White. It fills the room. Lying on his back on a queen-sized bed, Jonathan Lu stares at the ceiling and for a moment, you wonder if he even realizes you’re in the room with him. He’s wearing a clean white undershirt with pajama pants (those are white too). “You know, I didn’t always have one of these…” he says as he slowly kicks his feet back and forth - swimming in the sheets. “I mean, at least not when I first got out here. I slept on a couch, and then a really good mat… God knows, I slept on that thing forever.” His eyes drift a bit, and he looks as if he didn’t really mean to let that last fact slip out. The sigh he lets out afterwards confirms.
Later, he walks out of his room prepped for another full day. You can’t help but notice a difference. He’s wearing light wool pants, a simple v-neck sweater, and glasses now, only it’s all black. From his shoes up to his spiked black hair, it seems like the complete opposite of the man I saw this morning. It’s a powerful look, but not for the usual reasons. It’s not trying too hard, and not even overly aggressive. His presence is just such a strong contrast to his surroundings, you can’t help but feel like you’re sinking… like the figure in black might swallow up and absorb everything in the room. The reality probably isn’t far off. It becomes apparent that I’m speaking with an entirely different animal, now. This isn’t Jonathan Lu. He’s now assumed the persona: jonny.gotham.
His presence is just such a strong contrast to his surroundings, you can’t help but feel like you’re sinking… like the figure in black might swallow up and absorb everything in the room. The reality probably isn’t far off.
A lot of people think that the gotham part of his identity relates to Batman, a dark crusader that’s known as much for his feats of heroism as he is for his moodiness and brooding personal life. And although it is his favorite hero in the comic books, Gotham (how else could one refer to him?) politely chuckles, “No, really, it’s not that. I mean maybe a little, but the reality is much simpler.”
Few people know that ”gotham” existed way before The Bat. Washington Irving popularized its usage as a nickname for New York City, and thus Gotham City was born. The attachment to the name is just a nod to his home… sort of. “I never lived there officially, short of a couple months here and there in my youth,” he unabashedly admits, “but whenever I was there, it felt like home. Of course, I left it on rocky terms, and it’s never been the same since. That’s just how things go I suppose. I guess I’m a man with no home now?” He laughs it off with an unavoidable awkwardness, folding his arms and giving a gentle shrug of his shoulders, “That’s so melodramatic though!” The polite silence that follows agrees with him.
He now lives in California. Before moving to the west coast, Gotham had attended school at Cornell University studying engineering. “Those were some of the most difficult years of my life, but I got a lot of good things out of it. I even had one amazing thing that made the whole experience worthwhile. Now adays, we just talk about those four years like it was a war or something. You can’t understand unless you lived it… unless you were there.” His lip curls to a smirk. The vagueness of “things” he mentioned had been intentional, and there were no signs of him ever revealing what that one amazing thing ever was. His eyes tell me a bit more though - somewhere along the line, he lost it.
“I just couldn’t see myself crunching numbers for the rest of my life. So cliche, but it’s so true. Halfway through senior year, I wrote an email to someone asking for advice, and I followed my gut.” He would spend an extra semester intensively studying design under his professor, Jack Elliott, and that someone he had asked for advice from in the beginning? None other than Swedish designer Rob Lindstrom. “I was lucky, he took the time to write back, and my professor was as eager to teach me as I was to learn. We’re still friends.” The humility isn’t forced I suspect, as the wrinkles on his face hint at a young man working desperately to not let anyone down. Maybe he was lucky, but even so, it’s not something he’s taken for granted.
“My parents were less than thrilled. The best translation I could give was that I was going to do art.” Chuckling again, “I added the words: ‘computer’ and ‘internet’ at the last minute… I think that saved me!” He revels a bit as he relives the memory and then quickly comes back. I noticed that happens a lot during my short day with him. For a moment he’s there discussing, and the next he’s off in his own world, staring off in the distance or at the ground. At first I wrote it off as an attention disorder, but isn’t quite that at all. After some time, it appeared as though he was gathering information - whether it was the past or present didn’t seem to matter. He was absorbing, every drop out of every memory, reliving it each time he told the stories to someone.
“So why did you decide to move to California?” I ask, simple enough.
“… For the surf! And the weather!” He’s lying. Three prior drowning incidents a history of ice hockey and skiing don’t tell me nearly as much as the pause before his reply. I try for a real answer, “No?” he strugs, “Insanity I suppose.” I would try for more, but it’s already clear… no dice, not today.
