Why you should always email people who make things

Remember when society still had a shared culture? There was a time when, if a new movie or TV show was popular, it felt like everyone was watching it. Now things have changed, and we are all so splintered that there can be a huge hit show that nobody you know watches.

My memory is that the TV show Mad Men snuck in right before that great splintering. Of course, it was on cable, on a channel that hadn’t had a huge hit show before, and I was living in Manhattan where ads for each new season were plastered all over the place, so perhaps my memory is skewed but it felt to me like everybody was talking about Mad Men.

One thing that people loved to talk about: the animated opening credits sequence. Don Draper entered his office, put down his briefcase, and then his world falls away. He begins to fall past buildings with vintage ads, finally landing in his famous pose seated in a chair with arm stretched and cigarette in hand.

Here, watch it for old times’ sake:

One day in 2010, I noticed something about one of the very first shots:

Something struck me about the items on his desk.

That arrangement of items on his desk was obviously an abstraction of the lower Manhattan skyline. Right? You have tall buildings downtown, and then you have short buildings, and then you have tall buildings in midtown. How clever! How had I never noticed that before?

See, here’s an image from Google Earth that shows skyscrapers downtown on the left and midtown on the right, with just low buildings in between. This was obviously what the arrangement on the desk was inspired by.

My wife, however, disagreed. She thought it was just an arrangement of things on his desk and any resemblance to Manhattan was purely coincidental and all in my imagination.

Well, there was only one way to settle this: ask whoever made the opening credits.

So I did some research and I found out that the credits were designed by Steve Fuller. And his contact info was right there on his website. So I emailed him:

Later that same day, he wrote back!

Okay fine. My wife was right. I was seeing meaning where there wasn’t any.

But that wasn’t the end of his email! He added one more thing:

Whaaaa?! Sure enough, there it was as an attachment:

Whoa! I couldn’t believe he just sent this to me, a stranger, and asked me not to share it on the internet! Who just trusts someone like that?!

At the time, Ironic Sans was still a popular blog, and I was sitting on something that folks would love to see about a very popular show. I could have easily posted it. But he asked me not to, and I respected his request. I was just honored that he shared it with me and thrilled to see it.

So why am I okay showing it now?

Because a few years later he shared them with Art of the Title in a fascinating interview about the design process behind Mad Men’s titles, a much more appropriate place to let them out into the world. So they’re out there now already and I don’t think I’ve betrayed his trust by sharing them now.

It was a very nice thing for him to do, and it only happened because I took the time to write an email.

I had done this before

This wasn’t the first time I had emailed someone who made opening credits.

A few years earlier, back in 2003, there was a show on Showtime called Dead Like Me. It was essentially a workplace dramedy about a small team of coworkers played by Mandy Patinkin, Jasmine Guy, Laura Harris, Ellen Muth and Callum Blue who were Grim Reapers. Like, literally Grim Reapers. That was their job, guiding people through death.

It wasn’t the best show ever, but it was appealing and I enjoyed it. (I kinda miss it sometimes). And it had a simple but effective opening credits sequence:

It feels very much of its time, looking back at it. But I liked it. I liked how it set the tone of the show perfectly, and did it all in the most analogue way, just using people in costumes. No fancy graphics or animation. It was almost a little standalone comedic short film.

One day I noticed that the closing credits of the show credited the company that made the opening. They were called Digital Kitchen. So I decided to look them up and send them an email:

That’s it, nothing too long or fancy. The next morning, I received this response:

Oh, they also did the opening credits for Six Feet Under! Those were great credits. People talked about those almost as much as they would later talk about the Mad Men credits (and there’s an Art of the Title interview about the Six Feet Under credits, natch).

But what made me happy about his response was how happy he was to be recognized for something other than the thing he was mostly recognized for. He forwarded my email along to others on his team and I heard back from them that they too appreciated the recognition.

It was a short and simple email to send, and it made someone happy.

You know what you have to do now

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find someone this week who makes something that you like, and send them an email. (It doesn’t have to be an opening credits designer.) Tell them you like it, or ask how they did it, or find some little detail to ask a question about.

You never know what might happen.

And that’s it for another newsletter. Thanks as always for reading, sharing, donating, upgrading, emailing, commenting, and so on.

If you send someone an email this week, let me know how it turns out! (Not just any email, a complimentary email to someone who makes things. You know what I mean.)

See you next time.

David