Design Principal

Mau's two central concerns are hiring the right people and selecting the right work. He is clear about what kinds of projects he wants to work on. "We have what we call the 'Four Ps' checklist," he says. The four "P"s stand for "people," "project," "profit," and "plate." Mau evaluates whether a client is someone he'd enjoy working with. He asks whether the project is one that BMD could learn from, as well as whether the firm can make money doing it. Finally, he considers how the project would fit onto BMD's plate: What impact would it have on the already-overcommitted team?

Screening clients this carefully sends a message to employees that every project is important. And since BMD doesn't have a marketing brochure or a sales staff, the body of work that the studio produces also serves as its most visible advertising. "Chasing business is not the right way to get business," Mau says. His system works surprisingly well. Several years ago, a set-design project for Mikhail Baryshnikov's dance troupe led to a commission to produce a new visual identity for the Museums of the City of Antwerp, in Belgium.

On the people front, BMD has taken a similarly quiet and quirky approach. Many employees find out about the studio through word of mouth, or through art internships. "The studio is an ecology," Mau says. "It can only absorb certain kinds of people, so we're super rigorous. Explosive growth doesn't work for me. We want to grow in a more natural way and maintain the ecology. I feel like a guardian. Bringing in the wrong kinds of people poisons the garden."

In the summer of 1999, Mau ran a recruitment ad in an alternative Toronto weekly. Rather than following the standard help-wanted format, though, Mau created the ad in the form of a quiz. The headline was one of Mau's favorite catchphrases: "Avoid fields. Jump fences." There were 40 questions, from "Who designed Toronto's New City Hall?" to "Who made a film consisting of nothing but the color blue?" (Answers: Viljo Revell and Derek Jarman.)

The ad became something of a phenomenon. It generated responses not only in the form of letters and résumés, but also via Web sites, books, and sculptures. "It was just phenomenal," Mau recalls. "Everyone in town heard about it." The ad brought BMD three new employees, and an infusion of outside contractors and collaborators. "It also brought in a stack of résumés that we continue to draw from," Mau says. "We're planning to run an ad every year, not to fill specific job openings but to keep shaking the tree. We're looking for a very specific kind of person" -- not necessarily people who think of themselves as designers but people who use design to think through problems -- "and we figure there's a lot of talent that's stuck in the wrong place."

Mau already has his headline for the next ad: "The Test of Character Is Multiple Choice."

Design Principles

Since childhood, Mau has chosen never to hew to a particular job description, and he doesn't expect his employees to either. Hence the motto "Avoid fields. Jump fences." Growing up in Sudbury, Ontario, a nickel-mining town six hours north of Toronto, Mau studied science and engineering, but he worried that his adult life might consist of soldering circuit boards. In high school, he knew that he wanted to make a change, but his guidance counselor told him that it was too late. "I said, 'Surely, my fate can't be sealed at the age of 16,' " recalls Mau. The guidance counselor found a program for people who wanted to go to art school but who didn't meet the academic prerequisites.

"It was called Special Art," Mau says. "It was a year of doing nothing but art, and it changed my life." Mau immersed himself in drawing, ceramics, and photography, and he learned how to use the school's one-color offset lithography press to produce full-color prints. His work, including the design of his school's commencement program, was so good that the admissions staff at what was then called the Ontario College of Art, in Toronto, was skeptical that he had done it by himself.

Mau's trip to Toronto for his college-admission interview was his first trip ever to a big city. He was accepted, but he soon found his courses too elementary. So he started sitting in on the senior classes. "I was getting honors in the fourth-year classes and hassles in the first-year classes," Mau says. When he decided to show his own drawings, instead of his official class work, at a school exhibition, the department chair chastised him, and Mau dropped out of school.

He quickly found a job at Fifty Fingers -- one of Toronto's hot, young design studios. A year later, he moved to London to work at Pentagram Design Inc. -- a large, international design firm. While both positions helped Mau sharpen his skills, his outspokenness didn't help his popularity at Pentagram. "We were expected to be like slaves: Listen to your boss, and just do it," he says. When Mau quit Pentagram after a year and a half, his supervisor told him that one of the senior partners had long been suspicious of him. Why? "I was working late a lot, because I was interested in the work," Mau says. "And this partner said, 'No one here works like that.' "