LEE: Okay, name, Christopher, age, 44, where I'm from, Toronto, Canada, born.
BUHRMAN: How do you define your creative identity, and what early influences shaped the work you do today?
LEE: Professionally, I'm a graphic designer and teacher, but I've also done illustration like editorial illustration. And then within graphic design, there's a sub genre, like editorial design, I worked in branding, sort of dabble in type design, exhibition design, web design, you know, like everything. You do your freelancing, you do a little bit of everything, or you try music. I also write. It’s sort of part of my practice as an educator.
BUHRMAN: What else do you do creatively?
LEE: I’m trying to get more into crafts—more physical work. For a while I was doing a little bit of ceramics. In a way, type design is like that for me too; it feels like a kind of craft. Lately I’ve also been experimenting with seal carving, like stone seal carving—the kind used in places like China, Korea, and Japan. I’m not sure if Thailand has the same tradition. They’re used to stamp documents or letters. I’m not making them as a service for people. I’m mostly just experimenting with the processes and the tools. “Experimenting” might even be too pretentious of a word—I’m really just exploring creatively. That’s sort of where I’m at right now.
BUHRMAN: When did you first realize your creativity could be used as a job and not just a hobby?
LEE: Well, my father is an architect and my mother is a painter, so I grew up around art and design in a way—but not completely. There were books around the house, but my father didn’t really bring his work home. He was an architect and interior designer, but we were more like an IKEA family. Occasionally we’d have a random designer chair that my dad got from a job site or something, but that was about it. My mom actually stopped painting when I was born, but it was still something that was present in the house, and I knew that’s what my father did for work. He taught me how to draw. They both did, actually. So my father had a lot of design books in the basement, and one day I came across them and started looking through them. One book that really stood out was called Modern Publicity. It was kind of like an annual compendium of advertising and graphic design from around the world. The edition I saw was from the mid-1970s—maybe 1975 or 1976. It made a big impression on me. The designers who stood out to me in particular are people I still think about today. One was the Japanese designer Shigeo Fukuda. Another was the Polish-French designer and artist Roman Cieślewicz. There was also the New York studio Push Pin Studios, especially Milton Glaser, and another Japanese designer, Tadanori Yokoo. Those four were really my introduction to graphics, even though at the time I didn’t even know what graphic design was. After that, I started paying more attention to that kind of work. I found more books at the library—my mother would take me there—and I usually gravitated toward the art section or the film and cinema section. I remember reading about film theory when I was still pretty young because I originally thought I wanted to be a filmmaker. Anyway, that’s sort of the broad strokes of how it all started.
BUHRMAN: Kind of building off that, what parts of your background—like where you’re from—have shaped your work so far?
LEE: I grew up in Canada, and visually, especially in terms of graphic design, there is a strong modernist tradition there. It comes from the mid-to-late 1960s and connects to the International Typographic Style that developed after the war. In Canada, that visual style was also tied to government policy. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a lot of tension between English and French Canada, especially in Quebec. In response, the government developed multiculturalism as a national policy and tried to remove obvious cultural bias from its visual identity, especially anything that felt too English or British. The result was a very clean, typographic, modernist design language used across government materials, schools, libraries, and public spaces. I grew up surrounded by that civic design language, so visually, it became part of my background. But intellectually and politically, I’ve become more critical of Canadian multiculturalism. It presents Canada as a society of immigrants, but often leaves out the fact that the country is built on stolen Indigenous land. Because of that, I have a complicated relationship with that visual tradition. The aesthetic of neutrality — cleanliness, rationality, and order — can sometimes hide something much more violent underneath. That perspective influences my own creative work. I try to approach design from a more critical angle. In design school, we’re often taught that design is about problem-solving, but we don’t always ask: whose problem are we solving, and who defined the problem in the first place? That question probably captures my creative orientation more than anything else. I don’t want to spend time making things I don’t actually care about.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I feel that way, even if it’s for money. How long have you been teaching—12 or 13 years? And you said you were born in Canada, so you grew up there through college. Where did you go to college?
LEE: Well, I went to college there, and then I did grad school in Holland—the Netherlands. They actually prefer that you say the Netherlands. And I haven’t really been back since. There was maybe a year or two after I left when I was still around there, but not much after that. There is work there, but it’s a pretty saturated market.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I do want to visit there, because I feel like that region has a strong design culture. Like Denmark, for example—they have a lot of design, right?
