eventually, not immediately, at first making art was a means to get out of Maine and I just wanted out and it wasn’t until much, much later that I actually found joy in making art. But for a really long time it was just something that I felt like I needed to do because if I didn’t, I was gonna go work at that Wendy’s again.
AD: So it was your ticket out.
RK: Yeah. It wasn’t a clear linear ticket out either, like I went to this community college and took a class in history and did really well and even though I’d basically done below average work in high school because I had gotten one good college grade, it got me into this film school up in Northern Maine. And basically went there first semester and flunked out but before I could actually flunk out, I applied to a different school and basically got it as like, yeah, film school is not for me and I did get an A in this one community college course. I very ‘scrappingly’ got my way into a university -
AD: Nice, yeah, you’re working the system.
RK: Yeah, I mean the system was not designed for me [laughs], so I needed find different routes through it, yeah.
AD: Yeah, I get that. And I can see you figuring out the machine and then starting to figure out where you needed to tinker with it so that you could survive within it, or change it or whatever. So you worked the system to get into a university, catch me up.
RK: Yeah, so I was at this university called University of Maine at Farmington and my dad had moved into a nursing home and the beginning of my second year he passed away. I think that when somebody dies close to you, there’s this theology that it rocks at that particular second. And for me it didn’t because there was so much anticipation of build-up to his death that in some ways I was so emotionally ready for the immediate moment at which it happened. But I had zero tools for the longevity of what that would feel like.
He passed away and the next morning I showed up to class and you know, was like, this is my first day of sophomore and I was talking to my, what would become my sociology professor and I was like, look, my dad just died last night, but if this class is really important, I’d like to stay and she was looking at me like, you have to go and yeah, I was like oh, okay. You know, when he passed, like even though I was sort of starting to game the system a little bit, in my life, like it just, it really knocked me. That’s when I started to drink a lot and developed some addictive qualities.
AD: Okay, just misguided coping strategies?
RK: Well, yeah, I don’t know if it was misguided -
AD: Oh!
RK: I showed up to a doctor’s office and was like, I’m anxious and they gave me Xanax and I took a lot of Xanax. I would go to these parties and people wouldn’t know that my dad had died and they were like, have a drink, so that’s what I did. I mean I’m not sure it was misguided as much as I was entirely guided into that path.
AD: Got it, okay. So that was around when you were, what, 19/20?
RK: Nineteen, yeah.
AD: Heavy.
RK: Yeah, That’s where things really started to kick off. I mean you know, 19/20, I was full blown Xanax addict and I started to make better art around that time too, not coincidental, but I started to really get invested in making work. And I felt like, for so long with my dad being sick, like really took prominence over my life and when he passed, I really just wanted to fill almost both of our lives up with work. And sort of like do all the things he talked about doing but wasn’t able to accomplish.
And I just started making a ton of work and it was all around identity and expression and power dynamics and existential crises.
AD: What medium are you working in?
RK: At that time I was primarily still doing computer work but I would play with installation a lot. I had this studio in Farmington and I would stamp like an entire studio space with the statement, who are we and put like this projection of people around it and I played with sound a lot. I started collaborating with my friends who were musicians and writing, sort of songs, but mostly sound art that you would walk into this space and experience. I just really dove head first into conceptual art. I had a couple of professors who very much leaned me into that direction too. Yeah, as soon as my dad passed, I just, it was like all bets are off and I started making an insane amount of work and really just went head first into everything.
AD: Did that feel like a career path for you or just like a sort of need?
RK: It was definitely more of a need. You know, I remember having this conversation with my mom right after I had dropped out of that… I didn’t actually finish that school, I dropped out. And it was like right after I dropped out I was going to go on like tour and tour in Maine meant like you would play a week of shows down and back to New York. So you would stop in New Hampshire and then you’d play in Vermont, then you’d play in Boston and then you’d play in upstate New York. And if you were lucky you did one New York City show and then you would drive back to Maine.
And there was this band called Cambiata that my friends and I did, it was Sean, Miguel, Dan, Chris and Stan and my friend Noah and I basically did all the audio and art for it. I basically dropped out of school and did Cambiata for two years and that was like the best time of my life, you know? So yeah, I was very fortunate to just sort of sit in a van and talk to people and really start to understand how, Chris is a really great writer and I’ve always been really envious about this of him.
And I really was able to learn a lot about how Chris told story, which in turn, later helped me figure out how I told my own story. But at that time I wasn’t ready for it, I was just, I really needed to watch Chris and Stan and Sean and Miguel and Dan tell stories.
AD: Yeah you were sort of observing, soaking it up like a sponge but you were also kind of experiencing freedom with a bit of a creative tribe, maybe.
