Complicated Doesn't Make It Good - An Interview with Mark Gonyea
Mark Gonyea is extremely passionate about graphic design and how the combination of basic shapes can tell a compelling story. I had a great time sitting down and talking with Mark, an accomplished graphic designer, and children's book author. For those who love design and children's books and how to make one, this is an interview you can't miss.
Mark Gonyea: Acclaimed Graphic Designer and Children’s Book Author
Barney: I have with me in the virtual studio here, Mark Gonyea. So, Mark, you live in Vermont now, and you are from Vermont originally?
Mark: I grew up right across the lake in Plattsburgh and I didn't go very far. I’m the last North East hold out to all the relatives. My family has gone south.
Barney: I when I first went to the 2016 Vermont comic book convention, and they had a just a table of just artist alley's little giveaway schwag and little business cards and stuff. I remember I like my eyes drew straight to your “ABCs of the cryptozoology” postcard. Your style itself is fantastic and it's unique and nostalgic at the same time.
Mark: I feel like the term minimalistic has been overused a lot but I really like I trying to pair everything down into the least amount of information I need in order to convey whatever concept I'm trying to do.
Barney: so before we read started talking more about your work let's just dive right in and tell everybody the history of how you started doing graphic design and children's books.
Mark: I've always drawn. My parents have this story of getting contacted by my kindergarten school teacher. What I was doing was copying cartoons out of the Sunday paper and bringing them into class and selling them to the other kids. At six years old I was thinking this is a good gig.
Through high school and college and I took some typical art classes, like painting, illustration and printmaking and all kinds of other things. I decided that I really wanted to zero in on comics so I applied to the Joe Kubert School in New Jersey. That was at the time was the only comic book school that you could go to. I know Vermont actually has their own now. The Center for Cartoon Studies.
I graduated from the Kubert School in 95 and my very first job out of college was a graphic artist for Heavy Metal magazine which was a dream come true, but I was totally in over my head so that lasted about eight months.
I came back to the Northeast and settled in Vermont. I started working as a graphic artist for Vermont Teddy Bear and I was there for six years. one of the things about being a graphic artist in a larger company is you end up at a lot of meetings with marketers and copywriters and a lot of people that may not have a background in graphic design. You’ll have questions like, “why is that blue?” or why is that font so much larger than this other font?” or “why is there so much space around this other thing?”
I got really good at explaining design in a simple way so I started putting all of those little tidbits together and that ended up being my first kids book which is a book about design, “complicated doesn't make it good”; which has always been my operating motto.
After the book was made, I left Vermont Teddy Bear to just do kids’ books and graphic design.
Doing kids’ books wasn't what I had planned to do. I had done the design book as just a design book. I was sending it to traditional publishers, and they were sending me back feedback stating they don't do kids’ books and we also don't work with people that don't have an agent.
So I went out and sent it to a few agents and one company was kind enough to take it on and here we are, eight books later.
Barney: was there a specific artist or comic strip that you kind of were drawn towards and that helped influence your style?
Mark: there was a cartoon called “The Dot and The Line” and it was it's this amazing. It’s just a relationship between a straight line and a little round red ball and it's basically all about design. It’s all about structure and line and size and proportion, and curved lines versus straight lines. It’s just been such a great basis for what I like.
I also always really liked Shel Silverstein. His style is basically line art
Saul Bass is probably my favorite graphic artist and he only ever did one kid's book, “Henri’s Walk to Paris” and it's really cool because his whole deal is super minimalist so he's been always been an Inspiration.
Barney: A lot of your work is done digitally, do you do anything by hand as well?
Mark: I got to say it's almost 95 percent digital and it's been that way for a good 10 years. I do a lot of thumbnailing by hand but once I get to the point where I really want to start formatting pages it's almost all digital.
I use the trackpad. I don't use a mouse. I don't use a pen brush or anything like that and it's just because it's what I've used for the last 15 years.
Barney: here at and Storycomc we always say that everybody has a story to share and everybody can tell a story. On your website, you mentioned that you specialize in silent storytelling. How do you define that?
Mark: for me it’s wordless narratives. I do story posters which I considered silent narratives, where it's an almost long-form comic strip where you'll take anywhere from 48 to 108 panels and you're almost storyboarding it instead of writing it out so you're just taking the action and the sequence and a little bit at a time working out the story. It's really interesting because I'm writing at the same time that I'm doing the artwork.
Barney: you have a publisher and also self-publish. How did you get a publisher and how do you decide what books you will self-publish and which books will you give to a publisher?
Mark: When I had done the first design book back in 2003, I was physically mailing samples of everything to publishers and they would come back and say I should go get an agent so I only sent three copies to three different agents and the first two said no and then the third one said, “yeah, we'll give it a shot.”
I'm contracted that she represents whatever I do for kid’s books. Anything that's a coloring book or posters or postcards or anything that's not a book, I generally self-publish.
I'm in the process right now of looking for an art agent also who would represent that kind of work for me. Barney: you're still pretty good with the idea of wanting to get get an agent?
