Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit

When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.

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Matt launched Volumeone.com in 1997, and it now sits in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. Before that, he was a skater and punk kid from Texas who ran a record label with his twin brother, then went to Cranbrook and landed in New York just as the web took off. In 2004, he and a few friends rented an old boxing gym in Williamsburg and kept the word on the door: Athletics. Today it’s a 30-person brand studio working with Google, IBM, Stripe, and Major League Soccer.

We talked with Matt about how punk rock taught him to start things without overthinking them, what designers lost when Flash died, and how Athletics grew from a punk house into a proper agency. He explains why he calls himself the studio’s most capable intern and still takes on projects of his own to keep his skills sharp.

We also get into how his team uses AI as one ingredient rather than the whole recipe, and why good creatives can smell polished slop. We wrap up with his book, A Visible Distance, and the rebel optimism he passes on to his students at SVA.

Bio

Matt Owens is co-founder and Chief Design and Innovation Officer at Athletics, a Brooklyn brand studio whose clients include Google, IBM, Stripe, Square, and Major League Soccer. He holds a BFA from UT Austin and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. From 1997 to 2009 he self-published the experimental design quarterly Volumeone.com, now in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. He is the author of A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design (Set Margins, 2024), teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and writes on Substack. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

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