LEE: I would say the social democratic countries in Central Europe, especially the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, have really interesting environments for design and art because there is more public support for practices that are not necessarily commercially viable. Those markets are smaller and often language-constrained, so there tends to be more funding for research-oriented, speculative, or autonomous work — work that may not have direct monetary value but has social or intellectual value. That feels very different from New York, where most people are mainly trying to pay rent. Some of that more poetic or experimental work does exist here, but the circumstances are different. In New York, most people I know are hustling. There’s a Japanese word, yoyū, which means having space or breathing room to do things, and I think that’s what many people in New York don’t really have.
BUHRMAN: I feel like most people in my grade or in my classes want to do what they want to do, freedom-wise, yeah, but monetarily I don’t know. It’s hard to do that in New York City.
LEE: I mean, I tell people—like students have asked me, “Can you help me find an internship?” or “Can you write a recommendation letter for me?” Or they’ll ask if I know anyone offering internships in New York City. And I’m like, why do you want to stay in New York City? You might get an internship that maybe pays—if they’re doing things legally—but you’re still going to have a roommate or three, living in a closet. The work isn’t going to be any better than anywhere else. It’s probably going to be the same shit work. Doesn’t my job suck? Yeah. I’m like, go somewhere like St. Louis or something. Somewhere you can actually make something of your life—where you can afford to live and not have to work every single day and struggle. I mean, working every day is one thing, whatever. But working every day on something you don’t even care about—that’s the problem.
BUHRMAN: Is there another profession you were interested in before graphic design?
LEE: Yeah, like I mentioned, I wanted to go into film, but I didn’t get accepted to the film school I applied to. I actually ended up getting accepted into a fashion program in Toronto. In that school there were two streams. There was the Fashion Design program, which was for people who wanted to design clothes, and then there was a communication side for people who wanted to do everything around it. Like I mentioned before, I didn’t really know what graphic design was, but I knew I was interested in magazines. I wanted to make magazines. In the program description it mentioned magazines somewhere. Even though my mother studied graphic design, we just never really talked about it, so she didn’t tell me much about it. But I saw that in the program description and applied. I got in, and then I flunked out the first year. That’s another story. I flunked out, worked for a year, and then ended up in graphic design after I had a better idea of what it was. So yeah, at first I thought I wanted to go into film, just because I was kind of naïve creatively. But now, honestly, what I want to do is not work. That’s the dream. Work just gets you money, dude. Do you like living here in New York? I mean, I make about half the salary here that I could make in New York City, but the cost of living is much lower. The quality of life is way higher. Everything just feels better here, right? Young designers want to be in New York, and employers bank on that. They glorify New York and say, “Oh, you want to be here?” Well, okay—then you eat shit, but at least you get to be here.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, before I went to Pratt, I had only been to New York once, when I was two. So I didn’t really remember it. New York was kind of a dream to me. But my first year, I actually failed at Pratt. I had to—what’s the word—reapply? No, I had to write a letter saying that I’d do better or something. I don’t remember what the word is. But yeah, basically repent. Now that I’m almost done, I’ve realized I’m kind of done with New York. It’s not as great as I thought it would be. And I know, in my opinion—I mean, I’m half Asian—and I think Asia is just better. It really is better, in almost every way.
LEE: I’d say there’s a lot of stuff I miss about New York City, or just America, or the West in general.
BUHRMAN: I don’t think I’ll miss it that much. I mean, I have some family there, but yeah, that’s probably the only thing. I want to go to Thailand. Now, is there something outside of your field that strongly influences the way you think or create? For example, things like film or painting.
LEE: Creatively, I think craft influences me a lot. Even when I’m working digitally, I try to approach it in a crafted way and take my time with it. I design a lot of books, so I pay close attention to typography and typesetting — details that most people may not notice, but designers do. For me, that’s part of what makes the work worth doing. I also think politics influences me, not electoral politics, but politics as power. When you work for a boss or a client, there’s always a power relationship. You’re doing something because they have money and need something you can make. As a designer, you’re always negotiating how much you give and how much you should care. Craft can make the work feel meaningful, because there is joy in doing something well. But at the same time, I think about my own life too. I don’t want to spend all my time designing something I don’t care about. When I worked at Bruce Mau Design in Toronto, a lot of our clients were real estate developers, and we were making brands for luxury condos. I couldn’t afford to live in those places, and I didn’t really care about the projects. I was doing it because I was being paid. So I’m constantly negotiating how much effort to give: enough that I feel good about the work, but not so much that I burn out. With books, it can be different because sometimes I care about the person, the relationship, or the craft itself, even if I don’t care deeply about the content. But I don’t believe anymore in the idea that if you simply work hard, you’ll automatically be rewarded. A lot of it is luck, timing, and social networks.
