To Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley doesn’t know what to do with people like us. They call us graphic designers, visual designers, marketing designers—as if we are stylists who trim the windows and top the cakes.
No. We are makers, pixel poets, paper-molesting war mongers, stitching the standards of international revolutions. We play in a universe where everyone is a genius, everyone is a hacker, everyone has the tools to take dominion over their own fate. We prime the masses for the better world ahead.
The ink, shapes, type, color and copy—it’s all a vessel for crackling ideas and so are we. We are not deceivers. We are not charlatans who sell cardboard cutouts. Our gift is dangerous if abused and so we are serious in our work. We help Peter Parkers ache to become superheroes. And let me tell you, we all have a Peter Parker growling within us.
So, sound the bugles. Build the ramparts of a product and start the whispers, the low hum of a beautiful cause. We will paint it on the walls. We will tell the story. And with a strong story, a narrative to perk their senses, they will start to believe. You will start to believe. We can all occupy the same town square, the same inch of grass. It might be for an instant, but it will change us all. They, with excitement on your app’s load screen and you, benevolent and economical with a blueprint in your hand.
Call us communication designers. Call us to the fight with you.
24/F/SF
I’m twenty-four. I live in a city. I buy real furniture. I can keep plants and animals alive. I vacuum. I scrub the toilet. I frame my artwork.
I travel. I don’t worry about all the places I’ll never see.
Poverty concerns me. I don’t know what to do about it. I may understand the basics of politics. I doubt I really do. I vote anyway.
I use words like frenemy. I apologize for being late. I go out to brunch. I eat dinner at 10pm. I dance all night—occasionally. On weekends I sleep til 11. I go to concerts. I take disco naps. I check myself out in window reflections. I wear skyscraper tall high heels. I laugh loudly. I work out. I get manicures. I try to watch what I eat. I go back for seconds. I can host a dinner party.
My parents are mortal. I worry about their health. I get along with my siblings. I don’t call as often as I should.
I’ve fallen in love. I’ve fallen out of love. My older friends are tying the knot and having babies. The thought of a child makes me nauseous. The thought of love does not.
I cry for silly reasons. I have a streak of arrogance. I still believe in justice and meritocracy. I go on rants with other arrogant young people. They are my best friends. I make things with them. I want to change the world. I believe someday I will.
I’d rather learn from the internet than from a person. I try to do it myself before I ask for help. I pull out my phone to settle debates and confirm wild stories. I digitally catalog my life. I photograph everything. I overshare. I live by metrics.
I learn fast. I can’t sit still. I’m not concerned with balance. I want to work. I’ll stay up all night. I can do anything. I can’t do everything. I understand my limits. I’m realizing my potential.
I’m almost twenty-five. I’m ready.
Run from your problems
All good things come to an end. Or, they would if we ever stopped evolving.
There are two kinds of reinvention. A company that’s settled into a comfortable and wan pattern will shake up its brand to fly under a steadier standard. Take the Current TV redesign, which does this quite literally:
(image from Brand New)
The idea of an army-sized movement, of the immutable power of the tide, of a billowing flag in the dark—that’s got a lot more heft than techy crowds wielding pixels. And, it’s what Current has always been about.
There’s a different genius in the second kind of reinvention, the reinvention of conviction.
Sunglasses are built to shield us. They block out the sun, they anonymize movie stars to the flash of the paparazzi. I have always loved Ray-ban for its complete opposition of this idea. Let the other sunglasses keep out the world. Never Hide in Ray-bans.
Jeans are built for hard, gritty work. But, in Levi’s, there’s work to be undone. In the nostalgia for our forefathers, we don’t find factory drudgery. We find the love of careful craft and the freedom of razing the past to start anew.
When your brand’s heart runs dry, find a new north. Run in the opposite direction. Free yourself from the metropolis we’ve built and head for the frontier. Breathe the country air. At the very least you will come home changed.
There’s Process and there’s process
Let’s shoo the clients, bosses and managers out of the room for a second and talk about process.
Process is the bugle call of our design generation. It propagated with the IDEOs, frogs, Zurbs and Smarts of our industry and infiltrated every company. Finally, the heady coven of creation, distilled into phases and checkpoints—this was something the most empirical CEO’s could understand and salespeople could sell.
That’s wonderful. My parents don’t call me every night worrying I’m dumpster diving, and human beings have access to better designed objects as a whole.
Backstage, though, I pray to the design gods that we ourselves aren’t drinking this simplistic koolaid. Problem-solving and brainstorms are vital, but simply following the process we outline for non-designers would yield (and has yielded) unremarkable work.
Ouch! But, really, the ‘design process’ is bland, mechanical and easy. A problem comes in. You arrive at solutions, pick the winner and push that baby out into the world. It isn’t the interesting part of design at all. What really makes a brilliant designer is the white space between the outlined gospel. What creates the visual metaphors, the right questions to ask or the right shade of pink? That designer’s particular experience, whether it be school, work or play. There are hidden wells inside of us that don’t surface in explicit ways.
For example:
Even if you’ve known me for years, you might not know I watched nature documentaries every day for five or six years. Mental space for reminders and algorithms is filled up instead by seemingly useless animal facts. Besides helping me remember the names of conference rooms at Twitter, this experience gave me respect for systems and symbiosis, a sense of scale, and an eye for movement and detail, among other things. I didn’t know it then, but this antisocial TV habit was inherent to my personal design development, and vital to my career.
We create in the context of ourselves, and that’s not something easily quantified. I could never tell a client, here’s a charge for the hour I spent watching that Discovery documentary about salmon migration fifteen years ago. I couldn’t have found this solution without it. There’s no proof and no deliverables for that time. To the rest of the world, that’s nerve-wracking, but to us, it should be comfort that the best method of interesting work is to seek out experiences and learn how to let them change you.
Sell, and sell well. But never forget—each day is part of your process, and that you’re preparing for a project that may be years in your future.
Recent trip to Ocracoke, NC, armed with 6yr expired slide film, b/w with too high of an iso and a Nikon EM.