RK: Maine had such an incredible music scene and you know, if it wasn’t Cambiata, like my friend Dean and I would be making things together, or my friend Walter played in this band called 6Gig and 6Gig have moderate success outside of Maine. You know, he started this new band called Lost on Liftoff and that band had this guy Mick in it and Mick was like probably the first man in my life to not try to father me, but tried to be a big brother. I really respected that friendship a lot.
These people were like how I would go out and figure out how to make work and figure out how to be a person. And yeah, those two to three years that I did just that was like, was probably like the most important time for my creativity in adolescence.
AD: I can hear it in your voice. But it sounds to me like you felt like your horizons and your possibilities were opening up where at Wendy’s you felt like they were stagnant?
RK: Yeah, I just felt like it was freedom, you know? And I very much needed that at that time. And we were all screwed up. I mean Chris was, and he attests to this, but Chris is an addict and I’m an addict and we’re all trying to figure this out. Stan, who grew up in Lewiston is still one of my most fascinating friends, for many reasons. One of which is he works at a butcher shop and he has read more Steinbeck books or Foster Wallace or, you know, Kathy Ecker, or whatever contemporary or great literature, Stan has read it.
You had this very like, very blue collared guy talking to you about pasalease or something like that, at a very intricate level. And yeah, I mean that’s how I learned to, I don’t know, how I just learned to make things, how I learned to appreciate good art and figure out how to say it and yeah, that time was just, it was just really important.
AD: Yeah, it sounds like it, I’m really glad you shared that. That’s really the unofficial education right? It’s those
RK: Sure.
AD: Formative experiences, those chapters of life that teach you so much, but they don’t really fit on a resume.
RK: Yeah, I mean they’re just five very different people that Noah and I, we all just tried to figure out and it was just really fascinating to figure out how to make art and you know, when Cambiata broke up, it felt like, for me like I was done in music. We all did a couple of different things, like Chris and Stan and Miguel and myself and folks did like this record called Vanity Hits for a while and Dan did this work called Sea Level and Sean did this thing called My My and we all, because I wasn’t really a musician at that time, I was really only helping them make their art.
So I would talk to somebody and they’d be like, you know, what are they doing, really jealous about [laughs], because we were all still nerds and we all still loved each other and we all wanted to see what we could make. And Noah and I would jump from a Sea Level session to go to a Vanity session and everybody would be like, okay, what do those songs sound like [laughter]? Yeah, when it was over, I just felt like I had enough knowledge that I could go out and get a job, or at least lie my way into a job!
AD: Yes, so that job was a contract gig at Staples in Boston?
RK: Yeah, I sort of bounced between a couple of places in Portland after Cambiata and I quickly realized I had to leave and I met with this recruiter in Boston who helped me get a job at Staples as a brand designer under this guy Grail, Grail is a sweetheart and we’re good friends now. But Grail is a very specific guy, like he was really good at hiring in the sense that he cut through a lot of bullshit. And I didn’t live in Boston while I was interviewing for that job. So I remember being on the phone with this recruiter and him being like, you have to already live here to get this job and I was like, well, I don’t and he was like, you just need to Google Maps how you would get to an apartment, to that job.
So that when Grail talks to you about how, what route you took to get there, you can give him an answer [laughs]. So I was just like yeah, I live in Brighton or something and I took route nine here and Grail was like, how’s the traffic, and I was like, oh, not bad and yeah, so once I got that job I got this apartment in Cleveland Circle in Boston and yeah, I made paper packaging for Staples and designed what pen packaging looks like or college room dorm dancing water speakers or you know, style, like stuff.
AD: That must have been also very educational in a very different way.
RK: Yeah, I mean Grail was like a reformed musician, so he was like a buttoned, he wore button down, but he had sleeve tattoos, so I knew he was one of us [laughter]. He just sort of hid it in a corporate environment and you know, he used to take out, he would print these paper packagings and take out a ruler and study every… He was a very detail oriented guy. I just learned a ton from that flow of watching him, not only manage people, but also do creative direction. And I got a crash course in design and I worked at that job for about nine months.
I had bought this like $500 car to get out from Boston to Framingham, which is where Staples was. And it broke down and when it broke down, like I just had no way to get to Staples. Grail had offered me this fulltime job, but I would have had to have bought a car to do it and I hated driving [laughs]. And I was like no, thank you, I’m glad you made this offer but I got a job at New Balance because it was only a bike ride away from my apartment.
AD: [Laughs] Nice!
RK: I was very like, it was very utilitarian of me.
AD: Yes, very practical. And perhaps ambitious, even if it wasn’t consciously ambitious.
RK: It was ambitious in the sense that like I, you know, I really wanted to make work and I knew if I didn’t do it then I was going to go back to Maine and you know, I had seen so many musicians in Maine do these massive goodbye parties and then come back in six months. And I really didn’t want to be that person. Going to Staples or going to New Balance or whatever like that, making these hard decisions was very much structured and if I don’t do this I have to go back to Maine.
