Douglas Coupland is a Jerk
My personal story about doing business with my personal idol, and why it sucked.
Since writing this, Douglas Coupland responded to me and addressed the concerns outlined in this post. You can read that here, but I recommend reading this post first as the other one won’t make much sense without it.
Douglas Coupland: author, artist, designer, social commentator. I’ve followed all facets of his work for over 15 years, since I read the first line of Life After God. His books, like Girlfriend in a Coma and Microserfs, are among my favourite books of all time. His Digital Orca artwork in Vancouver is nothing short of awesome. He designs his own book covers. He’s the guy who coined the term “Generation X”.
As I’m a professional designer who went to contemporary art school and writes blogs on the side, he is incredibly successful at all the things I want to be successful at. I have read everything he’s written, love his artwork and his minimalist design aesthetic. He is, in essence, one of my personal idols.
Until recently, that is.
Last December, he put out a call on Twitter looking for people who were familiar with Adobe Illustrator for help with some artwork he was working on. A friend saw the tweet and suggested me to him, he tweeted me, I tweeted him, he started following me, he flattered me a little bit, some DMs and emails ensued. I was almost shitting my pants because, well, here was a guy who’s work I had admired immensely for a long time who now knew who I was and actually wanted me to do some work for him. To say I was pretty excited is a gross understatement.
The work itself was pretty simple: he needed an image of a dot-pattern vectorized in Illustrator (meaning, that it would make the image scalable and ready for vinyl-cutting) and he said he wasn’t sure how to do it himself. In hindsight, this should have been my first red flag because to do this, you basically just have to know how to draw circles in Illustrator. For a designer of any calibre to not know how to do that is actually pretty ridiculous. Clouded judgement: 1. John: 0.
The file itself was pretty straightforward (see image below) — a simple dot-pattern — and it looked like there was even a fairly simple pattern that, once creating a section of dots, could just be cut-and-pasted to fill out the rest. I was excited not only because Douglas Coupland had reached out for my help, but that there was no question at all that I had the knowledge and ability to help him. It felt like a very real connection between us — between myself and my idol! — had been made.
The emails at the beginning were congenial and I told him how long I thought it would take, making clear that this was based on the assumption that there was a distinct pattern. He assured me there was. We negotiated a fair rate. He said that there were a dozen or so more just like this that he would need done as well. So far, things were going smoothly.
Whatever these dozens of images of dots created in the end, I had no idea, but I figured it was something brilliant that Douglas Coupland was creating that would create a larger image that I couldn’t see because I only had a piece of it. I trusted him.
Then I started working with the image and, despite how it looks, there was absolutely no set pattern to the image. I searched for hours for any hint of a pattern in the dots — anything that would keep me from having to go back to Douglas Coupland and disappoint him. In the end, the search was in vain. All the dots were different sizes and nothing lined up in a pattern and all of the little circles (about 8000 of them in all) would essentially have to be created individually.
I immediately went back to Douglas Coupland (via email) and told him the situation. I told him that I could definitely still do the project, but it would take much more time than we had thought because, despite what he said, there was no pattern to the thousands of dots. I told him I would wait for his reply on how he wanted to progress.
No response.
I emailed him again a week or so later. No response.
A week or so later, I was worrying that I would never hear from Douglas Coupland — remember, a personal idol of mine — ever again, that I let him down, that he was disappointed. So, I decided that I would complete the project in my spare time, when I could. Clouded judgement: 2. John: 0.
Seriously, I couldn’t work for more than 20 minutes at a time on this project before going loopy. I’m a bit of a perfectionist anyway, but this was a project for Douglas Coupland; I wanted it to be as perfect as possible, so I spent hours and hours over a month or two adjusting vectorized circles, zoomed in at 1600%, to be as true as possible to their rasterized cousins. It was monotonous, boring, pain-staking work.
When I was done, I had already decided that I would send the finished product to him. I had justified in my head that he had given me so many hours of enjoyment through his novels and artwork that I could give some of that back to him through this. I felt noble and proud to have been able to contribute to his artwork in a small way. I sent him an email expressing all this along with the vectorized .eps file. Clouded judgement: 3. John: 0.
Of course, what I now realize is that I was desparate to hear back from him again, to receive some sort of acknowledgement of what I had done to help him, that he was grateful to me. To me! Imagine, Douglas Coupland, grateful to me! Vain? Insecure? Maybe. Well, yes, definitely actually. But a simple thank you from him would have sufficed.
Not surprisingly…no response. Nothing.
I was completely ready to let it go and chalk it up to a unique experience that I could learn from. Then, after a few months, Douglas Coupland (@dougcoupland) tweets something:
Two weeks back I began an ongoing blog about the making of next year’s museum show. Many words and pictures! http://t.co/bTwJCNP02s
I click on the link and poke around, and then I see this image on his site, looking oddly familiar:
Luckily, the image he uploaded was of a ridiculously high resolution for a website, so I download the image and compare it against the exact same one that I gave to him. And here it is, in animated .gif form. Hmmmm…
It’s smaller here, but I promise you, aside from the small cluster of larger dots about halfway down the image (he’s learned how to make circles in Illustrator now!), it’s exactly the file I sent to him. Remember, I was extremely detailed, and all of those circles line up precisely. Goddamnit.
I know, I know, I freely gave him the final image on my own volition, and that theoretically, he owes me nothing. But now he’s created artwork, going to sell or gain notoriety from said artwork, from my free labour. Am I asking too much for a simple thank you?
I tweeted him back, giving him perhaps one last chance to redeem himself, in my eyes:
@DougCoupland Hmmm…this dot pattern looks very familiar to me. Why would that be? http://projects.vanartgallery.bc.ca/Coupland/the-21st-century-condition/
Yup, no response.
So, I decided to write this article, to use my story as a warning to everyone reading this.
We all have personal idols, people that we admire, that we hold to a higher standard, that we want to emulate in some way. But they are just people, and just like in our own circles of friends and acquaintances, there are bound to be some jerks and assholes. Guard yourself against them when you must. I can tell you, it sucks when your personal idol turns out to be one, and someone you admired so greatly takes advantage of your admiration and generosity.
Or, you may think that it may just seem petty, childish, or whatever other names you can think of, for me to have written this article.
Whatever. Clouded judgement: 4. John: 0.
Since writing this, Douglas Coupland responded to me and addressed the concerns outlined in this post. You can read that here.