BUHRMAN: I think—yeah, let me just be honest. I mean, I’ve seen some work that, in my opinion, isn’t the best. And yeah, it’s for huge companies. Seeing things like that, I just don’t really understand it.
LEE: So it’s not a meritocracy. Talent, sure—it counts for something, but it’s not everything. Hard work isn’t everything either. Unfortunately, sad but true. But I think I realized that later than most people—or later than the smart people—because I kind of gave it my all. And then I realized it doesn’t come back the way I thought it would.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I had a talk with one of my teachers sophomore year. Do you know Frank Franca?
LEE: Yeah, I’ve heard of him.
BUHRMAN: I love him. He’s my senior thesis teacher. But sophomore year, he noticed that I wasn’t putting a lot of effort into my work, and he asked me if I even wanted to be here. We had a really long talk about it. And he was like, if you don’t want to be here, then don’t be here. It’s not worth it. And I was like, you know what? I do want to be here. And then everything kind of switched after that.
LEE: That’s the other thing about teaching. We use all these kinds of tactics to try to scare students into doing things. Like, “Great, if you don’t do this…” But that doesn’t work. That just teaches obedience, and it teaches authoritarianism. If you want someone to succeed, they have to want it. They have to want to do it. I say that to my students too. If you don’t want to do this, then don’t do it. A lot of students say things like, “I want to design because I actually want to be a painter, but my dad says I need to get a job.” But there are no guarantees with design either. So if you don’t love it, don’t do it. And if it’s about money, you can do something better than design. Honestly, you don’t even have to go to school. I mean, look at all these influencers and stuff. But anyway, outside of design, those kinds of things—questions of power—are influences on my work. I don’t know if they shape how the work looks, but they influence how I think about the work. They influence how much effort I give. And if somebody really wants my full effort, then they have to pay more. Well, yeah. That’s how that works.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, where does a project usually start for you? Like an idea, a reference, a feeling, or do you write down bullet points and brainstorm?
LEE: No, I don’t do that at all. As a designer, most of my work is commissioned. So again, it starts with somebody who has money asking for something, and I’m like, how do I get that money? So I align myself with what they’re asking for. That’s how those projects usually start. And like I mentioned, I’m doing a PhD program now. It’s a practice-based one, a kind of creative program. In that case there’s a structure for the work—I have to produce exhibitions, and they review those exhibitions. That’s the incentive structure. If I don’t do that, then I’ll be removed from the program. Okay, that sounds a little cynical. But underneath all of that, the independent work is motivated more by the kinds of things I mentioned before—the political stuff, the things that make me angry. I wouldn’t say it’s the same as caring about something because you love it. It’s more like something I spend time on because I can’t get it out of my mind. Anger can be a motivator. Hatred can be a motivator. In grad school, my thesis was about alternative currencies—forms of money that people create, especially during times of economic crisis, to help facilitate exchange in local communities. I started that because of hatred—hatred of capitalism.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, capitalism is everywhere. I mean, here I see it, yeah, it's everywhere,
LEE: Yeah, but we benefit and suffer from capitalism to different degrees. Especially as a student. I mean, this is kind of a jokey way I used to explain that project. I started it because I was a design student and I didn’t have any money, and money is a designed thing. So my thesis question was basically: why can’t I design money? It was a sort of naïve question, but it became a really generative one for me. So those kinds of things are motivations—need, you could say. Need, anger, hatred—those can all be motivators. I don’t really brainstorm in bullet points or anything like that. In those kinds of cases, I usually just do a lot of reading or research, and it’s pretty organic. It’s not like I go to the library with a strict plan. I don’t know if what I’m saying is totally true, but I like to think that I start by just making something.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I do that as well.
LEE: And then, in the school context, you’re always asked to rationalize or explain and contextualize what you’re doing. I think that makes students think that they have to do all of that before they start making something. But we usually don’t explain that very well. It’s not really one thing before the other. For me it’s always been kind of organic. The way I frame the work usually comes later. I like to think that it starts with making.