And I should be very clear, I love Maine, it’s one of my favorite places in the world now, but I had such a complicated relationship to it when I was in my early 20s. going to New Balance was like a, it was great and it was just the same thing. I built these environments for design and had cool design directors and was able to make sort of hipper design. It was just a cool experience.
AD: What did New Balance lead to? You didn’t stay within biking distance for your whole -
RK: So at the time I was working at New Balance in Boston, I had a couple of friends who were working on this like start-up and it was around trans healthcare. And I went really all in on it and started to work with them and we made this thing called MyTransHealth, which was like this tool around healthcare for trans people.
And I am obviously trans well, not obviously, you’re just listening to this, you really don’t know me at all. But yeah, so I had made this thing and it had gotten kind of popular on the internet. We did this Kickstarter and we made this thing and it was at a very specific time in how culture was talking about trans people, was when I was making that. And I was doing this thing where I worked at New Balance and I would take the Fung Wah, which was the Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, I think it’s called Lucky Charm or something right now. I had made this thing and it was all around identity and it was technically a tool that was supposed to help people but we had rooted this story in ourselves, which meant that our stories were forefront of it. And because I did that at a specific time, I started to get recruited for a lot of really cool tech jobs and it was right at the time that big tech corporations realized that they needed to handle diversity and inclusion, which is something they hadn’t done.
I interviewed at Facebook, bombed in the most spectacular way, interviewed in Seattle and took a role there. And that’s when things started to derail, like really hard. In the sense that I had just gotten like a very tiny amount of internet street cred and people who were designers on the internet that I thought were cool were talking to me. And these big corporations that, you know, as a person who grew up lower class in Maine, they were offering me a lot of money to go do everything basically, like the beginning of the end, is what I call that period of time. This was 2016 and it was like, it was a crash.
AD: Did you feel like you were a token hire or what kind of crash are you talking about?
RK: I definitely was. And this is where I learned a lot. I learned if you’re gonna be a token hire, like you should really not ruffle feathers [laughs]. And you should recognize, first of all, if you’re going to be a token hire, just don’t take the job. Before when I was trans, you know, and working at New Balance or Staples like that, like I had no, nothing on the internet, like I had done nothing.
AD: You weren’t known for being trans?
RK: Yeah, exactly, like I wasn’t, I didn’t have to be perfect, like I just could have been. And the second I made MyTransHealth, there was a lot of pressure on me to make every step correct.
AD: Like you had to be model trans-
RK: Like I had to be really perfect, like some people are awkward around it and then I would have to make them not awkward. I’d had this person who I worked for who was queer and it felt -
AD: But he felt comfortable with it -
RK: Yeah, the person I worked for was queer and felt really good about himself for hiring me [laughs] and I spent a lot of time in my day job talking about it, to reaffirm his leadership and reaffirm his decision of bringing me on. And I had this director who would parade me at Christmas parties to his family and then when it came time to promoting me would be like, no, of course not. And I’m like, dude, in front of your daughter you can tell me that I’m this hero but you don’t want to give me a promotion for my work?
It really freaked me out, for many reasons, one of which is that I didn’t know how to be perfect, but I’d just gotten a tiny bit of popularity on the internet for being perfect. And it created a lot of hardships in my head and how I dealt with those hardships is I drank a ton, in my early 20s, because things had gotten so rough on Xanax, I knew I couldn’t have taken that, but I did drink a lot and it hit this point for me where I realized I had to leave Seattle because there just wasn’t space for me.
It felt like every step I needed to take was perfect and there was no way for me to take a perfect step anymore.
AD: You felt painted into a corner.
RK: Yeah, I had this therapist who I was trying to process everything with my dad every step felt wrong. And I felt like I had gotten really far away from talking about art in a band with musicians -
AD: And I can imagine that you’re also, if things are on the outside looking like they’re going well, like you’re getting this well paid, you have this well paid position at a really established corporation, you might be telling yourself, what’s wrong with me? This should be good, I should be happy -
RK: Yeah, I had this therapist who prescribed me SSRIs and I took them to level me out because I was on such a high low trajectory of daily life. I had basically accidentally skipped a dose and one day decided I was going to leave Seattle, give my dog to a friend and move to New York. And I made a snap decision within a day that I was going to do that. And a week later I was gone, like I didn’t hang around. You know, it was just sort of this microcosm of the situation. Like I didn’t know how to be me and the way I handled that was trying to be the person people thought I was. But then when I made a misstep, it really screwed me over. And I didn’t know how to handle that.
And so left Seattle and I moved to New York and I get a job. I’m just like an emotional wreck where my ego is all over the place and on the one hand being told that I’m this pristine model trans woman and on the other hand I was wasted every day. So I had this, and I handled that wastedness by looking down at the ground all the time or not making eye contact or not talking to people or like really, I was really evasive.
