Design Principal

Mau returned to Toronto in 1983 and cofounded a three-person studio called Public Good, where he created ad campaigns and informational materials for unions, government agencies, and cultural institutions. Eventually, Mau left Public Good to start BMD and work on the Zone Books series. "We designed the first Zone dummy in seven days," he says. "If you had to produce a calling card as a young designer, you couldn't do better. Zone went to all of the right institutions, schools, and studios. I had an international practice immediately."

Mau's reputation continued to build as he designed more projects for Zone Books, as well as various projects for the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the Getty Center, in Los Angeles. His career mushroomed in 1998 when he gave a presentation at the influential Doors of Perception conference, in Amsterdam. After two days of lectures about technology, Mau took the stage to speak about personal creative development. He titled his talk "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth," and it had nothing to do with computers. It consisted of 43 suggestions and admonitions, such as "Make mistakes faster," "Allow events to change you," and "Ask stupid questions."

"The audience went crazy," Mau remembers. "At the end of this barrage of technology, I was saying that creativity is device-independent. I was asking the audience to use its noodle." The manifesto was later published in I.D. magazine, where Mau had served as art director for a time. It was translated into Italian, Swedish, and several other languages, and it became a viral phenomenon on the Web. It was posted in newsgroups and circulated by email. "The oddest thing I heard was that a New Zealand company had used the manifesto on its corporate Web site," says Mau. "It has taken on a life of its own."

Creativity by Design

Designing an organization for creative growth, to Mau, means unhitching it from a single "guru" figure and allowing the entire group to help shape the work process -- from brainstorming to final product. Many creative groups, like architecture firms or ad agencies, rely on a single central authority to define their style and to approve the work being done on a given project. BMD has tried to avoid that "hub and spoke" system.

That model "is all about a single person's productivity and [design] sensibility," says Mau. "What we have is more of a cellular system. We're all interdependent; no one is totally dependent on me. And the culture creates its own stylistic sensibility. People who have been here for years have contributed to it, and new people add to it. That model has more of an unlimited growth potential. It's not confining."

Mau doesn't flit around the office dispensing guidance and feedback in small doses. Instead, he delves deeply into a few projects -- usually in areas where the studio is trying to break new ground or to develop a new competency like editing digital video -- and very lightly follows the progress of others. "I don't want to limit what we do just because my time is limited," he says. "I did a lot of book design for the Zone series in the early days, for example. Other people work on that project now, though I still serve as creative director. They do a better job than I could, because the project isn't new to me anymore. When I worked on Zone, I was always a different person coming out the other side of each book. I want to give other people that kind of experience now."

On a Wednesday afternoon in April, Mau spends several hours sitting with the team that is reworking a section of "Stress," a 45-minute video that debuted the previous weekend at the du Maurier World Stage festival, in Toronto, and that will be shown throughout the summer in Vienna. The section is titled "Blitzkrieg." It doesn't yet contain any of the signature blitzkrieg images from World War II, but Mau wants to insert a few. Rather than dictating changes to the employees, he merely sits in the editing bay, watches a string of video clips, and mostly agrees on which pieces of footage would work best. In the end, the team decides not to add the blitzkrieg images.

"Bruce is demanding, but he's not prescriptive," says Cathy Jonasson. Jonasson left a prestigious curatorial position at the Art Gallery of Ontario -- and took a 20% pay cut -- to work at BMD. "Mau is very good at looking at someone's work and finding the best in it. People leave him feeling good about their work and knowing what they have to do to make their work even better. He constantly emphasizes what you mightcall the 'Mau method': Ask the right questions, understand the problem, and explore lots of possible solutions."