SOME PRACTICES BEGIN WITH A LOAN AND A DEADLINE. CODY HUDSON BOUGHT HIS FIRST COMPUTER TO MAKE A RAVE FLYER HE PROMISED SOMEONE FOR $75. THIRTY YEARS LATER THE WORK IS STILL MOVING. STEEL SCULPTURE, PAINTED CANVAS, SNEAKER DESIGN, ALBUM COVERS. ROOTED IN CHICAGO AND SHAPED BY EVERY NOWHERE TOWN BETWEEN HERE AND KENOSHA. HUDSON NEVER WENT TO ART SCHOOL. HE NEVER HAD TO. THE UNDERGROUND GAVE HIM HIS EDUCATION AND THE MIDWEST GAVE HIM SOME PERSPECTIVE. WHAT HE BUILT FROM THERE IS A PRACTICE SO DISTINCTLY HIS OWN THAT HIS KIDS CAN SPOT THE KNOCKOFFS.

Mathew Swenson: Your path into graphic design seems to begin less through design school and more through various scenes — raves, music, flyers, underground networks. Did design initially feel like a profession or just participation in these cultures?

Cody Hudson: When I started doing stuff that would be considered graphic design, I didn't know it was graphic design. We were making skate zines, making stickers, cutting up grip tape and putting it on a skateboard. I didn't even really think any of this stuff was art or design, it was kind of just what we were doing. I later learned the term when I was working at this animation house, painting animation cells on the weekends. I showed the person there some stuff I did, and they said, oh, you know what, this is a thing called graphic design. So I looked into it a bit and ended up going to a technical school, I took "commercial art” classes. This is all pre-computer. So everything was done by hand. As soon as I started doing it, I thought, I like this better than working at Piggly Wiggly.

Mathew: The first time you did a rave flyer... was that a turning point?

Cody: The first time I ever did one was because I was throwing a party with Drop Bass Network out of Milwaukee. My pitch to them was, you could save like $75 if I just do the flyer as well. They said yes, and then I foolishly had to go get a loan, buy a computer, and quickly learn how to use it to make a rave flyer before the party. It wasn’t great, but it did fit in with what else what out there at the time.

Cody: Pretty quickly I realized I was way more into the design aspect of it than I was throwing parties. So I stopped throwing parties and went headfirst into doing as many rave flyers as I could.

Mathew: Did you think about them as promotional items, or more like experiments?

Cody: I was pretty practical about it in the beginning. Just copying and being influenced by what was out there...fractals look cool, I'll put a fractal on here, this trippy type looks good. This is in 1993, pretty early Midwest rave stuff. Then eventually I started to think about it through the lens of, oh, this is something I can do to push an aesthetic that I'm interested in forward a little bit. That's when the flyers became ones I like to look back at more now. I started experimenting with uncoated paper, using gold ink or silver ink, adding drawings to them, doing stuff that wasn't traditional CMYK stuff. People actually liked that more than the ravey stuff, and I just kept pushing in that direction.

Michael Cina: I had been following you because you were doing fliers for Woody McBride, it was so different. The Easy Rider flyer is a personal favorite.

Cody: Thanks. That stuff was really fun, and it made me learn new things, made me push in different directions. I think it was maybe the first time I realized you could put more of your own personality into it. I went to technical school... you didn't really learn about theories behind design or anything so a lot of the early career was just mimicking what was out there, not realizing, oh, if I go more internal on this and put more of my personal thoughts into this, I can make it into something that is more a part of me.

Mathew: Did the flyers feel disposable at the time, or were you building a visual language?

Cody: It was both. The flyer in general is always pretty disposable. You leave a party and there's 10 people trying to give you as many as you can before you leave, or you see them in a stack at Gramaphone, just a pile on the ground. But the thought behind them, the style of it, started to slowly work its way into other work I was doing at the time. Those flyers don't really look like work I do now, but it was the starting point to get here.

"There was a point where I was trying to distance myself from it. Thinking, oh, I'm not just this rave flyer designer, I can do all these other things. Now, with time, I'm looking back at it and really appreciating that work and what it taught me." — Cody Hudson

Mathew: Was there freedom in that underground world, or did the freedom come later?