And was terrified of the world, like just absolutely terrified because I did not know how to exist within it in a way that suited me and the people around me. And did such a bad job at being a human being for the first year I was in New York.
AD: I want to hug you right now [laughter].
RK: No, everything shook up really well, I mean, I just didn’t know how to be a person. That’s it, like I really didn’t have the tools, you know, to be a person and return, like I ended up being a really bad person, which meant that people were paying me to give talks about making MyTransHealth and I would do them wasted because I didn’t want to do them but I felt like I had to do them and this was largely pressure I was putting on myself, not pressure other people are putting on me.
AD: An unmeetable standard.
RK: Yeah, I just could never meet it and the second I realized I was in a space and couldn’t meet it, I would get wasted and it would be like, great, now this isn’t a problem I have to deal with, this is a problem that somebody else has to deal with. It was really crass and it crashed in April of 2018 where I left my job, I broke up with my partner and I got hit by a car when I was on a bike in the course of like two weeks.
AD: Were you sober or were you drunk when you got hit by a car?
RK: No, I was hung over though. I just got side swiped, which is like a thing that happens if you’re a biker in New York, basically all the time. I had probably zero to nil about what to do, about, this guy just made a turn, so -
AD: Yeah, but still, it just felt like everything was collapsing on you in rapid succession.
RK: That’s when I decided to go for the gold, I made like a rule, I’m gonna do, I’m gonna not be in society for three months. Like it was a real Leaving Las Vegas style of just drinking. And any friendships I had in New York I was like, revolved around drinking and you know, I wasn’t really making good art and everything I was making was really morose and sad and felt really big. In July of that year I went to a meeting and I got sober and met a sponsor who very much saved every part of my life.
AD: I want to hug you again!
RK: Yeah, shout out to my sponsor, she just dug me out. Like I was a person who was operating without tools for life for a really long time and she came along and gave me a ton of tools on how to be a person. And yeah, I spent 10 months not working, I freelanced, but really light and going to meetings every day and sitting in a circle and talking about it -
AD: I have to back up, how did you pick yourself up and take yourself to that first meeting?
RK: You know, I was so far away from everything, like I was really far away from the world and I really wanted to get involved in the political cycle and this was 2018, so I knew it was going to be in two years. I was nowhere near the place to do that. Basically was like my second and third week into sobriety, my sponsor showed up to this meeting late and had scabs all over her arm because she rides this moped and she got into this accident.
And she was only at that meeting because a person that she had recently slept with was next door and when she walked into the room I was like, man, this woman must have like two days, like I’m in better shape than her [laughter]. And she shared and she was like, yeah, you know, I’ve 13 years and I’m just like, wait a minute, you have 13 years? [Laughs] And I immediately was like, you, if I’m gonna have a sponsor, it’s you. And we started to run the steps that night, she just took me through resentments and fears which, you know, had me rewrite the sentence: I have resent at… Whatever it is, because I fear that X is going to happen. I wrote that sentence over and over again for 10 months and wrote out everything that I was afraid of, everything that I resented and started to develop tools to let it go.
AD: Wow.
RK: Yeah, so about 10 months into sobriety I had left outpatient rehab and sent a few notes to people making amends because I had just really fucked up and I think I had, I think I had granted myself an excuse for fucking up because there was so much pressure on me being this perfect trans person. I had to accept that I actually did fuck up a lot of things and it didn’t have to do with anybody else and it was my own shit. Made a lot of amends and then I took a job at Jigsaw which is a part of Google and it was my first job back into the world post exiting reality.
And I remember talking with my manager and just laying it out. I’m sitting here and he’s like, can you design this product and I’m like, I can, but you have to know, this is what happened to me over the last couple of years and I really want to be a better person and figure out how to do this, but you just have to know where I’m coming from. And he did something really incredible which is that he created this space for me. I’ve come to realize that people who are really, really good at their jobs are people that create space for the people they work around. And he did that very, very, well.
AD: How did he do that? What shape did that take?
RK: You know he just bought me time, like if I was stressed about something, like he would send this email being like, she needs another day and so everybody would be like, okay. Or like, like I couldn’t work until midnight every night because I had to go to a meeting, so it hit 7:00pm and I was like, hey man, I got to go to a meeting and he was like, oh yeah, go for it. He just created space and by doing that, I basically relearned how to be a designer. Because before I was, everything was so wrapped up in ego or so wrapped up in cool trends or something like that.
I kind of, I had never really thought about just traditional design or traditional art or anything. And I spent six months making this specific product and it had nothing to do with making money for somebody, it had to do with around disinformation and stuff. I knew it actively did good in the world and I spent six months just making that and that totally just realigned me, and reminded me that I actually could design.
AD: What an affirming situation.