For a few months in the beginning, he did large format digital work for a local print shop in Orange County. “Nothing was ever calibrated! Such a waste of materials printing out a sample color swatch that’s three feet wide. I hated that.” The green design attitude isn’t just a holdover from his mentoring in college, “And the funny thing is that they wouldn’t let me calibrate it!” The conversation that follows about his time in the print shop seems like a graphic designer’s version of a stereotypical fledgling actor in Hollywood. Long hours, low pay… the usual. It proved to be a useful experience though, because in that short time, he was able to learn the ropes of large-scale printing. His relationship with the printing company he uses is a reflection of that. “They like it when you understand why the turnaround is a week or two, and I get better results with that level of communication.” I wonder if that was his goal for taking the job at the local print shop all along. I venture to ask, but I’m already too late. He’s already moved on.
There was a stint working as an in-house designer before he switched to working independently full-time. “I was a design lead-slash-director of sorts, though I never officially received the title. I had a big office though, that was kind of nice.” He jokingly slides in, “The chair was rubbish though.” He had been working days, and in his spare time, working on small projects here and there. “I wanted more.” You can sense the passion he has for his craft at this point as his sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, arms out as if holding an imaginary basketball. He leans forward with each word, and he twists his hands around what I can only guess to be an imaginary world in his hands. “I had all these good ideas and plans, but they kept getting lost in politics.” I notice his adjectives are never too much, as if he’s saving them for special times. Things are always “good” or “fine”, but it’s rare to hear a great or amazing in conversation at all. It’s clear that he’s a hard critic, perhaps mostly on himself, but you can imagine that when he does light up, it must be about something phenomenal.
“Starting out is tough. It’s always tough I think, but if you can cut it, it’s definitely worth it.” He goes on to describe how a few firms had passed on him when he was looking for an in-house position. “They saw me as a fresh graduate, not someone who had been actually doing professional level work for five years.” He doesn’t harbor any resentment in his statements, and though I’m surprised, I don’t know why. It’s fitting for him to react like that. He sits leaning against his desk and gives off that same shrug from earlier this morning.
The work did eventually pick up though, and then something happened. As he puts it, the train derailed. He had trouble balancing the work from his personal life, and as complications arose in one, he piled on work to compensate. “I was doing so much, and surprisingly, I never tripped up! But it was rough. I never let myself take breaks and I wasn’t happy with the work.” He burned out shortly after. It was a gracious derailing though, if I had ever heard of one. It wasn’t some fantastical blaze of glory and destruction like one might expect. He’s a gentleman. Gotham wrapped up his projects one by one, and politely told clients that he would be unavailable for quite some time while on vacation. “It was hardly that at all though,” he says just before his eyes drift off again. His eyebrow furrows as he remembers, “There was a lot of reading… somber music and movies, too. I was looking for space… perspective.” He admits that he never really found it. He made it to New York twice, and even ventured to Maine. “It was peaceful. I had no cell phone reception, and the closest internet access was twenty minutes away in a very small local library.” As unattached as his trip to Maine had been, it still didn’t do the trick. He figured that if he couldn’t find his space in a place like Maine, so far away from anything and everything, he wasn’t going to find it at all. He reasoned that he had just been going about it wrong. “Every time I came back, I was still unmotivated. Clearly I was just lost, but how do you find something when you don’t really know what you’re looking for? And what do you do when the small things you do know and want… don’t acknowledge you?”
After some time there was doubt whether he would recover, and the piling concerns eventually backed him into a corner. Then, something clicked. “I had no clue what I was going to do. But I knew what I didn’t want to do… be perpetually lost. So I changed the way I looked at the problem.” He says it so effortlessly, and the confidence sets back in as he shares his revelation. “I just had to get the train moving again. It was so broken… missing parts, rusted out… I’m being melodramatic and going way to far with this metaphor, huh?” Agreed, but we’ll give it to you. “So I just started doing. I got back into art and writing, and I’m starting up a blog to get the stuff out there. I’m not sure where the train is going, but maybe it’s better that way…”
It apparently worked. Today, he’s back into a rhythm, and his “train” is gaining speed. He’s been working on some art pieces with notions of maybe a gallery showing in the future. “How cool would that be?” He smiles. The work has begun to pile in again, and there aren’t many questioning his abilities anymore. He’s considering starting up a firm again, and expanding his one man show. He’s learned a lot from his mistakes, and his honest demeanor shows he’s not afraid to admit where he’s gone wrong before. “The way I see it, I kind of had my mid-life crisis already. And what’s the point in not being honest about it? I don’t have anything to hide, professionally.” The clients like that about him, because in a field where anyone with a computer and a copy of Dreamweaver and Photoshop calls themselves a designer, it’s hard to separate the hacks from the people actually worth their salt. Too often they make the mistake and realize it too late.
When I was wrapping up my interview with him, I managed to sneak in, “Your… de-railing. Was it a woman?” He smiles, and its a painful one - his left eye winces a bit, but he remains composed - the heartbreak kid.
“Thank you for the interview, I hope you got what you were looking for.” He bows his head slightly, and shakes my hand. I look down at my notes to try and get that last bit, but looking up, the door is already swinging behind him. I’m too late, he’s already on to the next thing…