BUHRMAN: What does a typical day look like when you’re working on a project? Like, where are you working—at home or somewhere else? Most of the time, how does the day go?
LEE: I think a lot of procrastination.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, that’s most design, I think. That’s probably every designer. Anyone who says they don’t do that is lying.
LEE: Yeah, I procrastinate a lot. But yeah, I think that’s usually the pattern. Was that the question? Was that it?
BUHRMAN: I mean, when you procrastinate, are you still thinking about what you’re going to do, or not really?
LEE: No, man, I’m doing the dishes. My house is clean. But yeah, I think that’s sort of how it is. I think designing is weird because it’s so disembodied.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, because you’re also doing it digitally, right? And it’s just like—screen, screen.
LEE: I feel like a lot of what I used to do—I don’t do it at all now—but in my early design work there was a lot of stuff that was handmade. We had computers and everything, but during my undergraduate education I feel like I was maybe one of the last generations trained in the older techniques. For example, I had this one class where we had to hand-paint typography. Actually paint it by hand.
BUHRMAN: I did.
LEE: Okay, that’s cool. Yeah, I’m glad that still happens. We also had classes in drafting, so we learned draftsmanship—like technical drawing. We learned how to prepare our tools, how to use a ruler and a square triangle, and how to work with angles and measurements.
BUHRMAN: What school was this in Toronto?
LEE: OCAD. (Ontario College of Art & Design University)
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I only know that from that show Kim’s Convenience.
LEE: Yeah, I have a friend who lived around the corner from the actual store. Oh really? It’s an actual place.
BUHRMAN: Anyways, what part of your process do you find most frustrating and the most rewarding?
LEE: The most frustrating part is working with people—clients—when they think the work is easy. Like when they say, “Oh, this should be easy for you, right? Just pick a font and a color. Can you just change this?” They don’t understand how that throws off the whole dynamic. For example, when I’m designing books and they say, “Can we just add a page?” Physically you can’t just add one page. Stuff like that. So I guess the frustrating part is having to educate clients, because they don’t know. They’re not designers. And I’m like, you paid me—just trust me. I know what I’m doing. It’s also that thing where you think, why are you paying me all this money if you think all I do is pick a font? You could pick a font yourself if it’s that easy. Or they say, “This will only take you ten minutes.” How do you know? Maybe it takes ten months. Are you going to pay me this much money for ten minutes of work? What’s wrong with you? Obviously it doesn’t take ten minutes. But that kind of stuff happens a lot. I mean, a lot of designers complain about that. The most rewarding part? Honestly, getting paid. Having them like the work is nice too, but mostly it’s just getting paid. I don’t think I’ve thought about that question in a long time. People always say they like hearing that others like their work, but I have a kind of weird relationship to it now. It’s a job. When I was younger my ego was tied up in it more, but that guy is dead. That guy took a vacation. If someone doesn’t like what I do, I don’t really feel hurt. And if someone does like it, of course that’s nice. But it’s not my identity.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I feel like I’ll learn that over time. I think I’m slowly starting to learn it.
LEE: I think—I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I just don’t have that. Yeah.
BUHRMAN: Okay, how do you know when a piece is finished? Or do you ever really know?
LEE: Yeah, maybe it’s more like you never really know. But then there are deadlines, so it just has to be finished. You can always add stuff later. But for commissioned work as a designer, it just goes to print, or it goes online.
BUHRMAN: I mean, for a personal project, you can always come back to it. You can always add more later.
LEE: I mean, my personal projects are more like long arcs. I don’t really think of them as ever finishing. They’re just something you work on day to day and week to week. So there’s no real finished product. I guess whether something is “finished” depends on how you frame it. If the project is a book, then yeah, I could say the book is finished. But the larger project—the thing I’m working on or thinking about with my thesis—is something else. For example, the question I’m thinking about is the relationship between race and design. That’s a question. It’s not something that’s going to have a final answer. I’m not going to suddenly say, “I found it.” That’s not going to happen. I might finish a book, or a kind of discrete project, that processes some of that thinking and those questions. But it doesn’t conclude them. Yeah, that makes sense.
BUHRMAN: Have you had a project fail or not turn out how you expected?
LEE: Yeah, of course.
BUHRMAN: What was the most recent—or I guess the worst—failure?
