Today we’d like to introduce you to Cody Paulson.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
As a teenager living in rural northern Minnesota, I spent all of my free time riding bikes, skateboarding and snowboarding because there wasn’t much else in terms of entertainment. I was probably 15 when I got my first camera and started filming videos in my backyard. After completing the first few edits, I realized I needed some way to share the videos with my friends. My family had just purchased our first computer, fresh with Windows ’95 and dial up internet. YouTube didn’t exist yet and streaming video was pretty much unheard of.
Sheer curiosity and boredom led me down a path where I began programming my own websites—stealing bits of code from websites I admired because there was no good resource for learning. I was so excited when I finally figured out how to host videos on my own site. But this posed an unexpected problem. It looked ugly… like, really ugly. From that moment on, I became totally obsessed with graphic design.
After college and a slew of related industry jobs such as printing press operator, newspaper designer, photographer and screenprinter, I finally landed my first legitimate design job at Swim Creative in Duluth. I worked there for about a decade, soaking up all the knowledge I could like a sponge. My curiosity then led to Minneapolis, as I really wanted to see the inner workings of big city design studios. Over the years I became Swiss Army knife of design related skills, dabbling in everything even tangentially related.
In 2020 COVID hit, and I was desperate to get out of the city and back into the forest. About the same time, a good friend from my skateboarding days and fellow designer Stephen Pestalozzi mentioned that he had the lead on a project that was too big for him to handle himself. Perhaps against all rational thinking, we both quit our well-paying jobs in the height of the pandemic chaos to work on a single project with no future leads. I moved back to Duluth and our design studio GRAPHIC SCIENCE was born.
Our diverse skillset led us to find our niche in brand strategy and identity, and very broad and high-level field of design that helps businesses and organizations articulate their mission and vision first, and then utilizes design to communicate these values visually. This encompasses all aspects of design—from logo design, to advertising, to photography, to social media. This multi-disciplinary approach continues fuel my insatiable love of design that started over 20 years ago. A bit of luck and a whole lot of hard work later, we just celebrated our 5 year anniversary.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest struggle I faced was finding coworkers and clients that shared my particular values and perspective on design. This had always fueled the dream that one day I would start my own design studio. Now I have the power to be more selective about the projects I take on.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
GRAPHIC SCIENCE specializes in brand strategy and identity. Many people think of graphic design as a glossy veneer that makes something “look pretty.” But to us, design is a powerful tool for communication. And if you’re going to communicate something clearly and succinctly, you need to spend most of your time first determining what it is you’re trying to say and who it is you’re speaking to. This means that good design emerges from the very DNA of an organization, and cannot be superficially applied after the fact. This unique approach sets us apart.
Notable clients include The St. Louis County Depot, J&RS Construction, Underwood Coffee, Betty’s Pies, Juice Pharm, Dovetail Cafe and Windsor Engineers. We’re probably most proud of our work for The Depot because the scope has been massive—ranging from that initial strategy and identity, to a massive 100′ mural on the side of their building, to a very complex and thorough way finding system, to marketing and advertising for their many internal events. And this year we just launched the latest iteration of their website (https://experiencethedepot.org).
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I always say Duluth is the perfect, biggest small town. Everybody knows everybody, but at the same time theirs space for anonymity (I’m a huge introvert). Some of the best mountain biking trails in the country and Spirit Mountain are both just stone’s throw from my house. It has culture, energy and entrepreneurial spirit of bigger city, but I can be so far in the woods that I can’t hear a car in less than 10 minutes. Did I mention the world’s largest freshwater sea?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://graphic.science
- Instagram: @codypaulson
- Other: https://codypaulson.studio