Mark: Right now, yes. If I was 20 right now and just starting out, it would be really hard for me to say the way to go is to go get an agent. It’s a lot of work to do it on your own.
Twitter exists and Facebook exists and all of these other avenues exist I don't want to say it's easier to get your name out there or to get a following but there are more opportunities to find that following.
I just turned 50 so I want somebody else to do it just bring me the work all I want to do is the creative stuff.
Barney: talk to me a little bit about the difference in processes between doing a children's book and doing a comic book.
Mark: I think for me it's almost the length of the story and most a lot of my earlier kids’ books were the non-fiction ones at 140 pages. A lot of my storybook kids’ books generally those are 32 or fewer pages. In my 32 pages probably only putting one illustration on a page or even a spread so there's a lot less space in the children's book for storytelling; you're just trying to fill the space with larger illustrations.
I feel like in a comic you can get a lot more complicated in the storytelling for sure and you can probably get more detailed with the illustration.
Barney: how much of the design intention do you place in the ‘re-readability’ of a children’s book? A good children’s book is re-read a lot compared to a comic book.
Mark: I write and illustrate the stories that I find interesting. I've always said that I do not really do kids’ books even though they're getting published by children's book publishers. I’m trying to do books that if I saw on the shelf in a bookstore I would stop and pick up
The New Kick starter
Barney: Let’s talk about your posters. Right now you have your 24th Kickstarter that's live. What I find interesting about this project is this touches on the two of your two passions: The graphic design piece and the children's book piece.
Fairly Factual Fairy Tales - A series of fairy tale infographic posters.
Mark: its five posters. I'm a big fan of fantasy and fiction and I love Aesop's fables and fairy tales. I didn't want to do just a basic retelling of those stories. They’ve been told a lot and people know the stories. I wanted to do some artwork that spoke to the general concepts behind the stories. In Little Red Riding Hood there are facts about wolves; there are facts about the color red; there are facts about the animal with the largest eyeball; the animal with the largest teeth.
Beauty and the Beast you get into mob mentality facts, facts about love and beauty and I threw in a few facts about Stockholm Syndrome.
Goldilocks and the three bears, there are facts about breaking and entering, how many people get lost in the woods every year.
Barney: Take us through some of the pledges on this. What do people get what?
Mark: this one is fairly straightforward. For $20 you can get any one poster and then for $35 you can get any two posters. I jump up to $45 for three and then 60 for all five. With any of those pledges you also get the high-res PDF to go with that. Of whatever it is that you choose. So, if something happens to the poster it gets wet or it gets ripped or any of that stuff you have this high res digital file you can go down to FedEx and print off your own for a personal use copy.
Barney: That’s actually a really good deal if somebody went for the $60 choice. You get five posters which means you're paying about twelve bucks per poster.
Mark: They’re really good quality. It is ninety-pound paperweight; which is almost like a wall paperweight paper and they're 18 by 24. I try to do all my posters in standard framing sizes so that you don't have to custom frame them or anything like that.
I can honestly say that none of these posters would get made without Kickstarter.
Barney: are these based off of the public domain classic versions of these stories or are there any references to the Disney version of these tales?
Mark: there's enough in the originals that Disney has included so there would definitely be a crossover but they're based on the grim fairy tales. The grim fairy tales are actually a lot more gruesome
Barney: do you have any idea have or sketches for any fairly factual fairytales 2.0?
Mark: I haven't yet for the fairytales; although when I start a project I always get carried away, so I have 16 or 17 infographic posters in this style. They’re not all fairy tales. I do the anatomy of a comic book where I explain all about like comic book creation okay, and I have the US government and I explain about the three branches of government and things like that; I do the solar system and I have one of those where I talk about all the planets. So the rest of the other 11 or 12 infographic posters I've done and have yet to do a Kickstarter for. They’re a little bit less cohesive as a group so I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to approach those.
Barney: there's a huge educational component. You seem to really love to share knowledge in a graphic design format.
Mark: I really like doing this. I'll geek out about design for a second. I really like graphic design and I love the idea of the relationship of one thing to another thing and there's so much bad design in the world, like just awful graphic design in the world that I hope that I can make it a little bit better.
The smallest bit of knowledge about design goes a huge way that takes you 75% of the way and then the rest of the way is just your own aesthetic preferences.
If you just know proportion in scale and color and you know choosing the correct font maybe or not choosing too many different things at the same time. That’s huge and that goes a long way to making competent design.
Barney: so what are some good references for folks who are wanting to learn more about graphic design?
Mark: I've always told people to find that thing that you like, find that book or artist that you like and it's fine to get inspired by them. Also, you only improve by doing; so do your own birthday invitations. Do your own Flyers for community garage sales. Do your own posters for just the movies and TV that you love.
Barney: I learned a lot about what it means to be a graphic designer and some ideas about what it means to make a really good children's book as well.
See more of Mark’s work on his website: markgonyea.com . There you can keep up with all of his Kickstarter projects.