RK: It was really, really amazing. After, basically after six months at Jigsaw I had been highly focused on Beto O’Rourke’s presidential run, after that senate race. Because during the senate race I was in rehab, so when Beto had his moment of like, you know, NFL players having the right to kneel, I was sitting in rehab being like, if I ever get out, that’s the guy I want to work for.
AD: Wow.
RK: When he announced, I sent this email, to my friend Victor who had worked on Hilary’s campaign with this guy Rob. Victor was like, yeah, Rob is leading the digital if you want to go there, just let me know and I’ll email Rob for you. Rob and I got on a phone call and he was like, yeah, I’m in DC, I’m moving to El Paso, Texas tomorrow and I was like, okay, what does your team look like? And he’s just like, it’s me, and maybe you [laughs]. And I was like okay, so I’m going to have to move to El Paso and Rob is like, yeah.
And I was on the phone with him and I was like, listen, I want to do this, but you have to know, these are all of my secrets, this is my drinking, I used to do pills, I just got out of rehab, I’m like, here’s everything that’s bad about me and I’m going to tell you completely upfront and then you can make your decision on if you want me to come to El Paso. And Rob was just like, oh yeah, for sure [laughs], come to El Paso and it’s like okay.
AD: [Laughs] I mean on some level didn’t it kind of feel nice to just expose what anybody could find out about you and then have somebody be like, yeah, that’s not a big deal, I just want you to design but I need you to do it in El Paso [laughs].
RK: Yeah, because I had been so scrappy about everything in my entire life, I had totally been trying to work around systems and like I had spent so much time trying to go around things and when I got sober, a big thing about sobriety is being completely honest with yourself and trusting a higher power. And because things had gone so well at Jigsaw when I was very truthful, I was like, I just want to start this one [laughs] in that same honesty. I was like, here’s everything.
And Rob’s perspective, he’s thinking like wow, this person who used to work at Google and has art shown in these galleries wants to do this, I’m gonna take her own. But yeah, then I moved to El Paso and decided to campaign for six months.
AD: Man.
RK: And El Paso is like the most remarkable place in America and I fell totally in love with it and fell totally in love with the work and the staff and the structure and the lifestyle and it felt like a really amazing summer vacation, even though it was some of the most intense work I had done in my entire life. But I had never; when I was a kid I never went to camp or anything like that and going to El Paso and spending 16 hours a day with my co-workers, ended up feeling like this strange summer camp.
AD: I love that you had a strong collaborative, positive experience, working for somebody that you believed in, obviously - can you paint a little bit more of that picture of what you fell in love with about El Paso?
RK: The first thing I did when I moved there was I tried to find a home group and, for meetings. And I had gotten sober in New York and the majority of New York drunks are artists that felt like they should be Jackson Pollock, felt like, it was a real Jack Kerouac thing of like, I’m gonna get drunk and make the best art. And then I was in El Paso and you’re next to Ciudad Juárez, which is the drug capital of the world and people are getting sober for very different reasons down there.
And I’m in these AA and NA meetings and it’s a different situation [laughs]. Like these are people who really had to, sobriety was more about just like wanting to make good art; it was about life or death situation. And I fell in love with the conversations and I fell in love with the people and I fell in love with the sky. Like El Paso has the best sunset and the best sky in the world, it’s beautiful. The saturation of the sunset in El Paso is uncanny, it’s stunning. I had been there for about a month when there was a mass shooting at the Walmart in Cielo Vista, which is about a mile from where HQ was. That shooting was a very intense experience and what I remember the most from it is how El Paso came together as a community. You’d see El Paso Strong everywhere and the week from when that happened, to the following weekend, I only worked, like it was only, like it was either you were rushing to give blood or rushing to help people in the community out.
Whatever you were doing, you weren’t, the only thing that we as a staff was doing was working and I remember the first time I went to a meeting after that experience, I was in an Uber because all the El Paso meetings were five miles away from downtown. And I was in this Uber and this guy was just kind of like, what are you doing in the city etc. And he’s like writing down this phone number, he’s like thank you so much for your work, if you ever need to get from place A to B, just call me. It was just a community that came together really strong.
And responded to the moment and that was the moment, for me, where joining a campaign and doing political work, was like all the shit about me was gone, it was just like I’m doing this and this is for the country and a way bigger purpose than just me feeling like, you know, afraid, egotistical burnout, which is what… Like the reason why I was making art for 10 years was that.
And the shooting happened and it totally just changed everything and it was, yeah, it was one of the hardest things that I witnessed. But at the same time seeing El Paso come together, created so much love for me in that place.
AD: Also you’re witnessing it with clear eyes -
RK: Yeah, there was no evasion of reality.
AD: Yeah.
