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Jakob: Well, fortunately it’s not only Antoine, it’s a bunch of people that are just fabulous. And if I’m instrumental in the process, and I think I am still fairly instrumental, just to look at everybody’s ideas, and say, "That! You’ve got something there. Do something with that!" or, "Do that, but did you see that movie, or I have a painting here, or I want you to listen to this track, or I want you to read this book, it’s all about..." You know, it’s just about trying to put things in context. It actually is very hard, and it’s even hard in cases like now, when you came I was like, well, is it me you want to talk to, or do you want to talk to the people who actually do something besides talking?

Gelman: Well, they’re sitting there doing something, you are talking, so everyone is doing their thing. [laughs]

Jakob: Right. No, it’s true, sometimes it’s ridiculous.

Gelman: Tell me, how did you get into graphic design?

Jakob: I was doing flyers for the club, for the nightclub, and we were doing it with Letrasets, you know.

Gelman: So you don’t have any formal graphic design training?

Jakob: No.

Gelman: Do you feel like that’s an advantage?

Jakob: [laughs] No, but it’s interesting. There was an article in One magazine, that short-lived thing, that was about self-taught people. And it was interesting, because the thing that’s so great about being self-taught is if your whole education is to be a graphic designer, you’re probably gonna think of yourself as a graphic designer, and that’s probably what you’re going to be doing, or something that’s related to it. For me, it was like, if I had any education, it was the technical education. When I was a teenager, I was building synthesizers and amplifiers, and a fuzz-box for my guitar. You know, I feel like once you realize-and I realized at one point, that it’s not about me being a DJ, or a graphic designer or a director, because it’s all about understanding how things fit together and why, and what happens when you put things together, and how you need to put things together for them to work, and I think one of the most amazing things was when we got our apartment, we bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, I think it was eight years ago, and we were gonna get furniture for it. And I have some friends who are architects, and they renovated the space for me, and then we started to talk about furniture. And I said, "Well, I kind of like this sofa," and they said, "You like that one? Why don’t we show you some stuff." And we went to a warehouse upstate where they had Danish furniture from the 50’s and 60’s. And all of a sudden, looking at all of this furniture, that part clicked. I had never paid that much attention to furniture. I had been so into first music and then, you know, graphics and stuff like that, and then all of a sudden I realized, "Oh, but it’s the same expression. It’s the same."

Gelman: But you didn’t start designing chairs.

Jakob: No, but the thing is that with music, I knew exactly, after having worked with it for so long, I knew exactly what I liked and what I didn’t like, and why I liked what I liked.

Gelman: And this was kind of untouched territory?

Jakob: Yeah, and I realized, after just seeing what was out there, looking at it, thinking about it, I knew there also. And if someone is-because all of the furniture in the office is stuff that I got, and if someone is saying, oh you have really worked hard on understanding and refining the quality of furniture-I say no, I didn’t study furniture. It’s like, I listen to music, and I know what I like in music, so you know. If you have a really strong opinion of how you like your beef prepared, you’re probably gonna have a strong opinion of how you like your salad to be prepared and how you want your drinks to be mixed. Of course it is about being opinionated, and it’s about not being afraid of having an opinion. So I did some flyers and I did some posters, and then I bought a Mac, and then the most important thing I did was buying all the books on Jan Tschichold I could find. I was gonna do this little brochure about my company-my company was called Par Avion, which was funny because I got so much mail from everybody in the building because it was air mail, and they put ‘Par Avion’ on it, so the mailman thought it was another thing for me.

Gelman: So part of your job was sorting somebody else’s mail. [laughs]

Jakob: Exactly. So I was gonna do a little folder about the company. And I found a Jan Tschichold book cover, and I said "I’m just gonna rip that off." And it was one of his symmetrical-

Gelman: Later period.

Jakob: Yeah, exactly. So I put my type in, and I put it in the exact same proportions, I was basically measuring the stuff, but I had the Tschichold thing there, then on the computer there, and then I printed it out, and it looked like shit. And I was like, well how is this possible? And I realized, well my lines are different lengths, and then I saw that, well this has more weight right there, so I need to move it to compensate for that, and all of a sudden, I begin to understand how you need to move things around to get it balanced, and how you need to move stuff around to get it unbalanced in a good way. So I think that that’s how I learned about typography, just by ripping off Jan Tschichold. So I’ve been thinking lately, well maybe I should just take a Chemical Brothers song and just reproduce it, like with another melody, but adding the same kinds of layers, and then all of a sudden maybe I’ll make a hit song, once I’ve understood how it is. Which is not-I mean, It’s not my goal to make a hit song, but I think it’s very interesting how you assimilate things you can- because you were asking if there is any new and different music being made and I think, on the one hand, everything has been made, but then you’re listening to something and you can say, no this comes from somewhere, but, like I was talking Akufen, if it comes from anywhere, it comes from William Boroughs and James Joyce, you know. It’s that kind of thing.

Gelman: During one of my visits I saw you using a Silicon Graphics machine, and I was impressed because it wasn’t largely available.

Jakob: I think I’ve been saying that what I’m doing now is basically supervising the creative process. I think that one thing that’s important is that I have been so hands-on with everything, that I have been using basically every piece of software that there is, and I think that by using the software I’ve learned how things can move and whatever, and so I started working in SoftImage on SGI boxes, and probably the most successful piece I did was the one with type in orbits, sort of spinning around, which was an opening for the Ted conference, and there’s two orbits with type, and well, many orbits, and at the end they form a-

Gelman: I do remember.

Jakob: What’s interesting about it is that if you’re going to do type in motion, there’s no reason to keep it on one plane, as if it was print. So all of a sudden you can put them in space, which is something since architecture has always been a great source of inspiration for me, and I some of the first graphic design I was trying to do was to make type that had dimensions. And I’m not talking about extruded, you know, metal type, I’m just talking about taking flat, two-dimensional type and putting it in space. And I remember I was looking at the old Universal Pictures opening where they had ‘Universal’ orbiting around the earth, or whatever it was, and just feeling that it was so great to put the type into space. That was of course done with a model that they shot, but it wasn’t until probably in the, I would say, mid- to late-90’s where I felt that I was ready and the software was ready, so that I could finally start to do that kind of thing. And I know ‘Panic Room’ is getting all these awards for the main titles, and I can’t really understand why it’s that great, because I think that what’s far more interesting is what MoMA has done with the type where they painted it on buildings so it doesn’t look like anything, then all of a sudden you’re on the subway and they all go together and you can see it, you know. So that’s the kind of stuff you can do with graphics in three dimensions and it’s great.

Gelman: Excellent. Are you wearing ski pants?

Jakob: I’m wearing the only Nike product that I own, which is a pair of running pants that I bought because I was running at the gym, and I was thinking that they were nice, and it was just too fucking warm to wear them to run in, so they were on the shelf for about three years. Yesterday I found them, and I was like, well, I can wear these.