Cody: It was both. Certain promoters were down for whatever, others were very specific... oh, this is the theme of the party, it should be this. I worked with really good promoters... Kurt Eckes from Drop Bass in Milwaukee, Woody McBride in Minneapolis. Both of them really appreciated my aesthetic and were willing to push things. Over time I just kind of stopped doing the stuff that didn't feel right to me, and focused more on the work that made sense. The people I was working with, I got their vision, and they got mine, and we could make a better thing together, as opposed to it being very work-for-hire style. You could say the same connection happened years later when I started doing a lot of the record covers for Chocolate Industries. Even though they paid me to do the work, it felt more like we were on the same team working together.

Mathew: You've moved through a lot of places, but Chicago keeps reappearing. What has the city given you creatively?

Cody: Chicago will always be home for me. Even though I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It's an hour north, right between Milwaukee and Chicago, and it was an interesting place to grow up. I had access to Milwaukee, where there'd be a punk show, and I could come down to Chicago and it'd be a warehouse party or a rave. So I was getting an introduction to a lot of different scenes. I moved around six or seven times in ten years, but always in between those jobs I'd come back to Chicago and give it another shot. It's a Midwestern city, but big enough that it has all the stuff you need. There's maybe an honesty to it. A warmth to it, in a sense.

Mathew: Michael and I spend a lot of time thinking about the Midwest not just as a region but as a point of view. Does distance from the coasts do anything for your work?

Cody: It’s hard to say, since I live here, being here is what I really know. I do feel like I'd be making similar work no matter where I lived. Although...if I did live in New York, maybe something would completely change. The nature would be removed from my work, and something else would come in based on what I'm seeing every day.

Mathew: With so much proximity to design in a place like NYC...everyone's on top of each other, it's hard not to influence one another. Space creates a buffer.

Cody: I could see that. The older I get, I'm out less. I'm by myself in the studio most days. Where my studio is now, there are other studios but I rarely see anyone in the hallway. The other day I realized there was a design firm I like upstairs from me but I've never seen them here. Maybe I should go knock on the door and say hello? So I'm around creative people, I just don’t get the chance to hang out very much. But I also feel like the community is here for me and I’m also here for the folks around me when they need it.  You can ask people questions about fabrication or talk about budgets or painting, it’s just maybe less socially then when I was younger and was hanging out at the bar a lot with a bunch of artists, skaters and DJ’s.

Mathew: Both of you do commercial work and have your own practice. How do you separate those identities, or is the work just an ecosystem that can be lent to different things?

Cody: I try not to separate anymore. I spent many years really trying to keep things separate. I wanted the paintings to feel like a painter made them, and the design to feel like graphic design. These were self-imposed rules. I would make an abstract design for a screen print and think, this would look great as a painting. But I would then tell myself, I can't be a graphic design painter, I want to be a painter. But as soon as I gave up on those rules and made the first more graphic painting I realized these are the paintings I've been trying to make for so many years. Once I let go of that it all started to come together for me and start to all make sense more and all the work started to feel like one complete world.

Cody: Now something from a sculpture will influence a design project and sometimes I’ll work on a poster and find something in it that would work better as part of a large mural. But what I really appreciate about working on paintings or sculptures, it's completely free. A completely loose process with no real end goal in mind, so anything can happen. That's where the experimentation happens that maybe a year later works its way into a design. When it's loose and it's open, more exciting things happen. And then I can bring them back to other parts of my work.

Cody: I wanted to ask Michael, with your work the styles can vary so greatly. Each Herb Sunday cover is so different. Where my style is going is in one specific direction, but yours can change so much while I can still tell you did it. I see the threads in there. How do you view the difference?

Michael: For me, what I try to do in the design process is push things as much as I can, like I do with art, so from both directions. I don't feel like I have a distinct style, I like to explore. For the longest time, when I was painting, I kept art and design separate. You said the work suffered when you did that, and I would agree... by trying to keep them separate, it feels like you're almost battling yourself more than just letting things flow. For me, design is often more digital while art is primarily handmade but I love it when they come together. The last Italo thing I did, I sketched it out digitally but then drew it by hand, and that makes it feel better. I like to explore and mix everything together.

Mathew: Do you feel like what you're doing is world-building? From a zipper pull to a large sculpture?

