So who am I, and where does that leave Projektmono? Well, I’m Marty.
Damo was my first creative director, but more than that, he was my first mentor. In 2014, I had just finished uni and was hungry to begin my career in design. I’d aced my viscom degree by leaning heavily on Pinterest trends and combinations of the five fonts that looked cool from Lost Type Co. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good education, but I’d found an easy path and learned how to take it shamelessly. The damage was done. My laziness was rewarded.
I left my home in Sydney and moved to Melbourne where I met Damo. He recruited me into the trenches of the 9 to 5. There, he gently corrected those mislearned habits of mine. He helped me lean on the fundamentals and gave me more opportunities than I had yet earned. He taught me how to work within the structures that surround professional creativity: the directors, strategists, account managers, photographers and everyone in between.
The way Damo cared about design made working on a print catalogue for truck parts feel like we were contributing to the cultural zeitgeist. He showed me that design fundamentals are timeless. You solve problems with the basics, then layer curiosity through unexpected consideration — through colour, illustration or surprising form.
Sometimes, after eight hours of designing, we’d go home and spend the next eight hours climbing the ranks in Counter-Strike. (He’d want me to mention that he reached Global Elite¹, the highest rank in CS.)
I moved back home after a couple of years of trench warfare with Damo. Since then, we stayed in touch through those infamous 90-minute calls. Sometimes I’d help him with projects. Sometimes he’d help with mine. In the background, he was building Projektmono, which was growing at an unprecedented rate. Every phone call, he’d update me on its progress.
Eventually, we both stepped away from the safety net of full time employment and began carving our own paths. For me, it was Studio 3AM™². For him, it was Projektmono™.
If I learned only one thing from him (and I learned far more than that), it’s how necessary gentleness is in an industry where it’s far too easy to have an ego, to steamroll your colleagues, to stand too close and forget the system you’re part of. He taught me that gentleness by living it every day.