Fate, Failure, and Fearlessness: One Man’s Formula For a Successful Design Career
Every elementary school in every neighborhood includes a certain type of special kid. It’s the kid who can draw as beautifully and effortlessly as a bird in flight. Meanwhile, the other students scratch their tiny heads in frustration as they try emulating that child and think, how does he do that?
Steve Barretto was that youngster with the natural artistic talent. Today he’s one of the most sought-after visual designers, with a portfolio of brand experiences for Apple, eBay, Dockers, Levi's, Mattel, PayPal, and many other retail, lifestyle, and non-profit organizations. But his route to success was anything but normal. “I didn't even know what graphic design was until my second year of college,” Steve says.
His journey as a creative professional began in the 1970s in San Mateo, California. “I was always the kid who found serenity by myself in my room with a pencil and some paper,” he says. “I would just draw whatever I could draw, whether it were superheroes or horses. I was really into horses because I’d always go to the racetracks with my dad on the weekends. I was blown away by the form of these muscular beasts.”
Steve’s passion for expression quickly formed a skill that adults recognized. In grade school, when other kids were stuck doing their math and English assignments, teachers often asked Steve to make posters and signs for school functions. His talent flourished all the way through high school, so it was a logical next step to major in art at San Jose State.
“I loved to paint and draw so I figured I’ll go study it,” Steve says. “The funny thing is, at that point I had no idea that there was even such a thing as commercial art. I had no idea there was even a category or a job title where people actually got paid to do art.” But during his sophomore year a fellow student casually mentioned to Steve that he should check out the school’s design program. There were classes for graphic design, illustration, and others about the principles of visual aesthetics. All of this was foreign to him.
“I discovered I’d need to learn typography because it needs to be paired with illustration for a calendar, a poster, an album cover, things like that,” he says. “And I thought, what’s typography? But that’s when everything clicked. As much as I liked drawing, I realized it leaves the interpretation to the viewer to try to understand the message you’re trying to convey. I preferred the idea of building and communicating a concrete, cerebral concept, adding element A to B to C and delivering a cognitive message that was enhanced by graphic design and typography.”
Steve found his bliss and completed all of the required classes, only to be rejected by both the Illustration and Graphic Design programs in the portfolio review process. Yet the experience fueled his determination, inspiring him to produce more sophisticated work and eventually earning Steve a spot in the Graphic Design program.
Then on literally the final day of photography class in 1988, his professor, Brian Taylor (a disciple of Ansel Adams) asked Steve if he’d be interested in a summer internship. Taylor’s wife worked for a burgeoning technology company called Apple Computer in Cupertino. He felt Steve would be perfect for the role. “I got the summer gig and it changed my life,” he says. “It’s that simple.”
Just like that, Steve was immersed in a culture of unrivaled design excellence, working day by day with some of the sharpest creative minds on the planet. It was like getting into the top grad school without having to apply. And then as his internship was about to expire, Apple went through massive layoffs, including with high-salaried members of the creative services team. However, they still needed world-class talent, so Steve accepted an offer to be a full-time Art Director.
In 1993, with a decreasing amount of creative and learning opportunities at Apple, Steve knew it was time to spread his wings. The conventional next step – a job at an agency – didn’t interest him. “I was a fan of Landor, Ogilvy, and other top agencies,” he says. “They flat out had the best brand identity designers in the world. Yet as I started to see who worked at these places, I noticed they were always private art and design school graduates. I believed that I’d be discredited immediately because it wouldn't be about my work, it'd be about my pedigree. I didn’t want to play that game. Besides, I always wanted to do my own thing.” The son of immigrant parents without college educations, Steve had always identified with the underdog and knew he could carve his own path.
So Steve started a design firm called Flux, which he ran out of his apartment in San Francisco. What he lacked in sales experience he made up for with hustle, chutzpah, and innate business acumen. “I was just going for it. I was fearless. I went to City Hall to apply for a business license and started talking to people about potential design work.”
Those “people'' were mainly his former colleagues at Apple, top-shelf design professionals who now worked at the hottest tech startups in the early 90s. They wanted Steve’s help for branding and design projects. (Keep in mind, this was pre-Internet when all communication was via phone call on landlines; Steve would send prospects physical packages of his portfolio).
He got referrals as well. One day he got a call from a marketing guy at a start-up named Verisign. “Can you do a logo for 3000 bucks? It's all I have”, he said. Steve took on the project and didn’t think much of it for years. Today, he can only laugh when he sees that logo on the corporate buildings for Symantec, who bought Verisign for $1.28 billion in cash. “I see that logo every time I deposit a check”, he says. “You just never know where your work’s going to end up, which is why I always keep an open mind.”
That let’s-see-what-happens attitude is best exemplified with BrownJesus, Steve’s own creation. In what he describes as “a total happy accident”, he was doing logo sketches for a corporate client at three in the morning and came up with a face that resembled Jesus. After a few more hours of work, he refined the concept into a personal statement: Even though he was raised Catholic, Steve never accepted the near-universal portrayal of Jesus as a white man with blonde hair and blue eyes. The next morning he called his lawyer to copyright the idea. Looking back Steve says, “Even if nobody liked BrownJesus, I wanted it to be the thing I leave behind for the planet.”
Steve made BrownJesus t-shirts and sold a dozen or so of them to a store in San Francisco’s Japantown neighborhood. The curator of the famed DeYoung Museum bought one and loved the concept so much, she offered Steve a pop-up store outside of Cheech Marin’s Chicano Vision art show. Brown Jesus got a top award at the AIGA competition that year.
From the outside, it appears the 1988 version of Steve simply caught one lucky break after another, but the Steve of 2022 has a different perspective:
“As I get older, I see luck as a result of intentional effort at something, and then being in the right place at the right time. If I hadn't tried my hardest in the photography class and produced work that made the teacher notice, he wouldn’t have thought of me for the internship. And I only took photography because it was a requirement. I don’t think I was a good photographer, but I was in the lab a lot developing film and making prints and failing a lot. It was the ethic of trying and failing and trying again that definitely plays into the reason why I’m still doing what I do. I’m always working on creating more love for brands. Because I’m okay with trying and failing and then just trying again until I succeed.”