Beyond Pretty Pictures: Marian Bantjes on her life, work and her transformative personal story

“This whole beard thing is really blowing me away,” says Marian Bantjes. Sat in an interview room at the OFFSET Festival in Dublin, Ireland’s trendy young things have baffled her. “I’m looking at these guys and they’re in their 20s and honestly they’re the best looking they will ever be and they’re hiding their faces behind these beards. It’s so bizarre; I just think why are they doing this? “I’m not used to it. The crowd I hang out with is much older so the design culture as I have known it has been very conservative. It’s very much a city phenomenon that I have heard a lot about, but I live on an island in Canada and we don’t have hipsters there. It took me a while to work out what makes a hipster, so seeing a whole lot of them all at once is really quite remarkable. “I think every generation has their fashion things that are likely to be looked on with embarrassment in the future,” she laughs. “It’s very similar to the time of the punks; there were these really pretty people looking absolutely godawful.” For someone once dubbed “the Michelangelo of Custom Decorative Lettering” (by Steven Heller no less) Marian is a warm and funny interviewee. She swears with a rare artistry and is thoughtful and articulate, occasionally questioning her own choice of words out loud and asking me to rephrase questions if she feels their context is incorrect. But above all she is forthright. “I have a very strong honesty streak and I don’t really see the benefit of hiding one’s mistakes. I think that making fun of yourself is often the funniest thing to do; taking digs at myself is something I do quite naturally.” “I think that’s the thing about my book Pretty Pictures. I really wanted it to be a tell-all, to be as open as possible. In a sense the opposite of the title; I was thinking about students in particular when I wrote it and I wanted them to know that everything is not always perfect and we all make mistakes and sometimes we’re miserable and shit happens.” Pretty Pictures is the monograph she published in 2013; a stunning 266-page look back at her career since 2003. There is work for big name clients and pieces done for friends and family, stuff she is very proud of and stuff she is now embarrassed by. The index not only directs the reader to “Favourites” but also lists projects under the categories “Died” “Killed” and “Rejected.” That self-awareness cuts both ways though, and while she might dismiss one piece as “a terrible piece of shit” she commends her successes when appropriate too. Of her T-shirt for the Speak Up blog which she admits “may have launched my career,” she notes simply: “It was bitchin’.” Marian wrote and designed the whole book herself and is as comfortable with text as she is with images. In fact she’s pretty hard to pigeonhole, described variously as a designer, artist, illustrator, teacher, typographer and writer. “I don’t like having different plates spinning, but I like exploring different things. I like to move from technique to technique and try different ideas, and try different styles to a certain extent. “That’s important because if I didn’t do that I would get bored but in the short-term it’s not a very good strategic move because clients tend not to know what they’re going to get from me. If I wanted to keep the money rolling in it would be much wiser to stick with something and be known for that. But once you do that it becomes even harder to change. Then change becomes a really big deal and freaks people out, whereas I think that people are slowly getting used to the fact that what they get from me will probably be unexpected. That’s what I want, but not always what they want.” Flicking through Pretty Pictures you are struck by this relentless experimentation. Her enthusiasm leaps off the page when she talks about creating typographic pieces in sugar for Stefan Sagmeister or using a ball-point pen to make intricate patterns on tin foil for New York Magazine. But she didn’t always enjoy such creative freedom. Marian went to Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art, but dropped out after a year frustrated by the tutors’ insistence that she specialised almost straight away. One day she went into a second-hand book shop to get change for the bus and saw a small advert for a job in a publishing company. This turned into a 10 year stint as a book typesetter (previously, she admits in her book, she had no interest at all in typography). In 1993 she and a friend started the design company Digitopolis and spent the next decade building up a portfolio of client work. But come the early 2000s she’d become “jaded and bitter.” “I no longer wanted to be a consultant on people’s marketing services,” she writes in Pretty Pictures. “I imagined myself on my deathbed looking back over my life, and I felt that I’d wasted it. I’d created nothing important or memorable or influential. I had lived in a small backwater of the design world, creating pseudo-importance from nothing, justified on the grounds that