LEE: I feel like I want to say yes, but I can’t really think of any particular examples. Not because I don’t think I’ve ever failed—I just don’t care enough to think of them as failures. For example, with type design: I published something a couple of years ago, and there are all these things I want to fix in it now. But that just goes into the next project. I could say those were deficiencies or mistakes, but I don’t think my ego is wrapped up in it enough to take that as an L. It’s more like, okay, that was one step. Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at things. I feel like I want to give you a better answer. Well, it’s okay. If you think about it, what would you say the breakthrough point was—like when you started getting a lot of work? I don’t think I ever really got a lot of work. Actually, last year I had a fucking ton of work. But there was one time when I was younger where that happened too, and I swore I’d never do that much work again. That year I slept like four hours a night for almost the whole year. I don’t care about the money that much—it’s just detrimental. I’d rather do less work and give more attention to the work I do take on. Eventually you learn to have the guts to say no. You get less afraid that if your price is too high they’ll walk away. What happened that year? I don’t know. It was probably just a combination of things. Networking is a big part of it. Wait—was that your question? I guess I could attribute it to something specific. I started designing this art magazine, and that connected me to networks of art museums, galleries, and universities. There’s also a connection between the architecture world—especially academic architecture—and the art world. So I started getting work through those networks. I was doing a lot of publications, exhibitions, and catalogs. That kind of work became my portfolio and my professional profile. I’ve also done branding and other stuff, but people don’t really know about it because it isn’t shown publicly. Even at the studios I worked at, they didn’t always promote that kind of work because it wasn’t glamorous. It was the work that actually brought the money in—like the real estate projects. That stuff is corny. It’s so bad.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, you can't always do what you want to do.
LEE: Yeah. I mean, usually you don’t. That’s why they pay you—that’s what the money is for. You don’t want to do that shit.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, like the job I’m doing for my dad—he runs a pharmaceutical business. It’s not really what I’m interested in, but it’s marketing, you know. I do like marketing.
LEE: Try to learn from it where you can.
BUHRMAN: I will, and I’ll take my knowledge to hopefully Paris, or wherever I end up. All right, what’s your favorite piece of work that you’ve done, and why does it stand out?
LEE: Well, damn, that’s hard. Not because I have so many—I think you caught me at a time in my life where I just don’t care that much.
BUHRMAN: You could say—maybe, like, I don’t know—something from last year.
LEE: Well, I wrote a book that got republished last year, and honestly I’m just starting to think about it again now, like a year later, because I was just sick of it. But now, having some distance from it, I’m like, okay, come back to this. Maybe I should start promoting it again—there are some interesting ideas in there. So I wrote and designed the book. Yeah. So maybe that project. It’s called Designing History. It came out through a Dutch publisher called Set Margins. Yeah, maybe that one.
BUHRMAN: You speak French and Korean, right? And English, obviously. Any other languages—Dutch or Japanese?
LEE: Yeah, I'm fluent in English. Comfortable in Korean. French and Japanese are passable, and Dutch is passable too. I can get by. I think it’s important to be able to speak other languages. But the problem with Amsterdam was that everybody speaks English there. So as soon as they hear my accent, they’re like, “Don’t embarrass yourself—we speak better English.”
BUHRMAN: People do that in Thailand as well. Yeah, yeah—but not to me. Like my older brother, he doesn’t even try anymore. He just gives up, because he also has a very American accent. All right, next question: do you consider your work to be beautiful? And what does beauty mean to you?
LEE: Yeah, whatever that means. I don’t really think about my work as being beautiful. It’s not a criterion for me. The grad school I went to in Amsterdam was known for being one of the only schools doing more experimental design at the time. The themes were more political and research-oriented. Another term people use there is “expanded practice,” meaning work that isn’t client-oriented or commercially driven, but follows other kinds of directions. So beauty was never really the question for us. But sometimes I see other people’s work and I’m like, that’s fucking beautiful. I wish I could do that. I wish I could design a page as beautifully as that person can. I don’t know where that sensitivity comes from. I don’t think I really have it. But everyone’s different.
BUHRMAN: Everyone thinks differently about things. When you create, do you think about time? Like the past, present, or future—or the impact it might have?