RK: There’s this restaurant in El Paso called Tabla, this guy Kenny who works there and I would see Kenny every night and he knew I didn’t drink but he would always give me a topo chico and we would talk and Kenny was the best. And still is the best, he and I still talk. But that’s the reason why I loved El Paso and when our campaign ended, I just felt like the job wasn’t finished and I made a mission to finish the job and went to the Biden campaign and did just that.
AD: Well, I love that you fell in love with El Paso for the people and for the skies and I -
RK: Yeah, the sunset is really, that’s where the gradients come from [laughs], if you look at -
AD: I was gonna ask you about gradients.
RK: You look at the sky in El Paso; it’ll give you the greatest gradients of all time.
AD: [Laughs] Well, I love that it made such an impression on you and I think you… I don’t want to project onto you, but I think you were in this kind of raw and also open and clear space to receive it.
RK: Yeah.
AD: And that sounds really beautiful and I’m so glad you had that experience and I’m dying to know now about the Biden campaign because you creative directed the Biden-Harris campaign and now you’re creative directing the Biden Inaugural committee/ So what is all that about, what does it look like, feel like, sound like, I need to know everything.
RK: Rob, who was with me in El Paso had gone to the Biden campaign and I think he went in December and January I basically went up to Philadelphia, which is where the HQ was and him and I, would just do what we used to do, which was like we went to dinner and sketched out ideas and thought about what could look like this or that or whatever. And we left the conversation where it was like if Biden wins two out of four between, you know, South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada, then I’d come to the campaign.
But if not, then it probably wasn’t gonna look like the, you know, there was no way that Biden was going to lost three and then somehow win the primary. So when the campaign did lose Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, I just told thought it was over. And I just, I was just like, I guess that’s it. And there were people around me who are making different bets on who it was and I just kind of like refused to not follow Rob and I would talk to Rob and he would be like, it might be over, but there’s a possibility and here’s what it would look like if it did happen. And I just very much made a bet on Rob and Biden and I was like, if it’s them, I’m doing the work. If it’s not them, then I’m not doing the work, like it’ll be somebody else.
And I just went all in on Biden and when South Carolina happened, South Carolina was great but go back and watch the tapes, people thought it was like a fluke, they were like, good for Joe. But when South Caroline happened for me, that’s when I got to work and Carahna Magwood, who is the deputy design director on the campaign, she was already there and she was building stuff and Abby was there and I just had a month where we all started to make work and everybody, like the country was coming around Joe.
And it was like this really great month where nobody was really expecting anything out of the campaign, but I was able to explore what a branded entity would look like for the general election. And that’s what we did, we just spent a month and change, like exploring websites and exploring brands and gradients and logos and typefaces and really finding the voice of the Biden campaign, structurally and visually.
By the time Michigan had happened and the time we sort of got around to Texas and understanding the delegate count, like everything just started to really shake itself out. I had everything in a pretty good place with the team. There was, obviously there were a lot of questions about how to launch it and we see typical brands launch, there’s a flip overnight and that’s how an ad agency would do it.
You just overnight there would be like, here’s a new thing and we didn’t do it like that. I really thought our serif needed to be a lot stronger and when everything in Minneapolis happened, with George Floyd, I was like, I can’t use this sort of weak serif to talk about this moment. So I have to flip over to Mercury, which is what I knew was going to be the serif anyways and so Carahna and I talked about it and I’m sure to the outside it felt like a very small decision, but to us it was a really big deal because that was the first piece that went out.
And it met a very important moment in this country and you know, shortly thereafter, decimal, which was the other typeface, went out and we started to push illustration styles and then started to push type decisions, color decisions and gradients started coming to life. And we had redone the website and that was out, so by the time Harris was selected as a running mate, we had all these pieces in place. And you know, it was basically like everything that hadn’t gone out, the second Harris was announced, just like the last pieces flooded through.
And from there you just hope it works [laughs]. The bulk of the work was those five months-ish and Carahna and I had done so much hiring, we’d built a team from basically four people to 25 people in a month. And we had all these theories about how our [oppo?] should feel or anything should feel and we had made these really risky bets. And I just felt really confident in our decisions and I felt really confident because Rob felt confident [laughs].
Rob had been my North Star for like a year at that point [laughs] and we just went for it on the creative. And we had an incredible team and we used the strength of everybody’s skillset and used the strength of our experiences and just designed and practice. Especially for the debates, the debates are such a big deal and we as a team ran five/seven mock debates together just to know how tight we can get and we did the same thing for town halls and we would watch movies together remotely. We just were a campaign family, even remote. And yeah, when we won it was like, it’s the craziest feeling ever -
AD: I can’t even imagine and I just had this feeling, like did anything about this kind of feel like basketball?
RK: Yes, only because, well, I mean for many reasons. One of which is like during the campaign, I mean I was thinking about my dad every day. My dad loved politics and he was a staunch Clinton Democrat and loved Biden. HHe passed away before Obama’s time, but would have loved Obama. I felt like I was fulfilling his mission in a lot of ways and fulfilling mine in my own way. It felt like basketball, it felt like chess, it just felt like a game. And obviously not a game, but it felt like the most important work possible to do.