Cody: I enjoy the process of actually making the work most. I do also get a kick out of seeing it out in the world though. But so much of what I enjoy is coming in here, cutting paper pieces and moving them around, trying to figure out where this all connects and what it is saying to me. So in some ways it is working towards one larger body of work or one larger idea you could say.

Michael: I think what's always struck me about knowing you and your work. You're part of the community around you. When you talk about your metalwork, you were walking past a metalsmith and then started doing sculptures around that. It seems like what surrounds you helps shape the work.

Cody: Yeah. Everything around me is going to influence me whether I want it to or not. My studio was next to a metal shop. I'd walk by the loading dock and see them working, we became friends. Pretty quickly I went in and said, hey, can you cut some shapes out for me? They're building stairs and railings, and I'm like, I'm cutting these things out of wood right now... it would be so much cooler to see these things made out of steel. If I hadn't been next to them, I don't know if I would have ever thought to make sculpture out of steel. We've been making those for 15 years now. It maybe wouldn't have happened if I hadn't met Collin and Bill.

Mathew: Not everyone can buy a big sculpture. But there's a version of your world that more people can reach... a print, a jacket, a running hat. Does that interest you?

Cody: Yes, I like it all. I came to art through the design world, so I was always interested in collaborations, designing T shirts and album covers, working on sneaker designs. Years ago, the larger art world was looking down on that stuff, and now it's interesting to see that’s completely changed. Since I didn't go through the academic system though, I didn't have those rules in place. I was going to do whatever seems interesting and challenging to me. So it’s fun to get messages from people randomly about the Nike running collection... people tell me they just wore my hat yesterday when they went out running or have some story behind what happened when they got it. That's fun to hear instead of only interacting with the small handful of people each year that can afford to buy a large painting. But those conversations are good as well, there is just less of them. But I’m open to all of it.

Mathew: It got me thinking of Dieter Rams and all his design for Braun... like, my grandma had a bunch of those products and didn't know she'd bought a Dieter Rams anything. It was just in the kitchen.

Cody: Yeah. My kids will be at school and come up to some kid and say my dad designed that shirt. And the kid's like, no. And they say, yes, he really did. But the kid didn't buy it because he knows who I am, he bought it because it was a Chicago Bulls hoody with some cool graphics on it. So I like seeing people just be into the work without it having anything to do with me.

Mathew: Have you done a good job of archiving your work?

Cody: As I’m getting older, I've been more worried about it. I have a pretty good archive going now though and I also make sure to get pro photos of any paintings or sculptures that leave the studio. I keep 2 of every print I make, I have a bunch of tubs for specific samples of projects that really worked out. It is nice to be able to go find a skateboard deck I made ten years ago. Some of the stuff I originally thought I was archiving on Zip disks... none of those even work anymore. Half the CD-ROMs I had don’t work either. So much of what I thought I was digitally archiving I can't even access anymore. At least with a tub of shoes, hats and T shirts... the physical format's not going to disappear. I also update my website quite a bit, even though everyone tells me no one looks at websites anymore. I still do it for myself. Once this stuff's up there, I can always find it again.

Michael: And what's nice is you're showing the work. People are able to see what you're up to. I don't show probably 95% of the work I do. Archiving is always a struggle. Going back and doing it after the fact is a more monumental task.

Cody: It can be a lot and once you wait too long it’s even harder, that's why I try to do it somewhat in the moment. Although I also think it's overkill sometimes. Do I need 500 projects on a website? I now put projects up but then hide them... they're up there basically for me, not even visible. I just need somewhere to put this so I know where it is.

Mathew: What do you think actually endures? Images circulate endlessly and disappear just as fast.

Cody: Instagram could just go away. I think of platforms I used to use like Flickr, or Blogspot or WordPress . I don't even have those passwords anymore. I don’t know what sticks around forever and also don’t know what even should. When I moved last time (I was in the last studio for 12 years) I threw out a whole dumpster worth of stuff. I threw out maybe 50 paintings. Chopped them up with an ax or took a jig saw to them so someone couldn't find them and do something with them. And afterward there were definitely moments where I thought, maybe I shouldn't have done that. But it also felt so good. I don't have to ever worry about that stuff again.