LEE: Oh, impact? No—I don’t know. I mean, that’s a good question. For my own creative, independent research work, I guess I do think about impact. I think about it mostly in terms of education. That’s really the main way I try to frame impact, even though there’s no real way to measure it. But for commercial client work, not really. It isn’t the cultural sector, so the stakes are relatively low. I don’t think about impact very much there. For personal projects, though, maybe—yeah. I think about the significance of their politics, or what they allow people to say or think about. Again, mostly in terms of education, and maybe more specifically design education. But I also hope it might have broader relevance. Some of the most interesting places I’ve presented my work are in a field called the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, often abbreviated as SoTL. Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about my work have happened in those spaces—not in design spaces. Design spaces can actually be pretty conservative. But in SoTL spaces there are people who are really committed teachers—people who are passionate about thinking through the impact of their work, how it affects students, how it affects the world, and how it shapes the way people think and what they believe they can do. That kind of stuff.
BUHRMAN: What do you think your work says about the time we live in now? I guess that kind of relates to the last question.
LEE: Ah, that's for somebody else to say it right.
BUHRMAN: Have you done anything recently that relates to the time we’re living in right now? I know you said you sometimes do political work.
LEE: This craft and design distinction—or the thing I’m trying to map—is the way that the distinction between craft and design maps racially. There’s a common way people talk about craft where it gets associated with tradition, and people think of it as being located in the past. But I think that framing of craft kind of uncritically accepts a Western, linear, progressive idea of time. In that view, the contemporary is now—technologically sophisticated, industrial, digital, internet-based, and so on. And then things you do with your hands—like using stone and a chisel—are seen as belonging to the past. But I’m like, no. I’m doing this now. It’s 2025, and I’m doing it now. So it’s not the past. If anything, it’s something that’s been carried forward.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I think it's becoming more popular.
LEE: Again, this connects to something else I’ve been thinking about in my work. I’m also critical of the tendency to romanticize craft as a kind of resistance to the alienating work we do under capitalism. For example, designing identities for condo developers—that’s alienating. I don’t care about that work, but I get paid for it. That’s the only reason I do it. I think a lot of people—especially your generation—are realizing something. You’re seeing my generation work really hard and still end up eating shit. So you start asking, what’s going to happen to us? You’re seeing that more clearly than my generation did, because when we were younger our elders seemed to be doing okay. At least it looked that way. Because of that, I think there’s sometimes a romanticization of ideas like going back to the farm or going back to craft. There’s this notion I’ve been thinking about called romantic anti-capitalism. It’s a critique of capitalism, but it mostly critiques the appearance of capitalism rather than its structural or material conditions. It doesn’t really attack the root causes. So in my own work, I’m doing this craft-based practice, but I’m also critiquing the way craft gets taken up in art and design discourse—and in education—as a kind of resistance to the alienation of the work we usually teach. Again, it’s one of those things where I don’t have a solution. I’m just hoping it’s useful to pose the problem. It goes back to something we talk about in design all the time: how design solves problems. Maybe we should also start asking how we create problems. That might be a useful activity too.
BUHRMAN: What is something you’re still trying to understand or explore in your work—about yourself, or just in general?
LEE: The main thing that comes to mind is the question that’s driving my thesis: what’s the relationship between design and race? How can you talk about design and race in the same context? Part of that comes from a critique of the way that conversation usually happens, especially in places like the U.S., where it often focuses more on representation and inclusion.
BUHRMAN: Where do you see yourself in five years from now?
LEE: Retired, hopefully in Thailand.
BUHRMAN: How do you want to be remembered? If you want to be remembered.
LEE: Personally, to be a good father.
BUHRMAN: How many kids do you have? Just one?
LEE: Just one.
BUHRMAN: All right, last question: what is one piece of advice you would give to young artists and designers today?
LEE: Some things someone said to me—which I didn’t really understand back then—but it makes so much sense now: just be good to yourself. Be kind to yourself. I think part of that is also those voices in your head that say things like, you have to post more. I don’t know—you know that voice inside your head. I tell myself that too. Like, you gotta post more, you gotta keep up. Then you look at someone else and think, look at that person, they’re so great—how come I’m not like that? You can just say, their work is beautiful. I wish I could do that. That’s great. There’s a lot of joy in that too. It doesn’t have to turn into why can’t I do that?
BUHRMAN: Yeah, not to compare yourself to others—just do your own thing.
LEE: Maybe the most practical advice is about posting. Don’t post—like, don’t listen to that voice that says you have to post.
BUHRMAN: Yeah, I’ve been told that a lot. But it’s also hard to post all the time.
LEE: It’s a fucking job, and I don’t get paid for it.