There was a lot of noise coming at Carahna and I from very parts of the industry, being like Biden-Harris campaign design is boring or simple or, you know, whatever. And I’m just sitting there with Carahna on the phone every night being like no, this is working. Just look at the numbers, this is actually working.
AD: I was really impressed; I mean I just responded to it, it was everything it needed to be without trying to be something it wasn’t.
RK: Yeah and everybody made jokes about this, but our very “no malarky” campaign, our design didn’t have malarky in it, [laughs] like it was very structured and straight ahead and unifying. It had these components that made it us and Carahna and I every night would just like talk and be like, this is, I’m pretty sure this is what it needs to be and that’s what we did.
AD: I love it. As you were telling me that story, flashes of your life came to me, I mean this is just as I’m listening, I’m paying rapt attention, but it seems like another really important moment, similar to being in a van with some creatives who are all kind of driving at the same purpose.
RK: Yeah, I mean it was exactly that. And the way that we came up with the type system was very musical. My team would tell you this because we talked about it every single day, but you know, Barack Obama speaks in three word hits, like, ‘yes we can’ are three really loud major chords. Hilary did the same thing, ‘I’m with her,’ ‘Stronger together,’ these are three to two word loud major chords. Joe will be like, ‘We’re in a battle for the soul of the nation,’ which is great, but it’s seven words and four of them you want people to forget [laughter].
And because of that, like the type system needed to have rhythm and we came up with that. I was playing guitar one night and I was like, okay, so the prepositions and conjunctions can be like a D major, which is like a softer chord, but big actual words like battle soul nation can be like large F major sounds and that’s sort of the structure of how I came up with things and that has very much, I learned that from Cambiata, I learned that from Sean, being a nerd about everything [laughs].
AD: That’s such a wonderful insight to your process.
RK: The gradients are such a conversation about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican and what I loved about the gradients is that a blend of the reds and the blues together to be purple and it was like, we are sort of all in it together and it became less about separating people and more about unifying people. And the gradients really accomplish that well. Those were the pieces that I was trying to instil into the campaign. But you know, I was still being called, people still wrote, like Biden campaign was this, you know, another boring graphic, but you know, now that we win it’s like, oh, Biden came in and it’s like that was remarkable work and Rob and Carahna at our next effort probably won’t be that good or whatever [laughs].
AD: Do you find it easier to tune that out and not hold yourself accountable to these un-meetable standards?
RK: Yeah, I just, I can’t control that and if I do try to control that, I’ll become like a really bad person [laughs].
AD: Well, you’re not afraid of becoming a bad person are you?
RK: In sobriety we have this concept of being spiritually fit and being spiritually fit, I think, on some level comes down to you know, being a solid person and one of the hardest things I had on a campaign, especially the one that we just had was like, so much about sobriety is about giving yourself up to God or to a higher power and working under Him, for Him. And when you’re at campaign you have a lot of power and it can be hard to reckon with God and hard to relinquish your power and relationship to a higher power in that work because you’re doing such important work.
And this isn’t like before, when I would have like ego working at a tech company. This is like, lives, and I had a lot of reckonings with God. and how I understand Him and how I understand the world through the campaign work because I had gotten sober on this idea that I’m just a person who works under God and a higher power and then all of a sudden I had been given a lot of power. That was the stuff that I found just sort of interesting to wrestle with, through the work.
AD: It’s like you have a sharp tool and you have to trust yourself to wield it for the greater good -
RK: Yeah, pretty much, I call my sponsor all the time being like, I think I’m in the right pocket here but like, I might be off. And you know, because of Covid I wasn’t in my normal routine which is go to in-person meetings and sit in a circle. I was on these Zoom meetings which technically are anonymous but are really easy to break anonymity, so I ended up listening to a lot of meetings while I was working. And I just had to really have a solid, firm relationship with sobriety and with a God in order to do this work really well.
And I leaned on it really heavy when I felt like I was just starting to lose control a little bit, especially that last month. I mean that last month was the craziest month of my life. I had a team of 25 and Carahna and I were trying to build this thing and we have 10 different teams that we were supporting and once you get through the actual work, then you have to make sure it’s like the sociology of it works. Once you get through all that, I just felt really confident in the decisions that we were making, even if there was some noise being like, these decisions are wrong.
You just stay the course and trust that the process is there. And it just made the victory, like when it finally happened on November 7th it was, like a weight had really been lifted from me. I think pretty much everybody else on the campaign too.
AD: And a lot of people out in the world too.
RK: Yeah, yeah, I mean -
AD: And so on behalf of so many people who respect what you do, thank you for designing a campaign that could communicate and help us get this election.
RK: Yeah, team work, 25 of us you know?
AD: Yeah, I know there’s a lot of people involved and I appreciate you giving credit where credit is due, and the collaborative energy of the whole thing. Because you can lift a lot more when everybody is using both their hands. So you won the election, but what now? Because it still feels really urgent and important.
RK: You know, when I set out to do this work, I was very much like talking with my sponsor being like, I wanted to win the election or have a piece, being just involved, I wanted the election. And I’ve done that and I’m not trying to get greedy with God. Like I know that sounds crazy but what I asked of my program to do, I have accomplished and there’s, it’s a very sweet feeling that I don’t want to take for granted.
And because of that I’m taking things very slowly and I am checking with my body and my health and my mind and really starting to consider where I slot into things and really just not being greedy with my higher power. Like I’ve done the thing that I set out to do, so now what’s next? And what that probably looks like is like writing about this a little bit more and you know, continuing this work on some regard.
But maybe not full and holistically as I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. But just continuously doing good work and giving back and being in a community and you know, feeling serenity to the world. And it’s still, you could be listening to this in five years or 10 years or two days, I really don’t know, but for me, I’m a month removed from the end of the campaign which means it’s very fresh in my mind. And there’s the inauguration and the transition and the White House and there’s all these pieces and I’m just trying to take every one of them very slowly and with grace because I don’t have the, I just don’t have the fortitude to continue at that level that I was at for two years straight, while staying healthy.
So I’m not trying to be greedy with God, I’m just trying to do some good work and hope that I can just continue that for as long as I’m allowed to.
AD: I hope to see many, many more Robyn Kanner gradients.
RK: [Laughs] Yeah, gradients are beautiful, they’re also in the sun rises and the sunsets. I was always wondering, just anecdotally but so much of what my dad wrote and political op-ed was about how much he didn’t like Reagan. And Reagan’s whole thing was like it’s a new dawn in American, a new day and so many of the gradients we did on campaign was about sun rises and I always wondered if somebody was ever going to call it out [laughter] and be like, these are very Reaganesque gradients.
Nobody ever really called it out, but it was sort of like this inside joke I had, in my head with my dad of just being like, I bet you would have gotten a kick out of this because I’m riffing off of that. [Laughs]
AD: I like it. I like it, thank you for sharing that inside joke. I can’t even tell you how much I’ve gotten out of this conversation. I feel close to you and I feel enlightened and I’m so grateful that you’ve shared so much of your story with me and with our listeners and I just can’t thank you enough.
RK: Thank you for having me, this has been awesome.
AD: Thanks for listening! To see images of Robyn’s work and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy these episodes, would please do us a favor if you like Clever, rate and review us! We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
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“ I wanted to get really good at something, and that was around the same time that I realized I wanted to get out of Maine too...I basically worked at this Wendy’s from 4:00 to 1:00am and I would go home and I just sort of self-taught myself design or how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or what these basic principles were.”
The Cambiata photo taken by Robyn Kanner
“There was this band called Cambiata that my friends and I did, it was Sean, Miguel, Dan, Chris and Stan and my friend Noah and I basically did all the audio and art for it. And that’s, I basically dropped out of school and did Cambiata for two years and that was like the best time of my life,”
Biden Harris Logo
Biden campaign selling hand sanitizer with his Covid-19 plan printed on it.
“When our campaign ended, I just felt like the job wasn’t finished and I made a mission to finish the job and went to the Biden campaign and did just that. ”
“ I mean the system was not designed for me [laughs], so I needed find different routes through it.
”
“Truth over flies” fly swatter adapted from “Truth over lies” campaign slogan.
“I didn’t know how to be me and the way I handled that was trying to be the person people thought I was. But then when I made a misstep, it really screwed me over. And I didn’t know how to handle that.”
Biden Harris banner featuring Kanner’s red-blue gradient signifying unification.
“I’ve come to realize that people who are really, really good at their jobs are people that create space for the people they work around.”
El Paso sunset
“I fell in love with the conversations and I fell in love with the people and I fell in love with the sky. El Paso has the best sunset and the best sky in the world, it’s beautiful. The saturation of the sunset is uncanny, it’s stunning.”
Biden x Gaga Battle for the Soul of the Nation
“The type system needed to have rhythm.”
“We just went for it on the creative. We had an incredible team and we used the strength of everybody’s skillset and used the strength of our experiences.”
Biden x Gaga Battle for the Soul of the Nation
“You just stay the course and trust that the process is there. And it just made the victory. When it finally happened on November 7th it was like a weight had really been lifted from me.”
Robyn after Biden+Harris win
“So I’m not trying to be greedy with God, I’m just trying to do some good work and hope that I can just continue that for as long as I’m allowed to. ”
Victory gradient for presidential election victory by Robyn Kanner
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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